Switzerland is famous for its mountains and lakes. And these mountains and lakes are s sort of a guarantee of having basically unlimited and high quality drinking water. I know, it is a luxury nowadays. There was an open doors day at a local water treatment facility on the lake of Zurich and everyone could visit it and have a look. My kids and I did it with great interest.
The water is supplied by the lake of Zurich - there is a pipe going 600m into the lake, 32m unter the water level. The huge amounts of water are pumped up to the plant where then the magic is done. There are no chemicals used to clean up the water in order to achieve high drinking quality - just high concentration of ozone, active carbon, sand and some bacterias. I was truly amazed by how just using natural ingridients the lake water can be turned into the drinking one. It taked water up to 8h to run through all the process! And as the end test there are some fishes in a small aquarium, which are constantly watched by a camera in front of it. If there are no movements, the system assumes that something is wrong and stops the entire plant. I guess you can say that our water is not vegan in that case? ?
Here is a short video summary of how it looks like inside.
I would love to hear your stories about your local water supply! I know that unfortunately not everyone so lucky as I am…
Lake water on the right side
Drinking water on the left side
Only 21 person works at the whole plant!
The last stage - cleaning water by putting it to go through sand
