Making Troubled Waters Potable

Like a lead guitarist who can belt out a winning song while picking away at his instrument, Gregory S. Allgood, director of the Children's Safe Drinking Water program at Procter & Gamble, is deft at telling the ongoing story of the Cincinnati-based company's flagship humanitarian project while stirring an earthy powder from a ketchup-packet-size sachet into a jar filled with filthy, turbid, brown water. His song is all about one of the company's most welcome commercial flops.

At the American Chemical Society's national meeting last month in Atlanta, Allgood chronicled how P&G's now 11-year-old project has grown into a global operation to provide millions of households with a dirt-cheap means of purifying the drinking water that has been sickening and killing them. Every day, diarrhea resulting from bad water kills several thousand children around the world and sickens many more, according to statistics from UNICEF, the United Nations' arm devoted to children's well-being. As Allgood told his tale, the nauseating turbidity of the jar of water he brought with him gave way to a roiling pastiche of clear water and brown, fluffy blobs that settled on the bottom.

Then, as he summarized results from studies documenting how this simple water treatment is significantly reducing the incidence of diarrhea in rural settings in several countries, Allgood filtered the water through a cotton cloth into a plastic cup. After letting the disinfectant in the powder do its job for a while longer, he took a confident sip of what now looked indistinguishable from tap water from a state-of-the-art water treatment facility.

In recent years, millions of similar home-scale, point-of-use treatment procedures using P&G's PUR packets have been performed in Guatemala, Pakistan, Kenya, Bangladesh, Liberia, Uganda, and elsewhere. By the end of the year, Allgood said at the meeting, the company's primary nonprofit partner for distributing the packets, Washington, D.C.-based Population Services International (PSI), will be getting the packets to people in even more countries.

"Point-of-use water treatment approaches can provide the health benefits of potable water to at-risk families decades before comprehensive [water treatment] systems are built," comments physician Stephen Luby, head of the Programme on Infectious Diseases & Vaccine Sciences, which is part of the International Centre for Diarrhoeal Disease Research, in Bangladesh.

To date, about 50 million PUR packets have purified some 500 million L of water, most often in rural locations where local populations draw and use their water directly from filthy and foul-smelling lakes and rivers. According to a UN study, more than 1.1 billion people in poor nations drink water that has undergone no treatment whatsoever.

About half a dozen field studies, some of which were published in peer-reviewed journals, show that the effort is having a measurable public-health payoff. Consider a study published last summer in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) by a research team composed of scientists from Procter & Gamble, the Centers for Disease Control & Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta, and the Center for Vector Biology Control & Research in Kisumu, Kenya. The researchers split 6,650 people in 605 "family compounds" in rural western Kenya into three groups that either used the local turbid waters as they always have or were instructed to use PUR packets or a dilute bleach-based disinfectant.

Compared with the control group that used the local turbid water during the study's four-month run, households that treated their water with P&G's PUR packets-which both sterilize the water by killing microbes and clarify it by causing suspended materials to settle out-experienced overall reductions in diarrhea occurrences of 19%. Diarrhea occurrences were reduced by 25% for children less than two years of age. The simpler bleach treatment, which kills microbes but does not clarify the water, led to a 26% overall reduction in diarrhea and 17% for the youngest children.

"Where water is highly turbid, the PUR sachets produce water that looks and tastes better to its users and reduces the risk of diarrheal disease," said Luby, a former CDC scientist and a coauthor of the BMJ paper. To date, a growing body of field studies, mostly orchestrated by CDC and collectively involving more than 25,000 people in Guatemala, Pakistan, and Kenya, has shown that groups that use P&G's packets suffer only about half of the diarrhea episodes of groups that use untreated water sources.

The chemical technology itself amounts to, in Allgood's words, "putting a mini-water-treatment plant inside a packet." The primary ingredients are calcium hypochlorite, which kills off most microbes, and iron sulfate, a flocculating agent that sops up suspended dirt, organic matter, heavy metals, and even bleach-resistant microbial spores that can cause illnesses.

Each packet, which costs P&G 3.5 cents to make, can purify 10 L of water, enough to keep a typical household going for a few days, Allgood said. By the time the packets are shipped and distributed by P&G's partners, the cost of each packet for consumers rises to about a dime. As cheap as that is, Luby noted, many people who could benefit from the water treatment still can't afford it.

Allgood said the powder in the packets harbors a few minor innovations, such as particle sizes particularly suited for the rapid and small-scale purification tasks the packets are designed for. But the more consequential innovations, he stressed, are the new partnerships the company has forged as a result of the project, the massive future markets that the initiative could open, and the "social marketing" that helps get the packets to people in faraway places. For example, in several countries, the PUR packets, which are manufactured in a plant in the Balochistan province of Pakistan, end up on the shelves of small shopkeepers who sell them in strips of 12 or boxes of 240. Those shopkeepers make money on their sales, up to $5.00 per box. The result of this social marketing, Allgood said, is a little bit of new economic activity that can have large public health benefits.

Luby added that having a high-stature company like P&G committed to the mission of improving water quality can leverage public health payoffs by "increasing the number of persons who are interested in treating their contaminated drinking water, either with PUR or with another method."

And then there are those unlikely alliances that P&G now enjoys. "I'm blown away by the level and extent of cooperation," Allgood said, adding that "we've not seen anything like it in our 170-year history. Since 1991, UNICEF, USAID, CARE, AmeriCares, PSI, Johns Hopkins, the International Council of Nurses, and many other groups have partnered with us to provide safe drinking water in the developing world."

P&G also happens to be a Fortune 500 company with a bottom line to worry about and shareholders' interests to please. "We got into this because of a global need, but we also would like to market to the 4 billion people in the world we don't sell to now," Allgood said. Philanthropic initiatives like the PUR water treatment technology could provide an entry for the company to embark on profit-making ventures in emerging markets. "We might call it a new business model," Allgood said.

When P&G first teamed up with CDC in 1995 to make a dirt-cheap water purification technology, the company expected to get a commercial product out of the deal. But about three years ago, after the company had rolled out the product in several countries, the numbers were clear. These little packets were a commercial flop.

Rather than cutting its losses and dropping the project, a sensible business decision, the company redefined its metric of success and folded the project into the company's philanthropic efforts. "It made sense because our partners and our employees loved it, and that is what made it work and what has made it successful," said Allgood, who was in Atlanta immediately following a month-long trip through seven countries with drinking water problems.

After Allgood finished his talk before the Division of Analytical Chemistry at the ACS meeting, he collected his jar of clarified water and began making his way through the cavernous convention center for his trip back to P&G headquarters. Before he got very far, he was intercepted by Malcolm Siegel, manager of the Arsenic Treatment Technology Demonstration Project at Sandia National Laboratories. The mission of the project is to help small communities in the southwestern U.S. and elsewhere find cost-effective ways of complying with government water standards for arsenic and other contaminants.

"Your stuff is great," Siegel said to Allgood, before floating the idea of collaborating on tests to see if the PUR technology could work not only for reducing arsenic levels in water but also for removing uranium contamination. Such collaboration would be possible, Allgood answered, so long as the government, and not P&G, would foot the cost. Before such a collaboration could go very far, P&G would have to secure EPA approval for the packets, a process that Allgood said is now under way. The two men exchanged contact information, and then Allgood went home.