Obviously, when the monsoon doesn't provide the life-sustaining rains, and water tables drop, and river water suitable for irrigation is over-subscribed, there will be conflict. To talk about the use of reverse osmosis (RO) or deionization as solutions to the need for hundreds of millions of liters a day for irrigation of human food crops is ludicrous. I am an industrial microbiologist and biochemical engineer and I have been designing and building water systems all over the world for biologics and pharmaceutical applications and for wastewater treatment for 43 years. To even bring up RO or DI in the same breathe as the discussion with this problem in India and all over the world in unbelievable. The is the Western mind with its attitude that "technology will save us". Give it a rest please! The ONLY methods of treating and reclaiming water, unsuitable for human food crop irrigation, are natural methodologies. I am talking here about the use of natural algae and duckweed, to name just two. There are many more like, water hyacinth, water lettuce and so on. Some of these methods have been tried in India and were less than successful, through no fault of the natural systems, but through improper design and maintenance. Too bad. Now everyone who actually makes these methods work gets tarred with the same brush. Well, the truth will out in the end. RO? DI? I don't think so. Show me the CAPEX and OPEX on such systems for handling, say, 500 Million liters a day. How about a billion? Those are the kinds of quantities that are needed in order to make a difference. And India doesn't have that kind of money. Even if it did, it shouldn't be spent that way. Cleaning up municipal and industrial wastewater and heavily polluted open water sources, using a low cost, natural, low tech. non-polluting treatment system and returning the water to safe irrigation is the only sensible idea. And yes, RO water is itself a source of pollution. 75% of the reject water from an RO system, which now has more concentrated pollutants in it than when it started is dumped..... where???? But don't worry.....technology will save us. That's the kind of stuff I mucked out of the stables when I was a kid on my family's farm.
Published by Ari Maayan, Chief Technology Officer and co-founder at Clean Environmental Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
Obviously, when the monsoon doesn't provide the life-sustaining rains, and water tables drop, and river water suitable for irrigation is over-subscribed, there will be conflict. To talk about the use of reverse osmosis (RO) or deionization as solutions to the need for hundreds of millions of liters a day for irrigation of human food crops is ludicrous. I am an industrial microbiologist and biochemical engineer and I have been designing and building water systems all over the world for biologics and pharmaceutical applications and for wastewater treatment for 43 years. To even bring up RO or DI in the same breathe as the discussion with this problem in India and all over the world in unbelievable. The is the Western mind with its attitude that "technology will save us". Give it a rest please! The ONLY methods of treating and reclaiming water, unsuitable for human food crop irrigation, are natural methodologies. I am talking here about the use of natural algae and duckweed, to name just two. There are many more like, water hyacinth, water lettuce and so on. Some of these methods have been tried in India and were less than successful, through no fault of the natural systems, but through improper design and maintenance. Too bad. Now everyone who actually makes these methods work gets tarred with the same brush. Well, the truth will out in the end. RO? DI? I don't think so. Show me the CAPEX and OPEX on such systems for handling, say, 500 Million liters a day. How about a billion? Those are the kinds of quantities that are needed in order to make a difference. And India doesn't have that kind of money. Even if it did, it shouldn't be spent that way. Cleaning up municipal and industrial wastewater and heavily polluted open water sources, using a low cost, natural, low tech. non-polluting treatment system and returning the water to safe irrigation is the only sensible idea. And yes, RO water is itself a source of pollution. 75% of the reject water from an RO system, which now has more concentrated pollutants in it than when it started is dumped..... where???? But don't worry.....technology will save us. That's the kind of stuff I mucked out of the stables when I was a kid on my family's farm.