Advanced cold plasma technology for the removal of persistent organic pollutants from fresh water.

Anamad and partners have secured funding from Innovate UK in their recent GCRF competition to demonstrate impact in meeting the sustainable development goals. This phase 1 project will work with partners in Ukraine to develop a distributed method of water treatment that can remove persistent organic pollutants without the addition of chemicals. This project contributes to the UN sustainable development agenda, that aims at providing universal access to clean water and sanitation, which affects poverty, health and economic growth in all DAC countries. It focuses on Ukraine with its 42-mln population, where 30% of people live in a rural environment and have no access to good quality drinking water.

We aim at both proving the feasibility of combination water treatment technology and providing clean water to local communities, which have no centralised water supply system. Without strict pollution control the surface water of rivers in the Ukraine, the main source of drinking water, are polluted with dangerous organic chemicals and other contaminants. Small communities cannot afford the water treatment systems used by urban residents because they are expensive to install and run. They get practically no support from their government. The situation is exacerbated by the fact that the Ukraine has a chronic fresh water shortage, it is 111th place of 152 countries in the amount of renewable surface water per capita.

The proposed technology is based on physical rather than chemical principles; it does not need expensive chemicals and does not generate waste. The physical process employed in this technology uses energy concentrated in small air bubbles where the complete destruction of organic contaminants occurs, keeping the energy consumption and running costs lower than in alternative processes. Its implementation will have significant socioeconomic impact on ordinary people improving their quality of life by installing affordable water treatment equipment and solving the problem of clean water supply. This is particularly important for children and young mothers who are the most vulnerable members of the society prone to multiple negative effects of water contamination.

We expect to install 10 units as the first batch in rural communities of the industrial Dnipropetrivs'k region, which suffers particularly heavily from the shortage of water even in comparison with the rest of the country. It will secure clean water for at least 12-13,000 people, at schools and hospitals. Anamad and partners are already looking ahead to a phase two project with Innovate UK to and we will increase the scale of the offering by 10-fold, and helping Ukraine to achieve the targets of the UN SDG6: clean water and sanitation by 2030