A water treatment plant construction site in the village of Gufu. Columns for the base of the overhead tank are visible. Photo by Maysoon Sharif.

While some people turn their sweat into water, Cornell student engineers who have previously built eight treatment facilities in Honduras are now expanding into a couple sites in Jharkhand, India. Anne Ju from the Cornell Chronicle reports:

Since its founding in 2005, AguaClara has worked to bring cost-effective, municipal-scale water treatment technologies to communities in Honduras, where more than half the population cannot access safe water. They have partnered with the Honduran nonprofit Agua Para el Pueblo to provide designs and transfer the water treatment technologies to communities. …

In India, AguaClara LLC is piloting what’s called a low flow stacked rapid sand filter, coupled with a chemical dose controller that automatically keeps the dose of water treatment chemicals consistent. The sand filter is a scaled-down version of one in use in Honduras, which was invented by AguaClara at Cornell and requires only a fraction of the area of a rapid sand filter, Sharif [a design engineer and co-owner of AguaClara LLC] said.

You can read more about AguaClara in India here.