Forest Hills Rotary - Projects and Events

Rotary's Pure Water for All is an international service project initiated by the Forest Hills Rotary Club (Pa., USA,) and now admisistrated by District 7300 and District 7280 of Western Pennsylvania, plus its partners. The goal is to provide extremely pure potable water for families in lesser developed areas and for locations where the regular water sources have been polluted by disaster. The process involves simple ceramic technology that delivers sufficient quantities of pure, disease free water for a family for less than three pennies a day.

Rotary’s call to action

Rotary International has proclaimed water purification to be the key challenge of the coming decade. To meet minimum world health goals, 125,000 people a day for the next 13 years will need to have access to safe water. Each year, 1.8 million people (90% of them children under 5 years old) die from preventable diarrheal diseases. Rotary has asked every club to identify a project associated with providing safe water in some part of the world.

Our club and partner clubs in District 7300 and District 7280 are promoting a low cost water filtration system that was developed by a group of ceramics professionals who wanted to find a way to contribute to world health through clay technology. The result of their effort is a remarkable water filter design that:

Can be produced virtually anywhere in the world from common materials
Requires no expensive fuel to fire the clay
Costs less than three cents per liter of water (cost of filter and container over two year life)
Has proven to be over 98% effective in eliminating water borne bacteria ( testing by major universities and in the field testing).That is better than the purity of most US municipal drinking water
Uses a small business model which can be monitored effectively by in-country Rotarians, who also can assist in distribution
Does not depend on governments or municipal systems
Gives families control of their own water purity
Can meet the water needs of the estimated 40% of global families for whom other water purification methods cannot be implemented