When will people worldwide have enough clean, safe water to drink? This is a very relevant question especially given the population growth. It is also something that affects not just people but the world as a whole. The one thing that everyone has to realize is that the time frame is based on factors that people have learned to control some of it based on attitudes with given societies and some is based on what we have learned in the way of science and nature.
When it comes to attitudes based in our various societies, there are a plethora of things that have to be dealt with some of which is the mentality of the leaders in a given geographical location in regards to whether or not they think of the environment as a way of helping or hurting the people who live in their countries. Some countries are more open to doing what it takes to help the environment while others use the environment as a way to hurt others.
There are also governments which believe that clean drinkable water isn’t a priority due to other things going on in their country that they would rather focus on.
With regards to science and nature we have progressed far enough to make an honest attempt to reverse the damage we have caused and can cause. The technology that we are capable of engineering doesn’t discern between the variations of clean or dirty, it just treats everything as if it needs to be treated.
Clean drinkable water, every living thing on the planet depends on it to some degree. The only two ways water can be effectively cleaned is to either let the Earth do her jobs in cleaning the water, or to have us take a more proactive approach to actually cleaning the water in ways that doesn’t take one problem and transfer it from one place to another.
One good way of dealing with creating clean water is how we have learned how to deal with our waste water that flows to the water treatment plants in many metropolitan areas. The process usually included the separation of the water itself from the sludge and trash that accompany the incoming water along with treating the water with environmentally friendly cleaners which include things that attack the bacteria and other things that can make plants and animals sick.
After the sludge is removed it is processed in a way that neutralized the bacteria and such that would be detrimental to the land environment while turning it into beneficial fertilizer that can be sold for gardens and for farming. The process itself is in essence just the speeding up of the decay process that nature has and therefore the facility can capture the methane that the process creates, which allows the facility to use the methane as fuel which allows the facility to reduce the amount of energy they need to buy from a power plant therefore reducing the power created by fossil fuels.
Besides cleaning waste water, we are capable of desalinating ocean water to create clean drinkable water which can be used in municipal drinking water and in the irrigation of farmland. The one problem with this that it is expensive along with needing a lot of energy to produce, a good way of offsetting the energy needs of the process would be to place the desalinization plants in areas where we can get the environment to help create the energy.
One good place to build a water desalination plant would be to build them where there the sun is the hottest and that is out the longest. This way you could use the solar energy, and you could possibly convert the heat to energy both to offset the cost associated with the process. Other good ways to offset the energy production needed would be to design the facility to use the water itself to create the energy.
We have to find ways of creating clean drinkable water without creating environmental problems elsewhere in a geographic region or globally.
