REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE

The demand for clean water have been increasing on different places for years.
Contaminated water caused by pollutants made by humans are the main reason for
the dwindling supply of clean water. That’s why, Scientist and Scholars are studying
different materials used in filtration that are relatively cheap and are easy to come
by.
An example of this is charcoal (activated charcoal). Activated charcoal,
sometime called activated carbon is useful for purifying contaminated water or
polluted air. A methodological process of creating activated charcoal is prepared by
Bess Ruff (2023). First, grind up the charcoal. Second, combine calcium chloride and
water in a 1:3 ratio (You can use lemon juice or bleach as an substitute). Then, stir
together the calcium chloride (lemon juice or bleach) solution and charcoal powder,
let it sit for 24 hours. Lastly, cook the charcoal for another 3 hours to activate it. To
test the efficiency of activated charcoal in purifying drinking water, an experiment
was conducted by Jamakovic, Karahmet and Varesic (2020) and assessed whether
it can really purify drinking water until adequate measures. The results showed that
activated charcoal with filter paper reduces calcium, iron, chloride, lead and
cadmium concentrations, the concentration of potassium, magnesium and sodium
after passing through the active charcoal with filter paper depends on the starting
sample. Activated charcoal with filter paper removes carbonates well, it doesn’t
remove efficiently chloride and we can say that it is a good copper purifier, but that
conclusion is not safe and ultimate.
Another example is sand (used in sand filters). Sand filters are used as a step
in the water treatment process of water purification. There are two main types of
sand filters, Slow Sand Filters and Rapid Sand Filters. According to the team of Luiza
Souza Freitas (2022), the household slow sand filter (HSSF) is amongst the most
promising point-of-use (POU) alternatives today. Since the development of the
biosand filter in the early 1990’s, the HSSF has undergone numerous modifications
ad adaptions to improve its performance, making it easier to operate. For Rapid
Sand Filters, they are know to remove microplastics with the size ranging from 10
micrometers up to more than 500 micrometers as shown from the research of
Sembering, Fajar and Handajani (2021), the microplastics used in the samples were
made from plastic bags and tyre flakes. The average removal efficiency for the tyre
flakes is 93.03% and 47.78% for the average removal efficiency for the plastic flakes.
Removal efficiency using Rapid Sand Filter (RSF) for plastic flakes on which the
Effective Size (ES) filter media 0.39 mm was 97.7% and on which ES 0.68 mm was
94.3%. Meanwhile, the removal efficiency of the tyre flakes for ES 0.39 mm were
90.6% and ES 0.68 mm was 85.25%. However, in this study, RSF mostly removed
microplastic particles greater than 200 micrometers in size.