• Question: how is water cleaned?

    Asked by 957putk52 to Jake, Pete, Senga, Simonne on 16 Nov 2017. This question was also asked by 338putk52.
    • Photo: Senga Robertson

      Senga Robertson answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      I answered a similar question just a second ago – it’s great so many of you are so interested in water.
      I’m going to use toilet water as an example (because I think toilets and poo are funny) but this applies to water from drains and sinks and everywhere else too.

      When you flush the toilet the water leaves your house via the water pipes, it flows through the sewer system to a wastewater treatment centre. The wastewater is treated using lots of treatments the first is a special filter to remove large particles (aka big lumps of poop), the second is bacteria treatment – the bacteria eat the pollutants in the water (pollutants=tiny bits of poop-yes, some bacteria eat poop, that is totally gross) and some of the chemicals we put in water like bleach and washing detergent, the water then goes through an advanced filtering system to get rid of any remaining chemicals the bacteria didn’t eat.
      After all of that the treated wastewater is used again for lots of things like drinking water and watering crops. yes, you read that right…your drinking water has probably been peed out by someone in the past….but it’s been cleaned and recycled so it’s perfectly safe to drink

    • Photo: Pete Gwynne

      Pete Gwynne answered on 16 Nov 2017:

      you can also do it using light – some places here use ultraviolet lights to kill bacteria. in other places where there’s more sunlight like in africa, you can make water safer to drink by just leaving it out in the sun all day. i saw a project where some scientists made a special holder to keep bottles in and put it on the roof of a school. the students leave a bottle of water on the roof all day, and the germs in it are killed by the sun by the time they go home!

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