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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 water treatment systems. AguaClara water treatment plants are designed to treat turbid surface waters at the municipal scale, built using local materials, and 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. The monthly fee for maintenance and supplies needed to keep the plant operational is approximately $1 per family.
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Point of Use Treatment Systems
Point of Use (POU) treatment systems became the favored solution for providing safe water, but the challenges of training every household, the impossible task of monitoring water quality, and high cost of replacing failed units has led to the realization that municipal scale water treatment systems provide compelling advantages.
We recognize that POU solutions may be the only viable option in rural communities where piped distribution systems would be too costly or where water scarcity makes managing a distribution system difficult. The AguaClara team is proposing a corrective to the current overemphasis 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 communities.
Some Point of Use 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 source. POU water treatment is more expensive per person, treats only the drinking water rather than all water entering a home, and is often unobtainable by the poorest members of a community. There are numerous advantages to working at the municipal level including economies of scale, fewer maintenance people to train, and treating all of the water that goes into a home, not just the drinking water.
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