Saturday, April 23, 2011

Water purification – The best water pollution solution

Water pollution is taking heavy toll in many corners of the world, with millions of people across the globe dying because of different waterborne diseases. Harmful chemicals and other pollutants have degraded the quality of water in many parts of the world, and world is finding it very hard to tackle the ever-growing impact of water pollution.

Water purification is one of the methods to at least temporarily reduce the impact of water pollution. Water purification refers to different processes that are used to remove chemicals and other pollutants from the water, mostly with the purpose to create drinking water, though water purification can be also for a variety of other purposes.

In cases where water pollution levels aren't high water purification can be achieved with simple processes such as boiling or filtering but the more serious cases of water pollution require more complex methods.

Millions of lives around the globe could be saved if people were to use processes such as chlorination, filtration, and solar disinfection to treat water at their homes but the implementation of these relatively simple methods is happening very slowly in developing countries, resulting in large number of deaths from waterborne diseases.

The more complex water purification methods are usually done in water purification plants. Water purification plants use many different processes to remove pollutants from the water such as flocculation, sedimentation, different types of filtration as well as many other mechanical and biological techniques.

Disinfection is usually the last process of water purification. The purpose of disinfection is to remove any remaining harmful microbes by adding disinfectant chemicals because otherwise harmful microbes could pass through water filters and create serious threat to human health.

The usual disinfection method involves the usage of chlorine as the disinfectant though many developed countries have lately started using chloramine instead. Chloramine despite not being as powerful oxidant as chlorine is has one major advantage over chlorine by providing longer lasting effects. The process of creating chloramine from the chlorine is very simple, all it takes is adding some ammonia to the water after the addition of chlorine.

As said before the main goal of water purification is to produce safe drinking water. There are both domestic as well as international standards for drinking water. Water purification is definitely the best method to create the safe drinking water, and safe drinking water could save million of lives across the globe.

1 comment:

  1. this probably made me pass my project :D

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