Ultrafiltration: viable for water treatment in developing countries?

An innovative water treatment system which uses filters with nano-sized holes could help the international community increase the number of people with access to safe drinking water. A new study shows the technology has been successfully applied in rural areas of South America and Africa.

Under the UN Millennium Declaration of September 2008, the EU is committed to providing assistance for development and eliminating poverty worldwide. Under the wider goal of ensuring environmental sustainability, one of the specific targets of the Declaration is to halve the proportion of people without access to safe drinking water by 2015. In this respect, the developed world can provide technical expertise as well as financial aid.

Spanish researchers have developed a filtering system, which aims to design a low cost, automated water treatment system that can be used in developing countries. The system has been tested at lab and pilot scale, as well as for three years in rural communities in Ecuador and Mozambique, where water supplies are highly contaminated. They suggest the system could be used in areas which lack the financial and structural investment for large, centralised treatment systems.