1. Introduction
The mismatch between freshwater demand and availability is the essence of global water scarcity, resulting in increased competition for freshwater resources, while estimated reliance on water resources is on the rise, posing serious challenges to Earth’s future food security and environmental sustainability [
1]. In fact, water availability and accessibility are two of the most significant constraints for various economic, industrial, healthcare, agricultural, and food sectors [
2,
3,
4,
5,
6]. The increasing global population, rising living standards, shifting consumption patterns, and the expansion of irrigated agriculture are the primary drivers of the rising global demand for freshwater [
1,
7]. Future climate change projections foresee an increased global pressure on water resources; as a result, the salinity level of seawater is constantly increasing, making flooding more likely and thereby dwindling the availability of freshwater [
8,
9]. Accordingly, the water crisis was identified as the most serious global risk for the next decade [
10].
Pursuant to the United Nations World Water Development Report 2017, improving wastewater management is as much about eliminating emissions at the source; this includes reusing reclaimed water through various recycling strategies as a necessary practice to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development [
11]. On the other hand, a total of 2.1 billion people (29% of the global population) do not have access to safe drinking water, and this access lack is responsible for 1.2 million deaths each year [
12]. Currently, ~4.0 billion people face severe water scarcity at least one month of the year [
13].
Malaysia is one of the countries with a high domestic water consumption, ranging from 209 to 228 L per capita per day (lcd). The consumption is still above the World Health Organization’s (WHO) recommended target of 165 lcd. In this context, Penang state has the highest domestic water consumption, while Sabah state has the lowest. As a result, if water consumption is not improved, Malaysia may face a water shortage crisis in the foreseeable future [
14].
On the other hand, distilled water is one of the most commonly used elements in undergraduate and postgraduate laboratories, as well as research centers, due to its inert nature. Despite the evident reuse potentials of non-distilled water produced during the distillation process, studies have revealed that water reuse implementation remains a rare practice [
15,
16,
17,
18]. Distilled water is produced by boiling water and then condensing the vapors. The non-distilled water will be produced during the water distillation process, and most of the time it will be drained into the sink rather than fully utilized. Previously, in 2004, professor Sharma proposed that 200 L of fresh water would be consumed to produce approximately 2.5 L of distilled water as a daily average use per laboratory, and upon using the conventional glass distillation apparatus, this estimates that to generate 100 mL of distilled water, it needs 4000 mL to 8000 mL of tap water [
19,
20]; i.e., a minimum of 3000 mL tap water will be drained, and the quality of this water will be diminished instantly. As previously published in Chan et al. 2020, the immense amount of water use in the distillation process could be linked to the billed water. Such uncontrolled water distillation practices might place academic institutions’ laboratories and many foundations far away from the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly goal number six which emphasizes the importance of water management in sustaining humankind, i.e., “ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all”. Consequently, the massive waste of clean water from the outlet of the distillation process is one of the silent causes of water scarcity which is oftentimes being overlooked [
21]. In this regard, the underutilization of such clean water may indirectly contribute to water shortages especially during the drought. This might eventually hit the same research cycle and human life in general, necessitating the enforcement of new policies, as the COVID-19 pandemic did. Therefore, addressing distilled water waste management within academia and research is indispensable to offer insights on current challenges and suggest future practical strategies for application once needed.
Human behavior has been recognized to have an impact on sustainability, including water management, and thus it is necessary to regulate human behavioral contributions to the water scarcity issue [
22,
23,
24,
25]. The same holds true for human awareness [
26,
27,
28], knowledge [
29,
30], and opinion [
31,
32]. Of this, the study and analysis of such variables could help in understanding and achieving distilled water waste management.
On the same line, having faculty members who behave sustainably on campus is the ultimate goal of higher education institutions, but this remains difficult. However, their daily life tasks involve online courses, zoom meetings, coursework preparations and delivery, administrative work, undergraduate practical courses, and postgraduate research experiments, all of which are closely related to sustainability [
33,
34]. Furthermore, because the majority of campus members do not pay their utility bills, they are frequently unaware of water and energy consumption issues. Faculty members’ behavior has an influence on the overall on-campus environmental sustainability; thus, regulating their behavior may provide opportunities for resources’ savings [
21].
Study Trend
Using the Google Scholar engine, the keyword “Green laboratory” yields approximately 5,600,000 published works; however, when searching “Distilled water” this number drops to approximately 1,940,000. Furthermore, a search for “drained water” and “Distilled water waste reuse” revealed a sharp decline in research articles with only 703,000 and 86,200 published works. Interestingly, as shown in
Figure 1, searching the PubMed engine yields a much lower number of articles using the exact same keywords (by 23rd May 2021). Such numbers illustrate the critical need for research in the field of green laboratories’ applications via distilled water waste management in universities.
To the best of our knowledge, this is the first questionnaire designed to assess Knowledge, Awareness, Behavior, Opinion, and Practice of faculty members and students (laboratory and non-laboratory users) on the use of non-distilled water produced by the distillation process. The resulting data, along with its statistical analysis, could pave the way for understanding the significance of evaluating such factors to assist schools, universities, sustainability departments managers, and policymakers in applying the correct approach as a key to successful non-distilled water waste reduction.
This work is conducted at a Malaysian public university using a purposely designed and validated new 23-item questionnaire that studied the green laboratory practice from the point of conservation of non-distilled water from distillation process. Such an approach could help to raise faculty members’ awareness of non-distilled water reuse, laying the groundwork for the subsequent plan, which could include the launch of a targeted online or on-campus campaign, as well as seminars aimed at educating faculty members about non-distilled water reuse and leading to the introduction and implementation of green standard operating procedures (SOP) at the laboratory levels.
4. Study Limitation
There has been no previous study of its kind for this specific group to draw a comparison from. Precisely, no study compares faculty members’ levels of awareness, knowledge, behavior, and opinion about distilled water concerning its drained water reuse as part of green laboratory practices. Furthermore, the data were gathered from faculty members at a Malaysian public university, so the sample size, while adequate, is small. The covered age range in this study is limited to respondents from 20 to 45 years old, which may have an impact on the results. Furthermore, the majority of respondents were females and from the student’s occupation, which may have influenced the findings. Besides that, the findings of this study are limited to the truthfulness of the respondents, so there may be errors in recalling some answers. Future studies will use larger samples with different backgrounds, such as the community in primary and secondary schools, with laboratory water distillers, to represent the entire society.
5. Discussion and Suggestions
Universities have a primary responsibility to promote a systemic approach to influencing policymakers in the field of green laboratories by first understanding the members of their faculties, which can lead to the creation of water scarcity programs that can be encouraged to become mandatory upon enrollment in degree-based studies in certain fields. This study shed light on the presence of a significant gap in addressing water scarcity in academia, specifically the method of handling the massive amount of drained water from the distillation process, which is carried out daily to produce enough distilled water for undergraduate, postgraduate, and research laboratories.
In this work, the results showed good awareness and knowledge among the academic staff and the laboratory assistant, respectively; thus, both personnel are having a highly critical role in pushing for the reuse of wastewater to their corresponding laboratory users, mainly students, which also scored highest in practice. Aside from that, higher management of the university shall play a role in seeing into the overlooked problem. For instance, regardless of the working domain but only if it involves the use of distilled water, new-era personnel are expected to have sufficient distilled water waste management skills, either from their undergraduate curriculum or through specific training. Thus, even when the personnel have full access to water resources, this will instill a sense of responsibility toward water resources and make it easier to regulate distilled water use and its waste reuse.
Subjective opinions from this questionnaire showed that more than 97% of the respondents supported the effort to recycle wastewater from the distillation process. Examples of the received comments include “Water crisis is always an issue in other states such as Selangor. Although Penang state may not have this problem, we should be aware of it as part of our efforts to protect the environment.”, “Recycled for plants or industrial”, “Water crisis, especially freshwater, has recently become an issue as its resources are depleting at an alarming rate. Pollution and contamination cause the water supply to become even more limited, so we must conserve while we still have the resource to ensure its long-term viability”. Others make recycling suggestions, such as “A chiller can be installed to recycle the water. However, electricity is required to cool the water and allow condensation to occur. So, make a chiller that doesn’t require electricity?” Investigating this comment led us to the negative side of the collected opinion, where one of the respondents, who is under the lecturer category, mentioned, “Too much effort required to save the non-distilled water, not value for money.” Thus, and based on these subjective opinions, additional suggestions could be the initiation of community-wide competitions and financial awards initiatives, in the context of distilled water reuse policies, as well as strategies to inspire youth and junior researchers to put theory into action.
It is worth highlighting that the sanitary or water management system is heavily reliant on the development of local water infrastructure. Professor Sharma’s innovation of a modified Recycling Distillation Technique that uses an earthen pot as a cooling reservoir is one of the commendable individual efforts made while resources are limited [
19,
20]. Another one was recently published where a group of dedicated team members made up of students, laboratory technicians, and instructors designed their new distillation system to waste no fresh water out of the distillation unit and replace the conventional glass distillation apparatus [
54]. More designs should be encouraged to investigate the impact of such implementations in various laboratories, in terms of the annual volume of reused non-distilled water, as well as the amount of tap water consumed in the first place to generate the distilled water.
Furthermore, the findings of this study could be presented to the top management of Housing, Building, and Planning, at the very least for future infrastructure expansion. A secondary piping system for different water distribution, for instance, may be considered for more sustainable water system usage, which channels the distilled water waste to further usage such as but not limited to toilet washing and watering plants (for gardening and herbal research). This necessitates additional research into the efficiency of water pumps as well as their robustness in the face of such water shortages.
A top-down enforcement manner could be beneficial in this regard; thus, governments and their related organizations can implement a “reward and punishment” strategy in which a specially designed water meter for distilled water waste is installed in laboratories, research centers, and schools with a water bill waiver if the institute achieves a certain level of distilled water reuse, and vice versa in terms of excessive use of distilled water without waste management.
Future scientists maybe are required to provide data on the benefits, drawbacks, and sensitivity of using non-distilled water from the distillation process in washing, as well as daily experiments from basic solvent preparations into molecular experiments. In this regard, a collection of such experiments’ results will contribute to the establishment and activation of on-hands SOP.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, and with the implementation of the new norms such as virtual education and academic events, different E-platforms should be studied and used to raise awareness for non-distilled water reuse from the distillation process based on game activities using different approaches including the internet of things, which was recently employed for raising awareness on water pollution [
27], aiding in the development of water-sensitive communities [
28], as well as reducing water reuse illiteracy and promoting green laboratory practices with a focus on distilled water waste reuse.