Entries by Aubrey Blanche

Peter Thum

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Wine turned Peter Thum to water. While working on a project in South Africa involving two wineries, Thum saw the difficulties that many people experienced just trying to get clean water every day. “I did a bit of research and began to see the size and magnitude of this problem,” he says. So he decided […]

Vessela Monta

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“We cannot say that rain is not interesting just because we can dig wells,” says Vessela Monta, a civil engineer by trade who began working with the International Rainwater Harvesting Alliance (IRHA) in 2002. Some resources — like the availability of harvestable rainwater — get forgotten when discussing sustainability, but not to Monta. She points […]

Chris Groves

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Dr. Chris Groves spends a lot of his time going underground into caves carved by eons of water flow. Once a boy with an interest in rocks, today Groves is a world-renowned cave and limestone karst expert who directs the Hoffman Environmental Research Institute at Western Kentucky University. “It was the only practical way to […]

Kunal Sangani

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Innovation started early for incoming Stanford University freshman Kunal Sangani. At just 17, he was named the U.S. finalist for the Stockholm Junior Water Prize for his project about the environmental effects of hydraulic fracturing (also known as “fracking”). A native of Syracuse, New York, where intense discussion about fracking led to a moratorium on […]

Ed Wargin

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Ed Wargin set out almost 17 years ago to document the Great Lakes, and he’s almost finished. The Fresh Coast Project is an effort to document the Great Lakes as a single unit. “I have felt through the years that we needed a solitary type of message, that we needed to look at the Great […]

Dibalok Singha

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Sustainable health for the poor is Dr. Dibalok Singha’s mission. As director of Dushtha Shasthya Kendra Bangladesh (DSK Bangladesh), he focuses on providing piped drinking water to people living in slums, such as those in Dhaka. The organization focuses on health solutions, but it is also very aware that the first step to preventing disease […]

David Kuria

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African culture can be a hindrance to talking about sanitation issues, says David Kuria, but it’s something he is nevertheless tackling head-on. Founder of EcoTact, a Kenya-based NGO that focuses on water sanitation and scarcity issues, Kuria believes that opening the dialogue about public sanitation issues is only the beginning to combating the 80 percent […]

Tang He & Dai Xiaoyan

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While young people around the world are saving up to buy the latest laptops and tablets, recent college graduates Tang He and Dai Xiaoyan are taking on heavy metal pollution in their native China. Zinc and indium — for new display technologies, among other uses — are just two of the many contributing factors to […]

Daniel Bena

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Dan Bena found his calling when he discovered the effect that could be made on the world by tweaking the standard business model for sustainability. “The thing that fuels my passion is the impact that we can collectively have,” says the senior director of Global Sustainable Development for PepsiCo. “When we can have a material […]

Daniel Hillel

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Living on a desert farm during the 1950s in the new Israeli state, Daniel Hillel was acutely aware of the challenges posed by scarce water supplies. Along with his fellow farming “pioneers,” Hillel — who would later earn a Ph.D. in soil physics and ecology from Hebrew University of Jerusalem — turned the Negev highlands […]