Breaking Through Biocontamination: A Novel Solution to Water Pollution

Photo by Adrian Lange on Unsplash

Spiraluna, it’s a small blue-green cyanobacteria based algae, and many believe it to be the solution to our growing water crisis. Of the 71% of Earth’s surface covered in water, only about 3% is freshwater and of that 3% only 1% percent is drinkable; and that number is quickly shrinking. Heavy metal as well as synthetic pollutants like the arsenic, mercury, plastic related phthalates, lead and the now infamous DDT are contaminating the water in a drastic and irreversible fashion, permanently reducing the amount of drinkable water available. And as it turns out, spirulina, might just be able to decontaminate this water; a 2018 study published in The Annals of Agrarian Science, finds that after just 15 days of incubation in contaminated water, spirulina can remove nearly all contaminants. However there is a crucial issue with spirulina, spirulina is in itself a contaminant as in its presence in water renders it undrinkable. While the issue of removing algae from water might seem simple enough, it is remarkably difficult to pull of, take the standard run of the mill activated charcoal filter, it’s a multilayered bed of different compounds designed to trap solid particulates and absorb liquid impurities and yet cyanobacterium like spirulina, sized between 0.5 to 60 micrometers, almost always slips through. While current technology has already laid out…