In January 2013, Water. Desalination + reuse (Faversham House) reported that the University of Arizona, together with the US Bureau of Reclamation, was developing a water treatment system for the Navajo Nation in the south-western United States. The system paired membrane distillation with a hybrid solar power supply. When the item appeared, installation was in progress, and a one-year trial was scheduled from March 2013. It previewed a feature from the magazine's November/December 2012 edition.
The item showed a university and a US federal agency preparing a field trial of solar-supplied thermal membrane treatment to supply water to an Indigenous territory.