County gains from clean water campaign

New water facilities at a rural school on Hainan Island, China’s southernmost province, have benefited more than 2,000 students and staff at the school.

The installation in Siyuan School, Chengmai County, uses ultra-filtration membranes to clean groundwater, allowing students to drink water straight from the faucet for the first time. Students had to bring boiled water from home for years.

In Chengmai County alone, 50 schools and 155 villages will soon have fresh drinking water using the same method that will benefit a total of 315,000 residents, 90 percent of the county’s rural populace.

China is campaigning hard to promote rural drinking water safety. Polluted water is one of the main causes of poor health in rural areas, and the government has promised universally safe drinking water in rural areas, where about 100 million people still go without, by 2015, according to Li Guoying, vice minister of water resources.

The staggering economic expansion of the past three decades has led to serious water pollution.

In 2012, China discharged almost 70 billion tons of waste water, polluting 57.3 percent of 4,929 monitored groundwater sites across the country.

Improvements to the drinking water supply in rural China have been slow in coming. The rural population is widely scattered across many geographically isolated villages that are difficult to serve.

“These filters allow us to set up water treatment works on a small scale with low installation and operating costs,” said Li Guibai of the Chinese Academy of Engineering.

In tests, water treated by the membranes — produced by Hainan’s own Litree Purifying Technology Co — surpass the national quality standard.

Compared to traditional chemical methods which remove bacteria, ultra-filtration removes even viruses without chemical agents. With its pore size one of ten thousandth of the width of a human hair, they can filter out dissolved compounds with high molecular weight, Li said.

In 2004, Hainan’s first ultra-filtration project was set up in Chengmai’s Yongtang, a village of only 40 households. Stable operation of the facilities for eight years led to expansion of the project in 2012.

Between 2012 and 2013, Hainan invested 130 million yuan (about US$21.5 million) installing 276 facilities which now provide safe drinking water for 600,000 residents in 17 out of its 19 administrative regions.