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Water filters
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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: July 11, 2016.

ou can survive without food for several weeks, because your body will gradually
switch to using stored fat and protein to make its energy. But cut off your water
supply and you'll be dead within days. Water equals life: it's as simple as that.
Around two thirds of your body (as much as 75 percent if you're a baby) is H2O.

Even your bones, which you might think are completely solid, contain about 25 percent
water. On average, we need 2.4 liters (0.6 gals) of water each day to keep ourselves healthy
(though we don't have to drink anything like that muchwe get a lot of our water from inside foods). With water so important to our lives, it's
hardly surprising we like it clean, pure, and tasty. That's one reason people spend so much money on water filters that can remove any
harmful impurities. How do they workand do we really need them? Let's take a closer look!
Photo: An electric kettle with a built-in water filter. Photo courtesy of Lee J Haywood published on Flickr under a Creative Commons Licence.

How water filters work

Thanks largely to an unusual molecular structure, water is amazingly good at dissolving things. (We look at this in
more detailed in our main article on water.) Sometimes that's helpful: if you want to bust the dirt from your jeans,
simply throw them in your washing machine with some detergent and the water and soap will literally pull the muck
away like a magnet. But there's clearly a downside to this too. All of our water constantly circulates through the
environment in what's known as the water cycle. One minute it's rushing through a river or drifting high in a cloud,
the next it's streaming from your faucet (tap), sitting in a glass on your table, or flushing down your toilet. How do
you know the water you're about to drinkwith its brilliant ability to attract and dissolve dirthasn't picked up all
kinds of nasties on its journey through Earth and atmosphere? If you want to be sure, you can run it through a water
filter.
Water filters use two different techniques to remove dirt. Physical filtration means straining water to remove
larger impurities. In other words, a physical filter is a glorified sievemaybe a piece of thin gauze or a very fine
textile membrane. (If you have an electric kettle, you probably have a filter like this built into the spout to remove
particles of limescale.) Another method of filtering, chemical filtration, involves passing water through an active
material that removes impurities chemically as they pass through.
Photo: Living filter: A classic wastewater filtering system outlined in a 1901 patent by Cleophas Monjeau of Middletown, Ohio. Dirty
water drips down from the tank at the top (blue), passes through vegetation (probably a reed bed), which removes nutrients, organic
matter, some kinds of pollution, and some bacteria, before dripping down through sand, charcoal, and gravel filters. The cleaner water
is collected for reuse in another tank at the bottom. Reed beds are still widely used in purifying wastewater to this day, including in
systems for cleaning up runoff from highways. Artwork from US Patent 681,884: Purifying water by Cleophas Monjeau, issued
September 3, 1901, courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Four types of water filters

There are four main types of filtration and they employ a mixture of physical and chemical techniques.

Activated carbon
The most common household water filters use what are known as activated carbon granules (sometimes called active
carbon or AC) based on charcoal (a very porous form of carbon, made by burning something like wood in a reduced
supply of oxygen). Charcoal is like a cross between the graphite "lead" in a pencil and a sponge. It has a huge internal
surface area, packed with nooks and crannies, that attract and trap chemical impurities through a process called
adsorption (where liquids or gases become trapped by solids or liquids). But while charcoal is great for removing many
common impurities (including chlorine-based chemicals introduced during waste-water purification, some pesticides, and
industrial solvents), it can't cope with "hardness" (limescale), heavy metals (unless a special type of activated carbon filter
is used), sodium, nitrates, fluorine, or microbes. The main disadvantage of activated carbon is that the filters eventually
clog up with impurities and have to be replaced. That means there's an ongoing (and sometimes considerable) cost.
Photo: A water treatment plant filters water for reuse by passing dirty water from homes and factories through beds of charcoal and sand. It's
like a giant version of the filter in our artwork up above, though there's no reed bed in this system. Photo by Betsy J. Weiner courtesy of US
Army and Defense Imagery.

Reverse osmosis
Reverse osmosis means forcing contaminated water through a membrane (effectively, a very fine filter) at pressure, so the water passes through but the contaminants remain
behind.

A closer look at reverse osmosis

If you've studied biology, you've probably heard of osmosis. When you have a concentrated solution separated from a less concentrated solution
by a semi-permeable membrane (a kind of filter through which some things can pass, but others can't), the solutions try to rearrange themselves
so they're both at the same concentration.

Wait, it's simpler than it sounds!

Suppose you have a sealed glass bottle full of very sugary water and you stand it inside a big glass jug full of less sugary water. Nothing will
happen. But what if the bottle is actually a special kind of porous plastic through which water (but not sugar) can travel? What happens is that water
moves from the outer jug through the plastic (effectively, a semi-permeable membrane) into the bottle until the sugar concentrations are equal. The
water moves all by itself under what's called osmotic pressure.

That's osmosis, so what about reverse osmosis? Suppose you take some contaminated water and force it through a membrane to make pure
water. Effectively, you're making water go in the opposite direction to which osmosis would normally make it travel (not from a less-concentrated
solution to a more-concentrated solution, as in osmosis, but from a more-concentrated solution to a less-concentrated solution).
Since you're making the water move against its natural inclination, reverse osmosis involves forcing contaminated water through a membrane
under pressureand that means you need to use energy. In other words, reverse-osmosis filters have to use electrically powered pumps that cost
money to run. Like activated charcoal, reverse osmosis is good at removing some pollutants (salt, nitrates, or limescale), but less effective at
removing others (bacteria, for example). Another drawback is that reverse osmosis systems produce quite a lot of waste-watersome waste four
or five liters of water for every liter of clean water they produce.

Photo: A NanoCeram Nanoalumina filter is a physical filter made from an alumina-based ceramic. It has nanoscale fibers small enough to remove
99.99999 percent of viruses and bacteria from polluted water or air. Photo by Warren Gretz courtesy of US Department of Energy/National Renewable
Energy Laboratory (DOE/NREL).

Ion exchange
Ion-exchange filters are particularly good at "softening" water (removing limescale). They're designed to split apart atoms of a
contaminating substance to make ions (electrically charged atoms with too many or too few electrons). Then they trap those ions
and release, instead, some different, less troublesome ions of their ownin other words, they exchange "bad" ions for "good"
ones.
How do they work? Ion exchange filters are made from lots of
zeolite beads containing sodium ions. Hard water contains magnesium and calcium compounds and, when you pour
it into an ion-exchange filter, these compounds split apart to form magnesium and calcium ions. The filter beads find
magnesium and calcium ions more attractive than sodium, so they trap the incoming magnesium and calcium ions
and release their own sodium ions to replace them. Without the magnesium and calcium ions, the water tastes softer
and (to many people) more pleasant. However, the sodium is simply a different form of contaminant, so you can't
describe the end product of ion-exchange filtration as "pure water" (the added sodium can even be problematic for
people on low-sodium diets). Another disadvantage of ion-exchange filtration is that you need to recharge the filters
periodically with more sodium ions, typically by adding a special kind of salt. (This is why you have to add "salt" to
dishwashers, from time to time: the salt recharges the dishwasher's water softener and helps to prevent a gradual
build-up of limescale that can damage the machine.)
Artwork: How ion exchange works: Magnesium and calcium ions (orange and red) flow into the water filter crystals (gray), which initially
contain sodium ions (yellow). The magnesium and calcium ions become trapped and the sodium ions are released in their place.

Distillation
One of the simplest ways to purify water is to boil it, but although the heat kills off many different bacteria, it doesn't remove chemicals, limescale, and other contaminants.
Distillation goes a step further than ordinary boiling: you boil water to make steam, then capture the steam and condense (cool) it back into water in a separate container. Since
water boils at a lower temperature than some of the contaminants it contains (such as toxic heavy metals), these remain behind as the steam separates away and boils off.
Unfortunately, though, some contaminants (including volatile organic compounds or VOCs) boil at a lower temperature than water and that means they evaporate with the steam
and aren't removed by the distillation process.

On balance
You can see that different types of filtration remove different pollutantsbut there's no single technique that removes all the contaminants from water. That's why many home waterfilter systems use two or more of these processes together. If you're looking for a home water filter, tread carefully. Bear in mind that you won't necessarily remove all the nasties.
Remember, too, that most water filters require some kind of ongoing cost and, without regular maintenance to keep them working properly, can leave your water in worse shape
than it was to begin with!

Should we stop drinking bottled water?

Many people buy water filters or bottled water in an often mistaken belief that tap water is dirty or harmful to drink. In fact, as the Environmental

Protection Agency (EPA) reveals, over 90 percent of US water systems meet the federal standards for tap water quality. In England and Wales, for
the year 2007, 99.96 percent of drinking water met national and European standards (involving some 40 different quality measurements). Those
figures are pretty remarkable really, when you consider just how dirty we make water and some of the things (like pesticides and car oil) that
people flush down their drains. Even so, the high quality of most drinking water doesn't stop people spending something like $35 billion,
worldwide, each year, buying bottled water that's several thousand times more expensive than tap water.
Cost isn't the only drawback of bottled water. Most of it comes in disposable plastic bottles that are hard to recycle.
Dumped in landfills, washed away in rivers, dropped on beaches, burned in incineratorsplastic bottles add to the
pollution that's reducing the quality of Earth's natural water supply. How ironic: by buying "clean" bottled water to keep
ourselves healthy, we're helping to make Earth a dirty place and making things worse overall.

Next time you buy a bottle of water, don't throw the bottle away: why not keep itand refill it with tapwater? Providing you wash the bottle out
properly, you can reuse the bottle any number of times. Chances are you'll get water that's just as healthy, but at a fraction of the cost both to your
pocket and to the Earth. Alternatively, buy yourself a hygienic, refillable aluminum bottle.
Best of all, give the money you save on bottled water to WaterAid and help some of the people who genuinely lack clean water in developing
countries. Let's count ourselves lucky we don't have to drink water straight from a dirty river, like many people still do.

Find out more

Selling Bottled Water That's Better for the Planet by Gloria Dawson. The New York Times, April 30, 2016. The story of Just Water, which
aims to provide a better alternative to bottled water.
Suckers for bottled water by Tim Hayward, Guardian, 9 April 2010. Tim blogs against bottled water.
The Story of Bottled Water: The Guardian, 14 December 2010. A couple of great videos here that explain the real cost of bottled water.
Bottled water: who needs it? by Tom Heap, BBC Panorama, 18 February 2008. Examines the case against bottled water asking questions
such as this: is it morally acceptable to import bottled water from Fiji where one third of the population lack clean, safe drinking water?

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On this website
Environment
Greywater
Water

On other sites
US EPA: Ground Water and Drinking Water: Definitive information about drinking water quality and safety from the Environmental Protection Agency.
UK Drinking Water Inspectorate: Drinking water quality and standards from the UK government.
EPA: Water Health Series: Filtration Facts: This eight-page, independent guide to water filtration discusses whether you really need to filter your water and compares the
effectiveness (and cost-effectiveness) of the different methods. [PDF format]

Books and articles

Installing a reverse-osmosis water filter by Merle Henkenius, Popular Mechanics, January 2004. Another easy-to-follow how-to for DIY enthusiasts.

Patents
For more details about how water filters are constructed in practice, try these references. I've picked one typical example of each of the main types of filter you can find many
more examples by searching Google Patents or the USPTO website.
US Patent 3,390,773: Water purification system by Ulrich Merten. Gulf General Atomic Inc, July 2, 1968. Describes a typical reverse-osmosis filter system.
US Patent US,7537,695 B2: Water filter incorporating activated carbon particles with surface-grown carbon nanofilaments by Michael Donovan Mitchell et al, Pur Water
Purification Products, Inc., May 26, 2009. A state-of-the-art activated-carbon and carbon nanofilament water filter.
US Patent 4,474,620: Apparatus for purification of water by ion exchange by James W. Hall. October 2, 1984. A typical ion-exchange filter using gravity and a manometer
pressure effect.
US 20040003990 A1: Water purification apparatus and method for purifying water by Pierre Mansur, January 8, 2004. A recent patent for producing "pure" distilled water
from tap water using both distillation and carbon filtration.

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If you liked this article...

You might like my new book, Atoms Under the Floorboards: The Surprising Science Hidden in Your Home, published worldwide by Bloomsbury.

Please do NOT copy our articles onto blogs and other websites
Text copyright Chris Woodford 2008, 2015. All rights reserved. Full copyright notice and terms of use.

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Woodford, Chris. (2008/2015) Water filters. Retrieved from http://www.explainthatstuff.com/howwaterfilterswork.html. [Accessed (Insert date here)]

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