Most of you have installed RO (Reverse Osmosis) water purifiers in your houses. Though the modern day RO purifiers seem to be the best choice for water purification but it may seem ironical to know that these purifiers are one of the vital causes of depletion in the percentage of drinking water.

Astonished?

It may also happen that the state bans some of our latest RO purifiers in the future.

Let’s see what exactly goes on inside these purifiers without going into those nerdy-engineering details. In such purifiers, water is directly drawn from the tap and then purified through reverse osmosis. But to get rid of the impure particles which start to accumulate in the purifier(during filtration), it uses a part of the tap water to clean itself and then expels this impure water through other outlets.

In this above diagram, you can see a simplified version of an RO purifier. You receive pure drinkable water through pipe #9 while the impure one goes down the sink through pipe #10.

Check the picture given below if you couldn’t understand the previous one.

That “Dirty Water” is usually let out into the sink.

After keeping a tap on the amount of water flowing out for 3 hours, about 20% of the water which comes out of the purifier as pure water is drained out of it as waste water. This may seem to be a very small value. A majority of purifiers take about 40% or more to clean up the impurities!

For example, the amount of water used by a family of 7 members, is 24 liters/day. This value includes water used for drinking and cooking purposes i.e. the purifier provides them with around 24 litres of pure water every day.

Now, for getting 24 liters/day the amount of waste water generated is around 4.8 litres. So the amount of water wasted in that family per person is around 4.8/7 = 0.68 liters

Seems nominal. Right?

This is just the data for one person in an Indian family. If you consider that in a country of 1.3 billion, about
0.001 of the population is getting access to RO purified water. Then the total water loss in India is around…

(1.3∗1010)∗(0.001/100)∗0.68 = 88,400 liters

Got blown away?

Therefore if 1 in every 1 lakh Indians has access to RO purified water(and that’s just a random approximation) then around 88 Thousand liters of water is going down the drain EVERY DAY!!!

Food for thought. Isn’t it?

So, just imagine that in a country where drought strikes every year, we’re wasting billions of water in just purifying the same! That’s what we Indians are collectively doing wrong (un)intentionally.

So, what can you do about it?

Just Re-use the waste water! One can reuse this water to:

• Wash utensils.
• Wash clothes.
• Clean the floor.
• Wash vehicles etc… the list is endless.

We just need to open our eyes a bit.

Source: Quora