Because we are trying to turn a planet that supports life into one that does not, I’m posting a question or topic here every week to see if together we can work out some nuts and bolts of how to survive this mess. The whole linkable list of prior questions/discussions can be found here.
This week’s question is How Are You Going To Clean Your Water?
Our water is getting less and less clean every day
What’s in our water? A lot, such as:
both legal and illegal drug metabolites, birth control, endocrine disruptors, anti-depressants, heart medications, arthritis medicines (especially downstream of retirement communities), micro and nanoplastics, motor oil, gasoline, copper from brake pads and pipes, salt and other de-icers, paint, anti-freeze, cooking oil, bleach, Pb (downwind of freeways and highways there’s still substantial lead on the ground, in addition to lead from paint and pipes), CuSo4, arsenic, nitrogen (algae bloom maker), phosphorus (algae bloom maker), cesium (radioactive), radium (also radioactive), chromium-6 (Erin Brockovich), DDT (still), THM (trihalomethane), herbicides, insecticides, pesticides of all kinds (now strongly tied to Parkinsons), leachates (from plastics, dumps, and illegal dumping sites), battery acid, PFASs (the forever chems), giardia, E. coli, cryptosporidium, fecal matter, all kinds of solids, toxins produced by bacteria, microbes, microorganisms, and much more
So how do we clean it, especially if we end up having to do so ourselves?
Filter
Sari cloth, screens, activated carbon, fruit peels, and “waffle stacks” are some of the diy filtration methods recommended and/or used worldwide when needed (though the
“waffle stacks” are only diy if you’ve got a 3D printer and indium oxide handy).
Sari cloth works if it’s cotton (for cholera and some other water-borne illnesses), and preferably the cloth should be old. Most
diy water filters combine screens, sand, and activated carbon to remove many problems, but not all.
Fruit peels as another purification method actually have been shown to work in a few studies, though again they reduce versus eliminate water-borne problems and don’t get everything.
Aerate
Bubbling air through water, stirring it up, cascading it down — all are forms of aeration. Aeration works at removing some things, especially dissolved gases, VOCs, and some industrial solvents, and it helps precipitate out of solution some dissolved metals like iron and manganese. It also raises the pH of the water. It doesn’t do much of anything for other heavy metals or pathogens or more stable chems.
Flocculate
Lovely word: To flocculate is to clump unwanted impurities together that are mechanically suspended in your water, not dissolved in it. There are loads of natural flocculants, such as starch, cellulose, gelatin, and tannin. They seem to work pretty well at
removing dyes and heavy metals. Of course, you then have to get out the flocculate sediment, which should loop us back to filtration and aeration.
React
Given the number of chemicals in polluted water, reaction as a method of cleaning them out makes sense, specifically reaction with the aim of precipitation or coagulation (dropping the bad stuff out of solution as a solid, or clumping it so it can be flocculated and scooped out). Chemical reaction is one of the main ways we currently clean water, (we use chlorine and/or potassium compounds in most municipal systems). This is also why you keep chlorine bleach in your emergency kits for emergency water purification. Historically, we’ve also used alcohols; in many places and times alcohol was safer to drink than water. But, unless you’re a crack chemist with the ability to do pristine lab work in the wild (chlorine gas was used in WWI trench warfare, after all), your best bet here is to stock up on water purification tablets with a looooong shelf life.
Irridiate
A UV-C (ultraviolet-C) system can scramble the DNA of most things that have DNA (or RNA for that matter). You’re unlikely to have a UV-C transmitter sitting around for the same reason you’re unlikely to have a portable x-ray machine sitting around: they’re dangerous. While UV-C can kill off most living stuff, it’s not good against iron bacteria and it does nothing at all to anything non-living, even VOCs. So if you have a UV-C lamp handy, you’re still going to have to do some of the other stuff above for clean-ish water.
Distill
This means evaporating water, collecting the evaporate, and then condensing it. This usually involves some kind of 2-pot system and heat (boiling or using sunlight), though there is
a buried cup method that works, too. One problem is demineralization of the water; there are minerals we need that we get through water. A second problem is that there are things that are going to move with the evaporated water and be in the distilled product, things like
10% or more of the micro and nanoplastics (and they are easier to remove via distillation from hard water than soft water, and you’ll still need to filter your distilled water to get them out).
Combination
Most municipal systems use a combination of treatments to get water as clean as they can. For anything longer term than a hike or a few day emergency, you’re probably going to want a combination of treatments as well.
Other?
And now for something completely different, using the filtration system naturally occuring in pine sapwood branches, basically hijacking the xylem. It’s slooow. And how long will it work?
