Water is an essential thing for our life and health. Wherever they are, people need water to live. Not only the human body consists of 60 percent of water, the resource is also essential for producing food, clothing, and keeping us environment healthy. Unfortunately, data from WHO Joint Monitoring Programmer (JMP) for Water Supply and Sanitation shows that freshwater makes up a very small fraction of all water on the planet. While nearly 70 percent of the world is covered by water, but only 2.5 percent of it is fresh. The rest is saline and ocean-based. Furthermore, just 1 percent of our freshwater is easily accessible, with much of it trapped in glaciers and snowfields. In essence, only 0.007 percent of the planet’s water is available to fuel and feed its 6.8 billion people.
We classifiy water usage into two types, clean water and drinking water. Clean water is used for human activities, such as washing clothes, taking bath, etc. Drinking water is consumed in human body. The needs of both of them are increasing day by day as the number of human is increasing as well, while the resources remain constants. The effect is there is water shortage all over the world.
One should be done is process saline and ocean-based water into clean or drinking water. We need tools that can process untreated sources of water into clean or drinking water, which is water purifier. Inside water purifier, there are water purifying process that use some technologies. There are a lot of technologies that can be used in water purifier, for instance filtration, adsorption, UV light, chlorination, ozonation, etc. Those technologies sometimes need to be combined to seize the desired water.
The prospect of growth of water purifier is very high. We can take Indonesia as good case studies. According to the recently published report by TechSci Research “Indonesia Water Purifier Market Forecast & Opportunities 2018”, the demand for water purifiers is increasing and water purifier market revenues are expected to grow by over two folds, increasing at the CAGR (Compound annual Growth Rate) of around 14% during 2013. Indonesia is archipelago country, in which two-third of it covered with water. With population almost reach 250 million people, the needs of clean and drinking water is very high. The situation worsened with the high intensity of disaster happen like flood that reduce quality of water. Right now, there is only one big companies that produce water purifier in Indonesia. The situation already explained above demand more water purifier device.
The barrier between challenge to be overcome and creative ideas to be implemented is always feasibility in terms of economic side. What we need right now is producing water purifier that is affordable for all people. The key point is correlating the resource and what we want. The type of untreated water, technology chosen, and type of desired water must match each other. For example, if untreated water contains many heavy metal ions want to be processed into clean water, adsorption with granular activated carbon technology is suitable to be applied. The quantity of water processed is also important for deciding what kind of technology used in water purifier. Corperation between companies that produce water purifier and government, to make it implemented massively, is needed right now. The price of technology will decrease inversely proportional with quantity of water purifier produced. It is not even just a dream anymore to produce water purifier for free, like WHO did in Africa, which lack of desired water.
Note : Essay singkat di atas merupakan essay penulis yang diterbikan di Jurnal PIPES ‘Asia Pasific Youth Journal on Water Volume 2’ tahun 2015. Anda dapat melihat versi onlinenya di https://www.slideshare.net/GolamKibrea1/pipesver2small
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