If all of the water in the world could be poured into one bucket, only one teaspoon of that water would be drinkable. In fact, the scarcity of clean drinking water is responsible for the deaths of 2,000 children a day; dehydration and poor sanitation. .
In the US, nearly 50% of water usage is devoted to power generation, a third to agriculture, and appropriately 5% for industrial purposes. The majority of the publicly or privately funded research on water technologies has been conducted to satisfy standards for municipal needs (11% of US water use)1. Although research is being conducted to better conserve municipal water, more research needs to be done to conserve water used when producing energy considering such a large amount is used in this area. .
Minimizing water needs for industrial operations is an area where new technology has been developed do increasing stringency on industry regulations. For most industrial plants, the cooling system uses the most water and discharges the most water. As more water restrictions are being placed on industrial plants, more options for increasing water efficiency are being looked into such as zero liquid discharge (zld) systems and low temperature evaporators. ZLD's help to eliminate waste by converting wastewater into disposable dry solids through evaporation and membrane processes. Aquatec, a leader in water treatment and conservation, today produces one of the best ZLD systems2. This system is a hybrid, which uses multiple processes starting with a high efficiency reverse osmosis (hero) followed by evaporation and crystallization. .
Wastewater is known to have high concentrations of silica, heavy metals, and hydrocarbons, which, if processed by a reverse osmosis system alone, leaves large concentrations of brine (salt and other chemicals). Aquatec's Hero technology reduces the brine water to less than 5% increasing water recovery and energy efficiency.