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AguaClara is a Cornell University project that is improving drinking water quality through innovative research, knowledge transfer, and design of sustainable and scalable replicable water treatment systems. AguaClara water treatment plants are designed to treat turbid surface waters at the municipal scale, . They are built using local materials , and are operated without electricity. AguaClara partners with local institutions, who build, operate, train, transfer, oversee, and monitor the water treatment plants to ensure long term sustainability. AguaClara plants have a one-time construction and capacity-building cost of less than $20 per person served. The annual fee for operation and maintenance is approximately $2 $1 per personfamily.
The Challenge, Approaches, and the AguaClara Niche
Diarrheal diseases from easily preventable causes , mostly from unclean water, claim the lives of approximately 5000 young children throughout the world every day. Sufficient and better quality drinking water and basic sanitation reduce this toll dramatically (UNICEF, 2005). Distributing Drinking untreated surface waters as drinking water is one of the water and using it for bathing are major causes of waterborne disease. Point of use and municipal scale treatment schemes are two potential solutions. In recent years, conventional municipal water treatment and supply systems have been seen as an unsustainable and expensive strategy for providing safe drinking water in low-income communities in underdeveloped countries. This conclusion is based on the failure of conventional technologies, developed for use in the first world, that have been inserted in third world settings, which lack ready access to Recent trends in development work to provide water treatment have favored point-of-use treatment systems over municipal-scale projects. Many municipal water treatment plants in the Global South have been inserted by developed nations, and they do not operate sustainably away from their normal supply chains, trained technicians, and sufficient capital investments. AguaClara technology is an innovative way to bring economy of scale to water treatment, while maintaining simplicity of design that can be sustained even in impoverished regions.
Point of Use Treatment Systems
Point of Use use (POU) drinking water treatment systems recently have become a favored solution among many development organizations, but the challenges of training every household, the impossible task of monitoring water quality, and the high cost of replacing failed units has have led to the renewed realization that appropriate municipal scale water treatment systems could provide a more sustainable solution. While recognizing that POU solutions systems may be the only viable option in rural communities where piped distribution systems would be too costly or or areas where water scarcity makes managing a distribution system difficult, the AguaClara team is proposing a corrective to the current emphasis on POU technologies where municipal scale treatment and distribution would be more economical and sustainable and would better meet the needs of the poorest members of the communitiesbut they are not necessarily cost-effective in villages and cities where there is access to a regular water supply.
Some POU advocates emphasize deficiencies in municipal scale treatment and distribution systems and encourage consumers to not trust tap water in order to promote their own solutions. Loss of confidence in municipal water systems undermines public willingness to finance such infrastructure, which even POU users count on for their water delivery source. POU water treatment technology is more expensive per personliter of water treated, it treats only the drinking water used for special purposes rather than all water entering a home, and it is often unobtainable by the poorest members of a community. There are numerous advantages to working Working at the municipal level including economies of scale, fewer maintenance personnel to train, and treatment of scale provides a solution to nearly all of the water that goes into a homeconcerns raised regarding POU water treatment.
Municipal Scale Treatment Systems
A series of shortcomings has prevented municipal water treatment plants from becoming an effective a widely-supported tool for meeting the Millennium Development Goals. Environmental process engineers have viewed each installation as a customized design and the resulting engineering costs easily exceed the construction costs for small water treatment plants. The conventional solution to the high design costs was to rely on imported package plants. The lack of empirical experience or a theoretical basis for the design of small scale (communities less than 50,000) hydraulic flocculators has forced a reliance on simplistic designs using electric power and imported components. No technology has been available for gravity powered dosing systems that could be calibrated and easily used to deliver chlorine and aluminum sulfate.
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