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PROJECT WATER TREATMENT and DISTRIBUTION

Water treatment is any process that improves the quality of water to make it more acceptable for a specific end-use. The end use may be drinking, industrial water supply, irrigation, river flow maintenance, water recreation or many other uses, including being safely returned to the environment. Water treatment removes contaminants and undesirable components, or reduces their concentration so that the water becomes fit for its desired end-use. This treatment is crucial to human health and allows humans to benefit from both drinking and irrigation use.

The processes involved in removing the contaminants include physical processes such as settling and filtration, chemical processes such as disinfection and coagulation and biological processes such as slow filtration.

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Water supply is the provision of water by public utilities, commercial organisations, community endeavors or by individuals, usually via a system of pumps and pipes. Irrigation is covered separately.

Water supply systems get water from a variety of locations after appropriate treatment, including groundwater (aquifers), surface water (lakes and rivers), and the sea through desalination. The water treatment steps include, in most cases, purification, disinfection through chlorination and sometimes fluoridation. Treated water then either flows by gravity or is pumped to reservoirs, which can be elevated such as water towers or on the ground (for indicators related to the efficiency of drinking water distribution see non-revenue water). Once water is used, wastewater is typically discharged in a sewer system and treated in a sewage treatment plant before being discharged into a river, lake or the sea or reused for landscaping, irrigation or industrial use (see also sanitation).

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