Clean Water Crisis in Indonesia

Quick Facts

Population of 255.7 million
33 million lack safe water
100 million lack sanitation
Only 30 percent of city residents have access to clean water

Indonesia needs to ensure that 50 percent of the population has access to clean-drinking water to meet the targets set by the United Nations.

Clean Water Problem in Indonesia

Indonesia has the worst drinking water in Southeast Asia. Water contamination is mostly due to human activities such as wastes of household, farming, industrial and mining.

Effect of water contamination

Caused a loss of US$4.6 billion per year.
That loss includes health costs, cost for clean water supply, loss of productive time, negative tourism image and the high infant mortality rate.
More children die from diarrhea caused by dirty water and lack of sanitation than malaria, measles and HIV-AIDS combined.

Membrane for Waste Water Treatment

Water treatment membranes are able to separate contaminants mostly based on size.
Water permeates through a membrane, however; larger particles, microorganisms, and other contaminants are separated out.
Membrane separation process operates without heating and therefore use less energy than thermal separation process.

Membrane characteristic-Porous membrane

Microfiltration

Microfiltration membrane employs pore sizes from 0.03 to 10 µm
It is often used to remove sand, silt, clay, algae and bacteria

Ultrafiltration

Ultrafiltration membrane employs pore sizes from 0.01 to 0.03 µm
It is often used to remove sand, silt, clay, algae, bacteria and viruses

Nanofiltration

Nanofiltration membrane employs pore sizes as small as 0.001 µm or 1 nm
Nanofiltration is used to remove natural organic matter, and synthetic organic chemicals from water

Reverse osmosis

Nanofiltration membrane employs pore sizes as small as 0.0001 – 0.001 µm
Reverse osmosis membrane is used for desalination projects.

Conclusion

Using membrane as separation process:

Can be applied into a portable water filtration device
Less energy is required than conventional thermal separation processes
Inexpensive-no electricity needed to operate the separation process
Depending on the pore size of membrane, the selective separation of certain individual substances or substance mixtures is possible

Portable Water Filters

Water crisis in Indonesia

As the third largest populous country in the world of 250 million people, Indonesia surely facing serious problem for their water quality due to excessive water exploitation, industrial activities, and daily wastes. Particularly in heavy populated cities such as Jakarta and Jogjakarta, degradation of water quality is also due to limited ground water availability. Poor sanitation adds up the problem, in which high amount of bacteria such as Salmonella can be found in most of ground water sample in big cities.

Some factories also failed to conduct a proper waste water treatment prior releasing their waste due to unqualified equipment, hence leads to detection of dangerous heavy metals both on ground water and water stream. Only 60% good quality water is available at national level. The rest 40% of the country population uses non-qualified water for daily uses.

Geological condition also contributes to water quality. In the archipelago of Indonesia, some small islands, such as Gili Meno of Lombok island, do not have fresh water but saline. The island people have to go by tugboat to the mainland of Lombok, approximately 2 hours, to get fresh water since their ground water contains high level of sodium. At national level, the households that have access to fresh-qualified water is below 50% in average.

Therefore, membrane filtration for water is one of the effective way to get good water quality fits for consumption. The membrane has nanopores which able to filtrate bacteria and heavy metals. With some modification on membrane’s surface, it also able to reduce sodium quantity to the level of fit consumption.

The three gilis of Lombok. Gili Air and Gili Trawangan have fresh water on the ground but not with Gili Meno. Those three are popular tourist destination in Indonesia.
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