Essay on Water Purification With Low-Cost Materials

Water is an essential need for our bodies and humans cannot live without it. Contaminated water is extremely life-threatening to humans and other creatures since it contains numerous bacteria and diseases such as E. coli. This type of bacteria lives in your intestines and causes several life-threatening health issues such as acutely high fevers, adult kidney failure, and seizures.  Unhygienic water is an everyday issue in impoverished locations such as Africa. With these impoverished countries, water purification is an absolute necessity to remain in good health. Water purification is the process of removing harmful and unwanted substances for human consumption. 

Typical household water filters use granular activated carbon. This type of carbon absorbs chemicals, taste and odor compounds, and organic compounds. The average cost of these water purification systems are $1650. These countries don’t have access to the costly equipment to filter water properly, meaning they either have to either drink the contaminated water or filter it in alarmingly ineffective ways. The purpose of this project is to filter water efficiently with low-cost materials. It would take the most impoverished locations very little money to make these simple water filters. The hypothesis of this project is, does the type of material used for filtering water affect turbidity.

The New Jersey Institute of Technology group experimented with low-cost water filters for developing countries. They used clay-pot filters with the materials such as biochar, charcoal, and hematite. The charcoal and biochar is used for removal of colloidal silver and hematite for heavy metal absorbance. 

Reference Page

-(E. Coli Bacteria Infection: Symptoms, Treatment, Causes & Prevention (n.d) https://www.webmd.com/food-recipes/food-poisoning/what-is-e-coli#1) 

- (Water In Crisis - Spotlight South Africa. (n.d.) https://thewaterproject.org/water-crisis/water-in-crisis-south-africa).

-(Bringing water to Africa’s Poor, Africa Renewal (n.d)https://www.un.org/africarenewal/magazine/october-2007/bringing-water-africa%E2%80%99s-poor).

 -(New Jersey Institute of Technology(2016, February 12) A Low-Cost Family Water Filter for Developing Countries. https://cfpub.epa.gov/ncer_abstracts/index.cfm/fuseaction/display.abstractDetail/abstract/10515/report/0). 

-(How do water filters work?: Types of water filter. (2018, October 6). https://www.explainthatstuff.com/howwaterfilterswork.html). 

-(Average Cost of Water Filtration System. (2018, November 13). Retrieved from https://ro-systemreviews.com/average-cost-water-filtration-system/).