WATER RECYCLING PROJECT

Ikiam University

Emily Galarza

English Level 6

Is water recycling a solution for absence of water?

Water is one of our more important resources, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) explains that in the world we have 1400 million km3 of water. Nevertheless, just 0,003% is water that we can consume, but we can’t access it all. The World Health Organization (WHO) defines that a person needs around 20 to 40 liters of water per day. This amount is concerned to how much water its necessary for produce food that people eat, to wash dishes, to drink water and to personal cleanliness. However, UACh (2004) details that we only need between 2 and 4 liters of potable water. It is remarkable how we waste a lot of water.

 Ecuador is located in the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ), this zone is characterized by increased mean convection, cloudiness and precipitation (Waliser and Jiang, 2015, p.1). Ikiam University is there and it is a big source of knowledge and biodiversity. However, it has many problems, one of them is water, because in many times Ikiam doesn’t have water service. This is owing to the potable water company because Ikiam depends on them, and when the rainfall is very intense the potable water company suspends their services. This fact affects all community in special to the students, because bathroom doesn’t have water and go to the bathroom ends up being unpleasant. One solution for this problem is a water recycling system by the implementation of system of support, based in the collection of water rainfall. 

The project of water recycling has a goal, to reduce water consumption in the bathrooms of Ikiam by the creation of a system based on rainfall collection. Ikiam is a University focused in the biodiversity conservation and what better way to reflect it that with a project of water recycling. With this project we hope to find out an effective and durable solution for the Ikiam problem.  We contribute to solve the absence of water, but in the same time we help with economy of Ikiam, and demonstrate to the students that there are many ways to use water. We just don’t resolve a present problem, we incentivize the conservation and sustainability of our environment.

For the success of this project we need to know a lot of things. First, how many bathrooms are there and estimate people flow to do a base model. Second, to know area of water recollection and which is the rainfall in Ikiam and months with higher among of water. Third, define dimension of reserve tank that it will be enough. With these steps we can saw how water recycling is a solution for absence of water.

For the first step, we will count the most crowded bathrooms and investigate how many people are in Ikiam to stablish a model of how much water is necessary in each bathroom per day. For the second step, we will get the blueprint of Ikiam University to know the roof area (place where we will collect the water). For know how much rainfall is there, we will go to the INAHMI data and estimate the amount of water and moths that have the most precipitation. For the third step, with the information that we got in the before step we can determinate the dimension of our reserve tank. With this we could calculate the fluid mechanics that the project has: like pressure, height and velocity that we need for help supply the water demand. Finally, we will make a list with the material and the price that we will need.

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