Two drinking water fallacies are common. Safe drinking water is a problem that has been solved. In an age when your smartphone has millions of times the computing power that was on board the Apollo spacecraft and AI provides answers to complex questions in seconds, it is hard to imagine that 2.2 billion people lack safe drinking water. But they do.
If safe drinking problems remain, they must be in villages. In fact, with population growth outpacing water infrastructure improvements in developing world cities, the resulting urban challenge is eclipsing the rural challenge.
For illustration, consider Freetown, Sierra Leone. The city’s water supply system was originally designed to serve 500,000 people. The city’s population is now three times that amount, resulting in intermittent service to most customers. Combined with the fact that losses between the water supply intake and customers exceed 45 per cent, the system is woefully inadequate to meet current demands and is falling further behind each year.
Intermittent service is common and one of the primary reasons for the growing challenge of providing safe drinking water to people in cities. Studies have documented that intermittent service results in compromised microbiological quality. Even if the water leaving a city’s central treatment plant is free of pathogens, the microbial quality is questionable when it reaches the faucet. In Freetown, it has almost certainly contributed to waterborne disease: the city experienced nine documented cholera outbreaks from 1970 through 2012, causing thousands of illnesses and deaths.
The story is the same, whether in Freetown, Mexico City, or Laos. Cities face huge obstacles in ensuring the reliable delivery of safe drinking water to their residents and in too many cases, cannot succeed.
Household water treatment is essential to solving the problem
The answer today and the foreseeable future is household water treatment. People collect water from their faucets (if they’re fortunate) or from neighbourhood taps, and then provide their own treatment to deal with the potential of microbiological contamination.
And what treatment approach is most commonly used? Boiling. Some people have electricity in their homes and can use an electric boiling kettle. Many people don’t and they boil their water over an open cookstove, probably using charcoal as the fuel. Even for those with electricity, service has frequent interruptions and they resort to using a charcoal cookstove or simply drinking untreated water for a period.
It’s a health problem. It’s also a climate problem. By our best estimates, more than one billion people worldwide practicing household water treatment do so by boiling. Boiling works. It eliminates pathogens. But it works at the expense of high energy use and high carbon emissions.
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The result is a significant source of carbon emissions: worldwide boiling contributes 107 million tonnes CO2 equivalent per year, which represents about 0.3 per cent of total greenhouse gas emissions. It’s not the largest source, but it’s obviously a meaningful source.
Why boiling? Why not filters? It comes down to money and convenience. Filters can be expensive. The use of household filters often requires two water containers; one mounted higher with the untreated water and a lower one to capture treated water. They produce clean water at a slow rate.
All these factors make them inconvenient, especially if your children are thirsty now and there’s no clean water left. This is a health downside to boiling as well. When the boiled water is exhausted and it’s in the middle of a hot day, the family drinks whatever is available. Inconvenience translates to negative public health outcomes.
There is a better solution than boiling
There is a hopeful solution being developed by a small group of engineers and scientists (and a doctor and even a philosopher), mostly located in Northwestern US. The group has developed a household water treatment product that offers convenience and affordability. They built and proof-tested an early version and conducted field trials in Kampala to garner customer feedback. They are currently seeking funding to finalise a production-ready version and begin marketing it.
The product looks like an electric boiling kettle but instead of heating water to kill pathogens, it uses ultraviolet (UV) LEDs to do the job. When a family has electricity, it only requires the push of a button and a three-minute wait, and there is a container of safe drinking water ready for use (with no delay waiting for it to cool).
If the electricity is out, it operates from a rechargeable battery and can do so for several cycles. Furthermore, because water quality varies from city to city or day to day, a UV sensor in the product adjusts the treatment cycle to ensure adequate treatment.
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As a replacement for boiling, it greatly reduces carbon emissions. It is safer because the risk of children being burned by a fire is eliminated. It contributes to public health because a family can treat batch after batch of safe water throughout the day and therefore is not left to use whatever water they can find. It saves money over buying electricity or charcoal to boil water and with the potential for carbon credits, the cost savings to families multiply.
A problem with a solution
It’s easy to take safe drinking water for granted. It’s hard to imagine that safe drinking water remains elusive for millions in cities around the world. And it’s doubly hard—frustrating—to imagine those truths when there’s an answer such as our UV water treatment kettle so close to becoming reality.
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