How Recycled Polypropylene Can Help Sustainable Water Management

Water is a primary good that man absolutely needs to survive and is contended for from the most ancient past to modern times.

The wars for water control are more and more numerous, whether they are known to the public or not making the news, they have impressive numbers. Between 2000 and 2009, according to a UNESCO report, 94 wars were fought to control water supplies, while between 2010 and 2018 as many as 263.

On a planet where the population continues to increase, especially in poor areas like Africa with a population of about 1.2 billion people that should double by 2050, the need for drinking water is increasingly urgent.

The control of large rivers, which bring water to both the population and agriculture, are increasingly the subject of political and military disputes. The Nile which bathes many African countries, the Indus which serves Pakistan but originates in India, the Tigris and the Euphrates which are needed by Syria and Iraq but influenced by Turkey, and many other situations.

If we then consider that in the world, according to the report, about 2.1 billion people do not have access to safe water and another 4.5 billion do not can take advantage of correct sanitation, it is easy to think about the level of severity of the water situation.

In this case you shouldn't play averages, considering only the amount of water available per person in the world, but also its geographical distribution, that is how many liters are available per individual in various countries.

We would soon realize that the numbers are alarming, with millions of people without water and just as many who have too much water and waste it.

Among the countries where there is a shortage of water or have extreme and opposite seasonal flows, such as droughts at certain times of the year and floods in others, the availability of safe, uncontaminated water is a real problem.

Furthermore, more and more often the lack of efficient sanitation leads to the contamination of available water, creating in turn very serious health problems among the population.

At this point we should ask ourselves how recycled plastic, in particular polypropylene, can help humans to alleviate the problem?

Through the use of recycled polypropylene, structures have been built that can help the population to reduce or solve the two biggest problems:

• The lack of efficient sanitation creates the dispersion of sewage polluted by fecal bacteria, which can mix with the water supply sources used for use domestic. If there are no safe sewage systems, it is possible to install recycled plastic modules composed of septic tanks and systems for the dispersion of treated water in the ground, without these polluting the groundwater.

• Water is necessary, in those countries where there are phenomena of alternation of long periods without water to periods in which the intense rains bring a quantity of water greater than the needs of the moment, the installation of water storage systems, positioned under the ground level, in order to keep stocks for as long as possible, which will not be subject to evaporation caused by the sun.

These solutions can be easily implemented even in countries where infrastructures and logistics are scarce, as the water control systems are modular, light because they are made of recycled plastic, allowing easy installation even without large mechanical means.

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Automatic translation. We apologize for any inaccuracies. Original article in Italian.