Abstract
This communication is motivated by recent publications discussing the affordability of appropriate decentralized solutions for safe drinking water provision in low-income communities. There is a huge contrast between the costs of presented technologies, which vary by a factor of up to 12. For example, for the production of 2000 L/d of treated drinking water, the costs vary between about 1500 and 12,000 Euro. A closer look at the technologies reveals that expensive technologies use imported manufactured components or devices that cannot yet be locally produced. In the battle to achieve the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal for safe drinking water (SDG 6.1), such technologies should be, at best, considered as bridging solutions. For a sustainable self-reliance in safe drinking water supply, do-it-yourself (DIY) systems should be popularized. These DIY technologies include biochar and metallic iron (Fe0) based systems. These relevant technologies should then be further improved through internal processes.
Highlights
Introduction published maps and institutional affilThe international community has achieved the Millennium Development Goal 7C of halving the number of people without access to “improved” water supply by 2015 [1,2].this success still leaves some 1.8 billion world citizens without safe drinking water, and 144 million continue to drink untreated surface water drawn from rivers or lakes [3,4]
The communication is motivated by the following three key issues: (i) decentralized water supply systems are usually perceived as more costly than centralized systems, mostly due to a lack of consideration of the avoided costs, including the local manpower [44], (ii) many so-called innovative solutions are based on materials and principles that have been used for the same purposes for more than one century [10], and (iii) slow sand filtration (SSF)
The objective was to assess whether frugal technologies for selfreliance in safe drinking water supply are already available in the literature (Tables 2 and 4)
Summary
The literature research has not adapted any systematic approach for a literature review, for example, by using several search terms and combinations thereof to identify the scientific literature related to frugal systems for small-scale safe drinking water provision. It is certain that the cost perspective widely depends on the stakeholder performing the economic analysis (e.g., developers, community of users, water agency) [44] In this communication, cost comparison is based on a very recent cost analysis in a paper entitled “Economic evaluation of water supply systems operated with solar-driven electro-chlorination in rural regions in Nepal, Egypt and Tanzania” [3]. Technological innovation continuously seeks to adapt or develop decentralized systems to the current needs of small communities [44]. New decentralized designs of water treatment should be context-specific since system requirements differ significantly from place to place All these criteria are important to select technology for the rural areas of developing countries where the procurement of materials is critical to achieve a sustainable water supply (Table 1)
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