British-based engineering company, Paqua, has launched a sustainable carbon-free water purification system to provide safe water to areas of the world that are off-grid, or have an unreliable power supply. The innovative system, called PaquaVida, uses disinfection via electrolysis and filtration instead of hazardous chemicals for water purification from source waters such as ponds, lakes and rivers, and can even run using solar and wind.
The system’s launch follows UK trials over a number of years in collaboration with the University of the West of England. Further Europe-wide testing has resulted in Albania, Romania and Greece now having fully operational systems supplying fresh drinking water that meets country-specific and EU Drinking Water standards to homes, businesses and hospitals.
The engineering team behind the groundbreaking project is led by Simon Escott. “An estimated 2 billion people worldwide lack access to drinking water from improved water sources* and it is predicted to be become more scarce,” he said.
“Our mission from the start has been to design a better and easier way to help more people access clean water. We have created a system that can continuously supply safe, fresh drinking water that isself-cleaning and requires minimal maintenance, with the occasional top-up of salt for disinfection production. The running costs are a fraction of the cost of buying water in so people can move away from transported tanked water or move their current drinking water treatment system to this more sustainable option. We are proud to be able to significantly reduce the environmental carbon footprint compared to traditional methods using our innovative solution. To have achieved all that we set out to do is amazing and we have been overwhelmed by the response we are receiving from communities all across the globe.”
* https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/drinking-water
