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this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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Oh, man.
I've been saying this to people for a long time. Here in my country, most water filters are based on charcoal and a final filtering element. That element used to be made of cellulose and other organic materials, but in the last decade, they started coming with that element made of polypropylene, until all the cellulose ones disappeared from the market. Just imagine your water passing though a porous layer of plastic, like a rigid sponge... this is a serious microplastic source.
You're talking like .01% as much plastic use per liter as plastic bottle water packs. Is that not....much much better?
I'm not sure how much microplastics are released in that way. It can be better than bottles, but if we used non plastic materials for so long, and it worked fine, I see no reason to put plastic in there.
Plastic is like lead, there shouldnt be any in our systems
It's like it in that this is true, but there's a big, big, big difference in how big a deal a given amount being in our systems is.
But the filters introduce way way fewer.plastics...?
Distill water, then add minerals back into it, and bottle in glass, profit.
Probably the best way. Distillation uses a lot of electricity, doesn't it?
Not necessarily. It just requires excitation at a molecular level. You can get creative with your source. They have been playing around with low energy methods like LED or even just using the sun, geothermal, etc.
Resistive heating is 100% efficient at turning electrical energy into heat
Unless it gets coated in salt...
wrong
Rock salt will act as a thermal barrier, sure you may be able to turn the electricity into heat but transfering that heat is another story
What happens when you distill salt water? It leaves behind rock salts...
Yes, I'm aware of different way to distill, but if this were to work in a home/commercial setting, it needs to be accessible/affordable.
I'd personally love to get a home distiller, but I read they were very expensive to run :(
I was about to write back that we are not far off the advances to make these affordable and then did a google search and found that you can get a distilled unit on Amazon for $180 that is capable of making a gallon in 5 hours for about $.45 worth of electricity. That is far less than what it costs to buy distilled water at the store, which is around $1 a gallon. If you look at this from a break-even analysis, you technically start to reap the rewards of ownership after about 800 uses since the first 400 uses basically cost you $1.45 per gallon, then the next 400 costs you $.45 per gallon, but you are recouping that extra cost over the $1 retail price, so by the 800th use, you are getting water at less than half the price of the store.
A gallon is not much though, not for a family. If you have to double or triple that amount, the electricity costs will really add up. If you're talking European electricity costs, you might as well drink expensive wine instead 😂
If cost was more in line with traditional filters, then it may be a more accessible option. But electricity costs are only going up.
Even with fission, nuclear is a panacea of energy with almost no waste for modern reactors. I can see there being an initial rise in energy costs to get those projects built out though. If they are phasing out nuclear, that would be dumb.
Additionally, researchers at MIT recently found that you can evaporate water without heat, so that should hopefully be a thing in the near future.