Environment, tedx talk, english
Description
Vocal Characteristics
Language
EnglishVoice Age
Young Adult (18-35)Accents
PakistaniTranscript
Note: Transcripts are generated using speech recognition software and may contain errors.
I was born in Gilgit baltistan, a land filled with exciting natural architecture and resources as a child. Whenever I stood gazing at the mountains, I was always in awe of the beauty and scale of it. Just the size of it made me used to feel so insignificant and so small, nothing I said nothing I did or nothing I could think of could quite match the grandeur of the place. The community at large was aware of the role of stewardship for the environment and was taking care of the planet by keeping it neat, clean and green. But like everyone else in the north, I moved to the cities and suddenly all the natural elements in my life were replaced by man made ecosystems. There were no mountains, only tall buildings, no freshwater streams, but Nawaz that were laden with wastewater. Not only did the knowledge contained wastewater, they were also filled with solid waste depending on where one resided in the city. The city was filled with trash. The people used to wait for authorities to come and clean it. A question that I asked myself then and very often asked myself today is how are people okay with it? I was not okay with the way people were living in the city. So I went to carry landfill and as I walked in into that space, a different kind of realization hit me. There were mountains of trash except that this time the junk was main made. It was a barrel, universe, a Himalayan equivalent of mountains of junk. Suddenly I did not feel insignificant, I felt quite significant and at that moment I realized that no matter what happens, no matter what the platform, no matter what the opportunity, I will prioritize the message of sustainability in my life and in my goals and whichever platform I get, I will put the concept of sustainability through. Now. You might be wondering why should I care about waste management in Pakistan. Unfortunately, less than 1% of wastewater in Pakistan is being treated. That means that we are sending 99% of our wastewater into the environment without any prior treatment. This contaminated water is costing us an annual income loss of $380 million. Besides that, that was based, water enters our water streams, our land, our food and eventually our bodies More than 32,000 hectares of land in Pakistan is being irrigated with wastewater. There is a price that we pay for not doing anything. Human activities account for 80% of the diseases in Pakistan And they cost 30% of the debt Figure that I had read that it upset me a long time ago and still upsets me every single day is that 250,000 Children in Pakistan under the age of five die because of waterborne diseases by not doing anything about wastewater treatment. Not only are we depriving our future generations of the quality of life that they could have, but we are also depriving some to have the ability to have any life at all. If this doesn't alarm us. If this doesn't upset us. If this doesn't make us want to do something about the planet, I am not sure what will. So, I wanted to do something about it. And by the way, you might think that based water is a problem of the poor only unfortunately it is a problem of the entire country. It is therefore, that I focused my research on wastewater treatment. I combined two membrane technologies in order to convert municipal waste water into clean drinking water in forward osmosis. A saltwater solution through the process of osmosis, attract waste water molecules, water molecules from the wastewater towards the salt water stream, thereby diluting the salt water stream but also concentrating the wastewater stream. But for this process to happen continuously, the salt water stream has to be re concentrated, which is why I had to add another membrane technology into it, which is called membrane distillation. The concept of membrane distillation is that one simply uses a waste heat heats up the salt solution in order to retrieve water vapors that can then be condensed on the chilled side of the membrane. So, by combining these two technologies together, I was able to retrieve water from the wastewater stream to the salt water stream and then retrieve water from the diluted salt water stream to a distillation setup that contained clean water only. I was super excited about the kind of work that I had done and learned and I wanted to come back and apply it only to come back and realize that my country is not ready for such kind of advanced technologies. So I had to sit back and reflect on the local challenge that I want to now put my focus on around the time I remember that I looked around and I was reminded of the fact that wherever there's a Nala there's wastewater, wherever there's wastewater there's solid waste and wherever there's solid waste, there is a huge amount of plastic pollution. So I decided that I would look at the complexity and the interrelation of this phenomenon that I had seen before I left Pakistan as well. Around that time, WWF had released a study and that study said that the societal lifetime impact cost of plastic was $3 trillion 2019. It also said that if you do not do anything about it in 2040 that cost will be $7 trillion. I wanted to do something about it both in my research and in my actions, the first thing that I wanted to do was to create as much awareness about the problem as possible. One campaign that has particularly gained a lot of attention and has brought me to places like ted was my plastic free campaign hunza in my own village which we volunteered for for the Gilgit baltistan environmental Protection Agency. But I realized that education awareness alone is not enough no matter how many times you tell people what they need to do. If it is not a part of their value system, if they do not care for the planet, they will not do it. It is therefore that together with my students who should be sitting somewhere in the hall, we are trying to create simple, interesting pedagogical tools for students to learn these values at a much younger age. Now, back to my research, I wanted to display the complexity of the issue. Generally when water contamination is published or talked about, people only talk about four or five indicators, bacteria have a metal and maybe a few more. There is so much more that you and I chuck into that water every single day in the form of products that we use that are never monitored in our water. We do not know what kind of impact it would have on the life below and above water. One such pollutant that grabbed my attention because of that interrelation that I wanted to study was micro plastic pollution. Micro plastic is any plastic that is under the size of five millimeter. And while you see a lot of micro plastic around you, the micro plastic is not visible to the naked eye. Micro plastic is generated comes in into the environment as the micro plastic itself in glitters and a lot of other cosmetic products that we use or it could be created from these products that we wear. For example, the plastic blended textiles or the micro plastic that degrades and weathers and creates those micro plastic pollutants. Some of you might have read that just two days ago micro plastic was detected in human blood for the first time And I think even more alarming was the fact that nearly 1.5 years ago Micro plastic was detected in human placenta. Again, you're exposing a child to micro plastic pollution and to pollution in general before they even enter this world. Together with my students, I wanted to look at micro plastic pollution in Pakistan and we went and tried to understand it in the lab went and collected samples from ravi and it's adjusting drains. What do you see on screen is the micro blaster that we could detect from ravi, it's soil samples and then eventually to it suggesting drains micro plastic pollution is not only real, it's also very, very close to home. I want you to think and know that water and wastewater and macro and micro plastic pollution are all interlinked. If you want to solve one problem, we cannot do that in isolation. We have to do that in conjunction with one another. Ladies and gentlemen, we cannot continue to live the way that we have been living. Our actions are causing all of this. Our choices are causing all of this actions that are driven by ignorance, indifference, convenience and affluence. It is code red for the planet. It is called Red, but it is still not too late for us to reboot and rethink and start living responsibly. I'm trying to be an agent of change. I'm trying to create as many agents of change as possible. But for this transformation to happen at a much faster pace, I would need to join hands with thousands of more people like me. You would need to join hands with thousands of people like me. So invite you today to make a choice a choice as to whether you want to be a significant contributor to the pollution or a significant part of the solution.