How Our Water Technology Creates Hope
Photo: Allie (blue hat) from Caminos de Agua showing a local community member from Los Ricos the water that comes out of the new Groundwater Treatment System.
Our new and innovative technology is going to help many more families access clean drinking water than ever before. This month, thanks to our Match Campaign, sponsored by two families, who are longtime supporters of Caminos de Agua, your contribution will be doubled – up to USD $10,000 – getting us there even quicker.
In recent years, through our water quality monitoring program, at Caminos de Agua, we have documented levels of arsenic more than 23 times above the World Health Organization’s maximum recommended limit and fluoride at more than 12 times the limit in community water supplies throughout the region we work in. Continued consumption of water laced with arsenic and fluoride is closely associated with a variety of chronic health conditions like kidney disease, skin lesions, dental and skeletal fluorosis, and several cancers as well as severe cognitive development and learning disabilities in children who are, generally, much more at risk from these contaminants.
There are tens of thousands of children in the over 2,500 communities in our region in northern Guanajuato State alone who are drinking water severely contaminated with arsenic and fluoride almost exclusively. Globally, upwards of 300 million people, with an estimated 21 million in Mexico alone, are impacted by arsenic and fluoride in their water supplies. These contaminants are extremely difficult to remove with few appropriate solutions available. If something doesn’t change quickly, new generations will continue to grow up on these increasingly contaminated water supplies and the consequences will be devastating.
Photo: Matthieu from Caminos de Agua teaching a local community member from Los Ricos how to fill up the new Groundwater Treatment System with filtration media.
Water Technology in Action
Developing, and adapting, low-cost yet effective water technologies is a cornerstone of what we do at Caminos de Agua. Since our beginning, we’ve been driven by the belief that technological solutions – when done in an open and collaborative way – are powerful tools for change. One of these technologies, developed by our in-house Tech Team over the last six years, is our Groundwater Treatment System (GTS), which has the potential to radically alter the course of the water crisis in the greater San Miguel de Allende Municipality, the surrounding region, and well beyond.
For years, we have relied upon rainwater harvesting systems as our primary technology to create access to clean water. While still a crucial solution, rainwater systems are also labor-intensive, time consuming to build, and have a high initial cost. So, when we identified arsenic and fluoride as core drivers of our water crisis, we committed ourselves to delivering a cost-effective, and scalable, filtration solution that could remove these contaminants on a community-wide scale – helping get the next generation off of arsenic and fluoride contaminated drinking water. At the end of 2020, we brought this reality to life with the installation of our first GTS in the small rural community of Los Ricos, just 20 minutes from the San Miguel center.
Photo: Caminos de Agua's first full-scale Groundwater Treatment System in the community of Los Ricos
Developing GTS was the First Step, Deploying it Requires Your Help
The installation and initial operating cost of our new GTS system is far less expensive than other alternatives, including rainwater harvesting. In fact, for the same initial cost of a rainwater system that provides access to clean water for one family, we will be able to install a full-size GTS – which will provide clean water for an entire community – and do so in a fraction of the time. Technology like this is a game changer for our region and has the potential to help countless more on a broader geographic scale.
Putting GTS through its final proof of concept testing, making final modifications, and creating models and systems to produce the filtration media, and scale, routinely install, operate, and maintain Groundwater Treatment Systems as well as train the communities who will own these systems, is a major and costly endeavor. Like everything else we’ve ever done, Caminos de Agua will proceed carefully, operating leanly and doing much more with much less than most anyone else could.
But to do that we need your help. By making a donation today, your gift will be matched, will have twice as much impact, and will help us get to our goal of helping communities at-risk gain access to clean water much faster.