China Focus: Ultra-filtration cures China's rural water ills

New water facilities at a rural school on Hainan Island, China's southernmost province, has benefited more than 2,000 students and staff at the school.

The installation in Siyuan School, Chengmai County, uses ultra-filtration membranes to clean groundwater, allowing students to drink water straight from the faucet for the first time. Students have had to bring boiled water from home for years.

In Chengmai County alone, 50 schools and 155 villages will soon have fresh drinking water using the method, a total of 315,000 residents, 90 percent of the county's rural populace.

China is campaigning hard to promote rural drinking water safety. Polluted water is one of the main causes of poor health in rural areas, and the government has promised universally safe drinking water in rural areas, where about 100 million people still go without, by 2015, according to Li Guoying, vice minister of water resources.

The staggering economic expansion of the past three decades has led to serious water pollution. In 2012, China discharged almost 70 billion tonnes of waste water, polluting 57.3 percent of 4,929 monitored groundwater sites across the country.

Improvements to the drinking water supply in rural China have been slow in coming. The rural population is widely scattered across many geographically isolated villages that are difficult to serve.

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• Filtration
• Quality Maintenance
• Water Governance