Our water being contaminated is one of the biggest forms of pollution we have to worry about. Not only can that make both people and animals sick directly, it can also contaminate our crops, seep into our groundwater, and flow into our oceans.
Luckily, there are at least a few Indians working on solving this problem in their own ways.
Gitanjali Rao may be only 12 years old, but she know enough to see how serious a problem polluted water sources can be, especially in poorer and more remote areas of India. So she built a device called Tethys, to help people gauge toxin levels in a body of water.
More importantly, the device uses a tiny sensor that can be linked to a smartphone with the app, so it's very easily portable, allowing people to check their freshwater sources even in the most remote villages far from scientific equipment.
More recently Shneel Malik, a doctoral student at the Barlett School of Architecture, built? a modular system to help clean polluting dyes and chemicals from water. Called Indus, the design is basically for a wall made from ceramic tiles that the water passes through.
The wall is also layered with microalgae and seaweed-based hydrogel, which use naturally-occurring processes to clear the toxins from the water.?
.Satyam Thakur, a Class XI student living in Bangalore, was actually looking for a solution to India's air pollution problem. He realised that clay pots, which are a common presence in most Indian households, are also good absorbers of particulate matter emitted by car exhausts and the like. Filters made of this material could therefore be fitted over exhausts from cars and factories to help reduce air pollution; but they can also be used to trap suspended particles in water. He found that using these pot filters could also clean polluted water enough to make it drinkable, after which the filters can be retrieved, cleaned, and reused, or converted into bricks for construction.
Twelve-year-old Haziq Kazi is on a quest to clean up all the plastic mankind has let loose into our oceans, wreaking havoc in the process. So he designed a ship (or ships) that he envisions cruising around the world's oceans, sucking up plastic to be dealt with later.?
Cervis, as he calls it, has rotating fans of sorts along its sides, that suck in water into a whirlpool, and the waste with it. The idea is that it can then be segregated inside the ship, with multiple chambers to store different types of ocean waste like oil, and various forms of plastic. Accordingly, it can be compressed and stored, and delivered to land later where it can be reused and recycled.
Back in 2018, Penn State professor of chemical engineering Stephanie Velegol, discovered that India has a way to filter pollutants from water literally growing in our backyard. Her filtration medium, 'f-sand', used sand along with plant proteins from the Moringa Oleifera. Also known as the drumstick tree, this is native to India and plentiful, making it a cheap and easily accessible resource.
While the drumstick tree is usually cultivated for food and natural oils, the seeds have been used as a sort of rudimentary filtration method for centuries. It does leave behind high traces of dissolved organic carbon (DOC) from the seeds though, which allows bacteria to regrow after just 24 hours. But by extracting the seed proteins and then adhering them to the surface of the silica particles in sand, the resulting mix kills microorganisms in the water, while the sand can easily be filtered out along with the DOC. And then, the filter material can be washed and reused again.