Light sciences can help to achieve the SDGs, found the International Year of Light some years ago. Let’s have a look at SDG6.
Previous post on the same topic.
SDG6: Clean water and sanitation
Water is essential to human health. Despite impressive gains made over the last decades, billions worldwide still suffer from health problems due to the lack of clean water.
Although much progress has been made in the use of conventional treatment processes, there is a continuous need for the development of new and complementary technologies to produce high quality water, especially in developing areas. Photonics technologies can significantly help in this regard by improving both water quality assessment and access to clean sources of water.
For instance, low-cost water treatment systems powered by solar panels can decompose organic pollutants in water, and solar powered well pumping has proven to be a sustainable, low-cost solution to provide drinking and irrigation water in off-grid locations in drought-prone regions. Research is also ongoing into the development of LED based portable systems for point-of-use purification.
