The National Academy of Engineering (NAE), supported by The Grainger Foundation, has established the Grainger Challenge Prize for Sustainability. The primary purpose of the prize competition is to accelerate the development and dissemination of technologies to enhance social and environmental sustainability for the benefit of current and future generations. A complementary goal of the prize competition is to increase awareness among the U.S. engineering community of the importance of designing and engineering for sustainability, particularly in an international context, and to encourage and showcase efforts by U.S. engineers to bring sustainable technologies to the marketplace and to promote green design philosophies.

The Challenge
The specific goal of this competition, which may be followed by future prize competitions in like amounts for comparable goals, is the development of a household or multiple household scale treatment system to significantly lower the arsenic content in groundwater from tube wells as found in many developing countries. The system must have a low life cycle cost, be technically robust, reliable, maintainable, socially acceptable and affordable, be capable of being largely manufactured and serviced in a developing country, and must not degrade other water quality characteristics.

Arsenic contamination has affected millions of people, in rural Bangladesh, and also in eastern India, Nepal, and several other countries. In Bangladesh, the arsenic is an unintended consequence of an aggressive international program to control the spread of cholera (prevalent in surface waters) by installing thousands of tube wells. Unfortunately, the tube wells tapped into aquifers, usually within 100 meters of the surface, containing hundreds of micrograms per liter (?g/L) of naturally occurring arsenic, well beyond the international standard of 10 ?g/L.

Efforts to solve this problem have been under way for a decade, but no single solution has been implemented on a widespread scale. Laboratory tests have been conducted on technologies to determine if they are affordable, robust, and meet local water quality standards for a treatment system that can be used either in individual homes or several homes located adjacent to a single tube well. The intent of the NAE/Grainger Foundation competition is to encourage the American engineering community to become engaged in finding a solution to this specific challenge.