Water purification is the process of taking contaminated water and putting it through a cycle that will end up cleaning and sterilizing it. There are many different ways to carry out this process in order to make the water healthier and safer to drink. What many people don't know or don't really care to think about, are the pros, cons, and cost of each choice of purification systems. Four specific purification systems are activated charcoal filters, ozone and ultraviolet light purification, and chlorination. .
Water comes from many different places that can cause water to be contaminated with germs and bacteria, which is why chlorination is used in many cases to provide safer drinking water by killing disease-causing bacteria and pathogens that could be present in the water. Even though it gets rid of bacteria, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) provides information on their website, www.cdc.gov, that states chlorination is not as effective in the same way towards some protozoa. Overall, the chlorination is proven to reduce diseases by around 22-84%, which is a huge improvement, but the numbers could be even better if the protozoa was also killed along with the disease-causing bacteria. This positive turnout of chlorination has been a great motive to keep on using chlorination to provide safer drinking water. With chlorination being the most inexpensive filtration option out of the four at the cost of one cent for every gallon, it's been easier every year to produce more chlorine treated water. The graph below represents the amount of liters of water that has been treated every year from 1998-2012. The demand for the treated water was at its highest in the year of 2009 with the amount of over 16 million liters of water. Chlorination has been proven to be very effective which is why it is still being used to treat water to this day.
Another filtration option, is the use of activated charcoal filters, which can also be described as activated carbon filters because of the main component of carbon in charcoal.