Considering the recent events in Flint, Michigan, many citizens throughout the United States and even the world started to wonder how something like that could happen in the developed country. In addition to the mismanagement by the emergency manager of Flint, an important aspect to what happened is the limited access of residents to autonomously filter/purify their own water, separate from the municipal water supply. Even more salient, is knowledge on the kind of water considered safe to drink and alternative methods of cleaning that water in a time of emergency. There were many mistakes that led to the contaminated water supply in Flint, but for my project I wanted to focus on the potential ways in which citizens in Flint or any other city can access information on filtration and have methods of cleaning their water. Another unintended consequence from the Flint crisis was the response from outside parties in trying to mitigate what was going on. “…a group of celebrities that included Diddy, rapper Eminem and actor Mark Wahlberg announced they were sending another million bottles of water to the city.”[1] This is in addition to the, “176,000 cases of bottled water,”[2] the state handed out immediately following when the crisis broke out January 5th to January 28th when the article was written. Although their altruistic attempts, this creates an entirely different problem. “Flint has only three landfills and a two-year-old, voluntary recycling program in which few residents participate. A private waste-hauling company that donated four huge recycling bins to Flint told NBC News that each can fill up with 680 pounds of water bottles in 24 hours. To put that in perspective, the average American throws out 185 pounds of plastic a year.”[3] The amount of waste created by the water bottles is not only inefficient in terms of getting Flint residents access to water, but has a hindering effect in the way the city handles the waste and a detrimental effect on the environment. On a micro level, families must use water bottles to complete their daily operations. One report by CNN which followed how many bottles the Luster family used in a day. CNN, “sorted how each bottle was used into eight categories. 36 bottles were used for cooking and another 36 were for washing hair. They used 27 bottles for drinking, plus 24 for doing dishes, and the rest were used for washing faces, brushing teeth and more. Each bottle held 16.9 ounces of water. The grand total came to 151 bottles -- that's how much the family of three uses in a day”[4] The level of inefficiency is astounding, even more so, the lack of any other source of clean water is equally troubling. Because of the lack of information on water filtration and the water bottle waste, I wanted to focus my project on how to educate citizens on water purification and how to mitigate water bottle waste in not only in Flint but everywhere. For water filtration education, I used the research I found on different websites and included how the National Sanitation Foundation (NSF) ranks and classifies certain filters. Furthermore, I included the ways in which certain filters work and how certain filter media clean specific contaminants. Finally, I display the methods I used to create my own portable water filter prototype using 3D printing.

[1] http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2016/01/millions_of_plastic_bottles_fl.html

[2] Ibid

[3] http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/flint-now-has-an-empty-water-bottle-problem.html

[4] http://www.cnn.com/2016/03/05/us/flint-family-number-daily-bottles-of-water/