Water Purification!
Over one billion people lack access to clean drinking water. This is according to the World Health Organization (WHO), 2007.
Four billion people become ill every year with some kind of diarrhea-related disease and almost two billion people die from it.
A large percentage of these cases could be saved, if there were an easy water purification method available.
Simple techniques for treating water at home such as chlorination, good filters, solar disinfection and storing water in safe containers, could save many lives every year.
A major public health goal in the developing countries is to reduce diseases related to contaminated water.
The Goal With Water Purification
Water purification is, just as it sounds, a process of cleaning the water.
The objective is to make your water pure, clean and safe to drink. Not to mention good tasting!
But what exactly do you need to do to make water optimally pure and healthy to drink?
In the water purification process you must remove undesired chemicals, biological contaminants, suspended solids and gases from contaminated water. And, you must leave dissolved minerals in the purified water!
The ultimate goal with water purification is to produce water that is safe, healthy and delicious.
Water Purification – How Is It Done?
Most water is purified for human consumption, mainly meaning our daily drinking water.
But water is needed in many areas, not only for drinking.
Water purification may also be designed for a variety of other purposes, including meeting the requirements of medical, pharmacological, chemical and industrial applications.
There are many methods used to purify and/or treat water including physical processes such as:
- Filtration
- Sedimentation
- Distillation
- Reverse Osmosis
Or various biological water purification methods such as:
- Slow sand filters
- Biologically active carbon
And chemical processes such as:
- Flocculation
- Chlorination
Lastly the method of using electromagnetic radiation such as ultraviolet light.
Won´t Boiling The Water Do The Trick?
Proper water purification processes will reduce the concentration of unwanted particles, parasites, bacteria, algae, viruses and fungi.
More, there is a range of dissolved material derived from the surfaces that water may have been in contact with after falling as rain.
You can´t tell just by the look of it whether water is of an appropriate quality. No, a visual examination is not good enough.
A simple procedure such as boiling your water will NOT treat all the possible contaminants that you can find in the water.
Neither will the use of typical household activated carbon filters. Most fail miserably to remove adequate amounts of chemicals and particles.
No, the water needs to go through a robust water purification process to be totally “Healthy Water“, thus safe for your family’s drinking purposes.
Who Decides If Water Is Good Enough?
The standards for drinking water quality are typically set by governments or by international standards. These standards will typically set a minimum and a maximum concentration of contaminants, depending on what the water is to be used for. These standards are typically obsolete, having been set many years ago. Just in recent years, hundreds of newly discovered chemicals in our nation’s drinking water have been discovered and many of these have no standards set, so they can legally be in our water at any concentration and may not even be reported on.
Even your best natural spring water – considered by some to be safe – must be tested because in today’s chemical-intense environment even underground water sources may have contaminants which flow hundreds of miles from their source.
Because every source of water is potentially contaminated, individuals must take the initiative to validate the purity of their drinking water to protect their family from hidden contaminants.
The intent of our website is to provide resources to help understand water quality issues, to learn about various water purification techniques, and to share our highly-recommended water purification products which we consider to be the best available for contaminant removal and drinking water purification.