A Way to Make Polluted Water Clean Enough to Drink

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A Way to Make Polluted Water Clean Enough to Drink

It’s called a Water POD — short for “Portable on Demand” — and one is being tested in the murky waters of the Menomonee Canal just south of Milwaukee’s Downtown

The goal is simple, but the challenge is huge — take polluted water and turn it into drinkable water with low-tech systems. No large or more costly treatment plants, which are often unobtainable in poor countries across the globe, threatened daily by unsafe drinking water that is causing a public health crisis across continents.

The Water POD is the creation of Stonehouse Water Technologies. It has come off the drawing board and into the development of the first-generation, igloo-like pod being tested in the canal, thanks to the support of a clean technology program supported by Wells Fargo, according to a recent report in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Hensley Foster, president of Stonehouse, says the Water POD uses filters to remove sediment, bacteria and Cryptosporidium, chemicals, odors and metals from the water. The filters can be modified for different pollutants, and a final ultraviolet light exposure is used to kill viruses.

Foster told the newspaper unsafe drinking water causes widespread diarrhea and an estimated 2.5 million deaths across the globe each year.

According to Foster, each Water POD can produce 3,000 gallons a day, or enough to provide safe drinking water for about 1,000 people. The operator of a POD could charge customers about 3.5 cents per liter of clean water to cover costs.

While other water purification systems require diesel engines and trailer-sized plants, Foster’s plans are for the 8-foot diameter POD-sized units, or even smaller cupboard-sized units that can be put close to where users live so they don’t have to travel to get water supplies. The units can operate with gravity flow alone if the source or a storage tank is located above them, or they could operate with solar units requiring just 12 volts of electricity, according to the news report.

The next step for the Water POD is deployment and further testing. That will come in October when a unit will be sent to the Dominican Republic, where a sister parish of the Milwaukee Archdiocese has constructed a well to serve villagers.

The results of that test will be watched closely by Catholic Relief Services, Foster said.

Milwaukee is no stranger to water-borne illnesses. A little more than two decades ago more than 400,000 area residents — almost a quarter of the Milwaukee area population — were stricken in the 1993 Cryptosporidiosis outbreak. Sixty-nine people died.

It would be poetic justice if the city that suffered so much in that outbreak gave birth to a water system that solved those fears for poorer countries around the world.

Source: Journal Times

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