Combined central treatment and distribution are
relatively recent phenomena, having only become
standard in the last century or so. Given that <1%
of treated water is actually ingested, the concept of
treating all of the water in a system to optimal drinking
water specifications is becoming more impractical, especially
in the face of increasingly stringent regulations,
high costs, water quality deterioration during distribution,
and reduced access to high-quality source water.
The Safe Drinking Water Act has created special
opportunities for small systems to use decentralized
compliance through point-of-use (POU) and point-of-entry
(POE) techniques to provide supplemental treatment
for part of the delivered piped water. Two-tier
water systems that include the use of POU or POE
devices or possibly even bottled water provide a feasible
and cost-effective means of delivering safe water to
consumers. Community-managed decentralized strategies
also offer small systems the opportunity to achieve
safer, higher-quality drinking water than these communities
might otherwise have had, more quickly and at
reasonable costs.
These alternative approaches create new logistic,
management, compliance, monitoring, and regulatory
oversight issues, but these are solvable. Most of the
principles supporting decentralized solutions for small
systems are also applicable to providing community-managed
"beverage-quality" drinking water in much
larger systems. For all water providers, decentralized
and centralized treatment combinations represent a
better use of diminishing water resources and limited
finances. Includes 19 references, table.
| Edition : | Vol. 95 - No. 3 |
| File Size : | 1
file
, 1.2 MB |
| Note : | This product is unavailable in Ukraine, Russia, Belarus |
| Number of Pages : | 8 |
| Published : | 03/01/2003 |
