Articles in 2024

On its 50th anniversary, we highlight how despite its limitations, the Safe Drinking Water Act and its amendments represent a milestone in environmental legislation that should be improved and protected.

Concern about the potential health and environmental hazards of substances known as PFAS have led to strong regulations, especially in Europe and the United States. This Perspective examines whether early warnings were followed and whether lessons can be learned from the way the chemicals were dealt with since their discovery.

The synergistic combination of PFAS preconcentration and low-temperature degradation is a challenging goal in the broad field of water treatment technologies. Metal–organic frameworks as next-generation adsorptive thermocatalysts, owing to their nanoporous and fine-tunable functional nature, demonstrate a promising solution for this challenge.

We have the tools and solutions we need to address shared water challenges in a changing climate; however, we lack the political will to implement them through effective cooperation.

Adding metal tracers to nanoplastics has made it possible to trace their fate and effects on freshwater ecosystems, while also considering their interactions with other major environmental stressors, including warming and nutrient pollution.

The microbial community present at the taps of each house is taxonomically unique. However, the antimicrobial resistance and functional potential of each home’s bacterial profile are similar to those of other houses in the same city.

Taxonomic compositions in bathtub faucet water microbiomes showed household individuality, with differences in the prevalences of non-tuberculous mycobacterial species. A similar antimicrobial resistome was detected.

A robust pyrazolate metal–organic framework acts as both an adsorbent for perfluorooctanoic acid and a catalyst for degradation under mild conditions, providing an integrated approach for the capture and destruction of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances.

Monitoring the presence of antimicrobials in the environment is essential to understand and tackle the rise of antimicrobial resistance. An extensive investigation of antimicrobials in wastewater treatment facilities across Australia reveals a direct correlation with various socioeconomic factors.

By simultaneously integrating the measurements from the Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) satellite and those from other Earth-observing satellites into hydrological modelling systems, we could transform our understanding of the global terrestrial water cycle. This opportunity comes with big challenges for the scientific community.

The use of antimicrobial agents can exacerbate the proliferation of antimicrobial resistance genes, which can put public health at risk; evaluating this risk requires proper monitoring. An extensive investigation of Australian wastewater reveals a distinct correlation between the type of antimicrobial used and the socioeconomic status of the population.

In its 50 years, the Safe Drinking Water Act has improved public water supplies across the United States, but it has not advanced the right to safe drinking water in America to address water inequities and injustices.

A one-dimensional nanotubes-on-two-dimensional hierarchical nanofilm self-organized by the capillary effect within the nanopore and the interfacial polymerization reaction allows rapid aqueous nanofiltration.

Water solutions across different scales can prevent or mitigate conflict if existing obstacles to their implementation can be overcome so that water can act as catalyst to bring people and communities together to co-create collective solutions for peace.

Polyamide membranes with a hierarchical structure consisting of one-dimensional nanotubes on a two-dimensional nanofilm can deliver energy-efficient nanofiltration with outstanding water–ion separation performance. This architecture provides a promising approach to the synthesis of scalable and efficient mixed-dimensional water purification membranes.

Current water disinfection practices still face unpredictable health risks associated with carcinogenic byproducts and bacterial resistance. Rationally synergizing electroporation and electrochemical oxidation approaches offers a promising solution.

Zhang et al. present a sequential electrochemical process that enables synergetic physical damage and chemical oxidation of antibiotic-resistant bacteria and antibiotic resistance genes, providing an efficient and residue-free water disinfection approach.

A curvature-induced ion docking effect can be used to enhance the ion storage capacity in capacitive deionization processes, leading to unprecedented water purification efficiency.

A design principle based on the curvature parameter provides important guidance for the design of capacitive deionization electrodes.

A range of co-existing and integrated sanitation systems, from onsite to sewered and centralized to decentralized, is needed to improve sanitation access in rapidly expanding cities around the globe.