Happy World Water Day!
This World Water Day focuses on Groundwater - the United Nations’ theme is “Making the Invisible Visible.”
World Water Day was created to both highlight the importance of groundwater as well as solutions to preserve this precious resource.
The UN outlines options such as collecting data on it, strengthening environmental regulations, and emphasizing allocating resources to protect groundwater. World Water Day also highlights the UN’s 6th Sustainable Development Goal - Ensure availability and sustainable management of water and sanitation for all.
We thought we’d take today to discuss the specifics of groundwater and how Glanris aims to be a solution for keeping groundwater clean — we do this not just through our product, but the entirety of our solution. Glanris’ Biocarbon™ is a tool for a cleaner planet with accessible clean water for all. Our patented process converts rice hulls into water filtration media, instead of letting them burn or rot. Glanris’ media provides the following environmental benefits:
Significantly mitigates CO2 / methane emissions, reforms unsustainable agriculture practices at no cost to farmers, improve air quality / local health.
Fights critical water scarcity and security issues by providing a filter media with massive sustainable raw supply availability, the ability to filter metal and organic contaminants effectively, and an accessible low-cost price. This makes Glanris perfect for point of use, industrial, municipal, and environmental remediation solutions.
Sequesters carbon through converting biomass to biochar.
What is groundwater?
Groundwater is the water present beneath the Earth's surface in the pore spaces in soil, sand, or gravel and in the fractures of rock formations.
A unit of rock or an unconsolidated deposit is called an aquifer when it can yield a usable quantity of water. Groundwater accounts for nearly 99% of our planet’s freshwater resources and provides almost half of all drinking water worldwide.
Why is groundwater important?
Groundwater aquifers provides almost half of all drinking water worldwide.
Typically ground water is contained in aquifers deep underground. These aquifers have been created by surface water that has seeped through soil, rock, sand, and clay layers and settled in large underground lakes, some quite large. The sand, rock and clay layers act as natural filters that remove organic contaminates leaving the water typically very pure. Industrial runoff and environmental contaminants have been creeping into ground water supplies over the last few decades. They get there through cracks in the natural filtration layers of sand and clay. This puts our groundwater resources at great risk as it takes potentially hundreds to thousands of years to refresh aquifers through natural filtration.
So how do we protect our groundwater supplies?
The biggest step to protect groundwater and surface water (which can feed groundwater aquifers) was taken back in 1972 with the Clean Water act. This regulated what could and couldn’t be discharged into the environment, especially by corporations. The most important steps then and now are taking care that pollutants dont seep in and contaminate the groundwater. This means as individuals we need to be careful with the pesticides we use, and take oils and paints and other toxic substances to the land fill or proper disposal sites instead of dumping them. Corporations need to be good stewards as well and adhere to the maximum discharge limits for their contaminants. Historically many of the chemicals used to clean the water were pretty toxic themselves.
This is where Glanris can help, by providing, low-cost, sustainable solutions to remove toxic organics as well as heavy metal contaminants from wastewater with our nature based solution, Biocarbon.
What about our contaminated groundwater?
When groundwater does get contaminated, and remediation is required, Glanris can help here as well.
Typically this involves pumping the contaminated water up from the aquifer and filtering it. These filtration systems can run from large tanks like a swimming pool filter to large troughs where the water flows through filtration media. The size of the tanks and the troughs are dependent on how much water needs to be filtered. The amount and type of filtration media depends on the contaminates in the water.
Organic contaminants are typically removed with activated carbon. Heavy metals (lead, chromium, mercury, etc) are harder to remove because they are usually dissolved in the water. They are removed with a variety of methodologies from ion exchange resin beads to nano-filtration.
Glanris can can remove organic contaminants from the water like activated carbon does, but can also remove dissolved metals as ion exchange resins do, but at a fraction of the price. Glanris’ material is also sustainable: made from agricultural waste material. Ion exchange resin beads are a petroleum based micro-plastic that will become environmentally persistent pollution when exhausted. When dealing with remediation, we must think about the environmental ramifications of the interventions we put in place. At exhaustion, Glanris’ media will sequester carbon for hundreds of years, instead of infiltrating our eco-system for millennia.
Check out our video from World Water Day 2021
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MORE RESOURCES:
National Groundwater Association - Facts About Groundwater Usage
UN Water - UN World Water Development Report 2022 ‘Groundwater: Making the invisible visible’
UN SDGs - Sustainable Development Goal 6