Treatment and Purification

An average trekker leaves behind approximately 100,000 kgs of water bottles per year. During average trekking of a week , trekker drinks up to 50 litres of water. Each trekker leaves behind 50 PET bottles along the track. PET bottles can take 1,000 years to biodegrade. Nine out of 10 water bottles end up as garbage or litter, and that means millions per day. PET bottles require massive amounts of fossil fuels to manufacture and transport, leaving behind carbon foot prints. Billions of bottles show up at landfills every year. The entire energy costs of the lifecycle of a bottle of water are equivalent, on average, to filling up 250 ml of each bottle with oil. "Making bottles to meet Americans' demand for bottled water requires more than 1.5 million barrels of oil annually, enough to fuel some 100,000 US cars for a year," according to the study. "Worldwide, some 2.7 million tons of plastic are used to bottle water each year."

Since its foundation in 1968, the IRC International Water and Sanitation Centre (IRC) has facilitated the sharing, promotion and use of knowledge so that governments, professionals and organisations can better suppo

Please see message below: ======= We are in process of distributing 1,000 sets of TERAFIL water filters among the victims of Bihar flood affected areas for supply of drinking water. These filters can provide at least 50,000 litres of clean drinking water every day, which can be operated without electricity by the victims easily, like any other candle filters.

Image & News Courtesy: Department of Science & Technology, India The Department of Science & TechnologyIndia has carved out a "Major initiative on Water Technologies in the Eleventh Plan".

A slow sand filter built with Japanese aid is running out of use because the community cannot repair the broken pump. Can we help organize the community to take charge of its asset?!

The Central Electrochemical Research Institute (CECRI), Karaikudi, India with the sponsorship of Department of Science and Technology (DST), New Delhi, India has developed an indigenous, low cost method of removing Arsenic from drinking water. The purifier is eco-friendly and can be run off a solar power source. Models for Domestic as well as Community use have been developed

Drop by drop ACCESS & HUL in Base of Pyramid Partnership for Safe Drinking Water for Rural Poor:

Yakalakshmi lives in Nekkunda village, Telengana region in Andhra Pradesh with her husband and two children. Though she has water piped to her house by the village panchayat, her entire family fell ill for a month last monsoon season by drinking water directly from the tap. "We all got high fever and severe diarrhea", she says, "we had to spend around Rs. 4000 on health care, which was very difficult for us". So when she got the opportunity this January to buy an effective water purifier through her Self Help Group (SHG) on an installment basis she was one of the first to sign up. Yakalakshmi is just one of the beneficiaries of a unique tie-up between ACCESS Development Services, a microfinance technical services non-profit organization, and Hindustan Unilever Limited, one of the country's largest producers of fast-moving consumer goods, to provide safe drinking water to rural poor. "Most of these villages have piped water or boreholes", says Padma, Project Coordinator at a local NGO, PEACE, "the problem is that tests by UNICEF in this district show that up to 70 percent of these sources are contaminated."The contamination gets even worse during the rainy season, especially due to poor sanitation and waste-management practices.

Most drinking water projects are designed for supply of treated water through pipes to communities ; this requires investment on infrastructure such as pumps, overhead tanks, supply pipes, water purification equipment and after the project, maintenance staff and funds; while all this calls for planning, funding and time to execute, yet we cannot be certain that the water delivered remains uncon

Bottled water as daily drinking water Thirty five years after Bisleri launched India's first bottled water, urban India is filled with numerous bottled water brands, some known, and some unknown. There are more then 250 brands and 2000 plus bottling plants across the country. The market for packaged drinking water is around Rs 10 billion and is growing at the rate of 40 percent per annum.