Currently, 2.1 billion people across the globe lack access to clean drinking water. Without access to clean water, people are suffering from a plethora of life-threatening illnesses; cholera, typhoid, dysentery, reproductive disorders, cancer, and parasites are just to name a few. With this exacerbating problem, my water filtration system, the biosand filter (BSF) presents as an affordable, simple, and efficient water filtration system to alleviate the issue of water contamination.

I created my BSF with PVC materials and added Eucalyptus cinerea, which has anti-fungal, anti bacterial, and anti-microbial properties that are similar to a. Melia biomass (chinaberry plant), which was used in a journal article published by the Polish Journal of Environmental Studies. I hypothesized that the efficacy of my BSF would be higher than that of the control sand filter (filter without plant biomass) in removing the three parameters of turbidity (clarity of water), e. coli, and iron (III) chloride.

For testing, tainted solutions were created with the illness-causing concentrations of iron (III) chloride (10 ppm), and Escherichia coli (1500 cells/mL). The concentrations of which are deemed unsafe by the CDC. These solutions were then passed through the control sand filter and the BSF, three times a day for a testing period of 10 days. To quantify turbidity, the LaMotte light-scattering, turbidity test was used. For bacterial removal, a cross calibration between cell count on the hemocytometer, and absorbance on the spectrophotometer was utilized. To test the presence of iron (III) chloride, a visual qualitative detection was used by forming an iron (III) chloride and sodium chromate (Na2CrO4) precipitate.

Through comparing the two filters, results proved that the BSF had higher removal rates of bacteria than the control sand filter, removing up to 98% -99.8% of e. coli, while the control filter stayed at 87-88% of removal which was shown to be statistically significant through the ANOVA test. Both filters were able to remove 10 ppm of the iron, and the BSF was able to lower the turbidity level to the acceptable level of 5 JTU. This project suggests that the efficacy of the BSF in the removal of contaminants is higher than that of the control filter.

The implications show that the BSF can be modified to cater to specific countries, as native plant biomass can be implemented in place of Eucalyptus cinerea. For example, Africa's common Ximenia caffra root, and South America's Theobroma cacao can be other sources of BSF biomass. Due to its efficacy and versatility, the BSF can be an effective water filtration system across all developing countries.