Desalination Plant

There’s a £270m water filter sitting in Beckton (east London) that many of the residents in London don’t even know about.

 

It’s not like the shower filter cartridges or shower filter heads we keep in our cupboards waiting for our current cartridges to run out and then swap. It is a water filter unlike any other in the UK and is sitting moth balled waiting for a particularly dry summer or draught conditions when it will be able to take contaminated water from river and sea sources and filter them into clean drinking water.

 

A typical shower filter cartridge can filter around 40,000 litres of water (such as the 8 Stage Luxury Shower Filter) but this mother of all water filters can filter around 140-150 million litres of water per day. An average 8 minute shower in the UK uses around 62 litres so that would equate to around 2.4 million showers!

 

This gigantic water filter takes water which is unsuitable for consumption; salty brackish water from the Thames Estuary that is stored in a reservoir. It then treats the water through a chemical process and follows the standard water treatment processes of other water plants, such as; mixing, coagulation, flocculation and lamellar settling. But the extra step to remove all the salt and minerals is this treated water then goes through three lines of reverse osmosis water filters. After which minerals are put back into the water and chlorine is added as per normal.

 

Whilst the desalination plant is not running currently and it never has had a need yet to supplement the water supplies already available to Thames Water. With the dryer summers and the fact that London actually has lower annual rain fall levels than cities such as Sydney, having such a backup plan for a mega city like London is a great idea.

 

Martin Baggs, Thames Water's Chief Executive, said: "Our existing resources - from non-tidal rivers and groundwater - simply aren't enough to match predicted demand in London. That's why we're tapping into the new and limitless resource of the tidal Thames, fed by the rolling oceans beyond, so we can ensure our 8.5 million customers have enough water in future in the event of a drought.”

 

If you're looking for a shower filter or even a water filter for your kitchen - not as gigantic as this one but still very good! Just look no further than our website at PureShowers.co.uk