There are many reasons why you should purify your water. One reason or benefit we have not talked about on this site extensively is that purifying your water also has many environmental benefits. In fact, it could be considered a very eco-friendly practice.
To start with, the very principal of water purification is eco-friendly. You are not just trying to treat water to make it safe, you’re trying to make it pure. This involves removing contaminants across the board. When people talk about water treatment, they are often talking about reaching a standard that won’t kill you. Water that is safe to drink does not mean that the water is automatically good for you. For more on this, read here.
There are other ways to think about purifying your water in eco terms, however. For one thing, if you are taking measures to have pure water in your house, it’s unlikely that you will be spending money on bottled water at the store. In many cases, bottled water is nothing more than purified tap water and there is the unfortunate side effect that you are also purchasing a plastic bottle.
Taking control of your household water treatment also has eco benefits. For example, if you use something like a UV treatment system you are destroying bacteria and virus DNA with light rather than a harmful chemical disinfectant like chlorine (what almost all municipal water plants use to treat their water).
Another way to think of water purification in terms of environmental benefits is that by purifying your own water, you are helping to filter our contaminants from the general water supply. It has been shown in recent years that certain chemicals like pharmaceuticals can bounce around in the municipal water supply as they are not sufficiently removed by treatment plants. Stepping up to purify your own water helps to ensure that you are doing your part to take these chemicals out of the water supply.
Finally, you can really get eco-friendly with your water purification efforts if you are willing to invest in some creative methods and systems. For example, you can create a purifying system that is based on certain kinds of clay. These types of filters are great because in addition to not requiring electricity or any type of plastic, they are also based on all natural materials. There is literally no waste product with such a system. To find out more on these systems, you can do a simple internet search. You can also find many online manuals for “do it yourself” devices that you can actually build from scratch with a few basic tools and materials.
Finally, here is a video of a water filtration system. We have included it because the author of the video also talks about some of the environmental benefits that he has been experiencing.
If you have any thoughts on the environmental benefits of home water filtration, please be sure to share them in the comments below. We would love to hear from you!
Photo credit: flickr user fayncbikerjaa
{ 0 comments… add one }