How to Make Water Clean and Accessible
By Nur Izzati Najwa binti Izuddin
The issue of clean, accessible water is one of the big technical engineering difficulties that the world faces today. A significant cause of mortality is a lack of clean water, and many people go without this basic essential. According to Alexandra Lee, it will require new technologies to make it possible. With 85% of humanity live in the world’s driest regions, many of which are situated near the north-pole, in a long distance, icebergs will have to be towed. David Jonker stated that Georges Mougin spent his whole life attempting to make that a reality.
Arup K. Sengupta said that despite this, as a result of contaminated water, almost 3.5 million people die per year. Furthermore, every day, over 800 children under the age of 5 die as a result of diarrhoea caused by polluted water, unsanitary conditions, and poor hygiene. However, we are optimistic that the global water and sanitation problem can be resolved within our lifetimes. That’s why we are concentrating our efforts on providing safe drinking water, sanitation, and hygiene (WASH). According to World Vision website, every person in every society in which we serve, especially the most disadvantaged communities in the most difficult-to-reach areas. So here some of the methods to make water clean and accessible.
To begin with, almost all of the water on the planet is unfit for human use. Desalination is a process that purifies sea or salt water for human use. The desalination process’s high costs have stifled its use. In the other hand, arid countries are experiencing that it is a necessary solution. According to the International Desalination Association, in producing 273 million gallons of drinking water every day, Saudi Arabia has the world’s largest desalination facility.
Besides, as well as decontaminate water, solar stills also have the ability to desalinate. By using the sun’s energy to distill water, this simple approach is used to produce safer drinking water. With holes drilled into the ground and a layer of plastic covering them, it was initially designed for military and survivalist use. Borgen Magazine also stated that Aquamante is a company that creates refined small-scale solar stills that can purify water from a range of sources and come in compact packets. The Aquamante solar stills will yield two litres of unstained water per day when exposed to enough sunlight.
In addition, from Borgen Magazine also, by combining a bicycle and a water refiner, we can create a basic technology that allows human in rural communities to have access to clean water. When Nippon Basic, a Japanese company, designed the bicycle water purifiers, they had this in mind. When a rider pedals, water can be collected straight from the source and washed. Until being placed in a bottle, the water is filtered into a series of micro-filtration membranes.
After that, the methods that can be used in making water clean and accessible is extracting water from thin air, which can be used to make water safe and usable. Eole is an organization that actually creates water from nothing. Atmospheric water can now be obtained from very dry areas all over the world thanks to modern technology. Eole, for example, has installed atmospheric water generating turbines in the United Arab Emirates that can harvest up to 16 gallons of fresh water per hour from the atmosphere. In providing seven gallons of clean water every day, the company has also built ambient water generators for homes and offices.
Moreover, in my opinion, methods that can we use in order to make clean and accessible is by developing water monitoring and regulation, governments should have both regulatory and incentive sideboards, such as maximum cost recovery provisions for water tariffs such as cost-share on water reuse and rainwater harvesting systems. This can seem to be a difficult challenge for developed nations, but policymakers do it all the time in schooling, electricity, and other areas. According to Betsy Otto, it’s past time to do the same with water.
Next, by using handy small-scale technologies like Personal Filter Straws with exclude of salty water, it allows people to drink water from almost any direction. Water is passed into an incredibly fine medium that absorbs mud and germs within its pores, resulting in pure, unpolluted water. Filter straws can extract up to 99% of bacteria and poison from water.
As a conclusion, David Jonker mentioned that despite the fact that seas, streams, and rivers occupy 71% of the world’s surface, more than 10% of people lack gain to secured drinking water. Since 1990, significant change has been made, with one-third of humans now having access to better water. For 2.6 billion people, a focused effort as a Millennium Development Goal over the last 15 years has made a huge difference. In World Vision website, the Sustainable Development Goal over the next 15 years is to guarantee liquid gold for the remaining 660 million. This work is more critical than ever before, since clean water is needed for hand washing and disinfection in order to prevent diseases like COVID-19 from spreading.