Microbial Biotechnologies for Potable Water Production

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Microbial Biotechnologies for Potable Water Production

The global provision of safe water is a key aim of UN Sustainable development goal (SDG) 6, but this goal also intersects closely with SDG 13, climate change, requiring energy efficiency and minimal GHG emissions, and SDG 12, requiring sustainable global water consumption and production patterns and reductions in pollution of water resources. Safe drinking water has a quality that would not present any significant risk to health over a lifetime of consumption. While physical and chemical disinfection processes may remain essential to reduce the pathogenic burden during water treatment, we believe that increased exploitation of microbiological processes for drinking water treatment is the most sustainable way forward for the global provision of safe water. Biological drinking water treatment processes are available for the removal of a wide range of chemical contaminants, are less costly and less energy intensive than advanced chemical or physical treatment methods and are robust over a wide range of operating conditions and water qualities. 

S. Jane Fowler and Barth F. Smets*
DTU Environment, Department of Environmental
Engineering, Technical University of Denmark,
Bygningstorvet 115, 2800 Kgs Lyngby, Denmark.

Received 21 July, 2017; accepted 21 July, 2017.
*For correspondence. E-mail bfsm@env.dtu.dk; Tel. +45 45251600; Fax +45 45932850.
Microbial Biotechnology (2017) 10(5), 1094–1097
doi:10.1111/1751-7915.12837

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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