Tackling the water scarcity problem in rural areas: Guidelines and best design practices

Pure water is the key resource of the Earth's life. Its availability is as important as critic especially in the developing regions, within areas stricken by natural catastrophes or wars and in humanitarian camps. The lack of drinkable water makes daily life almost impossible, forcing people to make strong efforts to survive. Furthermore, during the last decades, humanitarian organizations invested funds to improve solutions to strike the lack of drinkable water in overpopulated areas. Different improvements made in the last decades on water desalination, the most critical water filtration. These plants should be the answer also in humanitarian sector and in developing regions to tackle the problem of scarcity of drinkable water. Nowadays several desalination technologies and plants are available: however, due to them characteristics, nonporous membranes for the raw-water desalination and purification could be the most feasible solution for this difficult field. Reverse osmosis (RO) or Forward Osmosis (FO) plants allow producing ultra-pure drinkable water from water resources caught in nature, e.g. sea, rivers, lakes and aquifers. This paper starts from a critical review of the topic and of the most promising technologies for water purification. After that, it proposes a mix of guidelines and best design practices targeted on nonporous membrane technologies to produce ultra-pure drinkable water targeted on rural, i.e. severe, environments. The final long-Term goal is to support humanitarian logistics operating in critical contexts.