Biosand Water Filters are an old technology, but that’s good news! In rural India, where the villagers don’t even have a city tap system to partially filter out harmful chemicals (in the cities, these hardly do anything but rural villages don’t even have this small protection), a way to filter water that is not only effective, but also requires no technical expertise, electricity or fancy breakable parts to keep running is quite literally a life saver.
Biosand Filters work using gravity and layers of gravel and sand that vary in the size of grains used. For instances, some layers are coarse and catch the bigger problem causing bacteria and viruses on their sharp edges, while other layers are fine to filter out the smaller, harmful particles. The outside shell is constructed of durable concrete that only requires maintenance every ten years for upkeep.
The need for these is great. We’ve only just had our work spread by word of mouth to reach both schools and prisons for women and adolescents in dire need of clean, drinkable drinking water to replace their one tap which had its source in heavily contaminated ground water and polluted wells.
The need for these in India is so great that we could never keep up with the demands ourselves which is one reason we have started annual clean water trainings and Biosand Filter construction schools in partnership with local Rotary groups in the U.S. These schools both teach a valuable trade (a mainstay of our ministry strategy) as well as kick start new businesses local to the villages. We help get them on their feet until they become self-supporting and watch as jobs and the means for clean water are produced right within the villages themselves.