{"id":528658,"date":"2010-04-15T13:26:21","date_gmt":"2010-04-15T17:26:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.circleofblue.org\/waternews\/?p=14358"},"modified":"2010-04-15T13:26:21","modified_gmt":"2010-04-15T17:26:21","slug":"british-company-creates-cheap-small-scale-desalination-for-agriculture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/528658","title":{"rendered":"British Company Creates Cheap, Small-Scale Desalination for Agriculture"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new system, which uses sub-surface pipes to remove salts and deliver water to plants on demand, grew 200 prosopis trees in the United Arab Emirates’ desert during a test-run.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"field-290\"<\/p>\n
Photo courtesy bookgrl<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

A British company has developed an irrigation system that allows saline and brackish water, which contains more salinity than freshwater, to be used for growing crops, Wired<\/a><\/em> reports.<\/p>\n

The Dutyion Root Hydration System uses a network of underground pipes to deliver water directly to a plant\u2019s roots. Water then diffuses through the walls of the polymer pipe because of differences in moisture levels, which act as filters and leave contaminates behind. Almost any water source can be used\u2013-even industrial wastewater\u2013-without the need for secondary purification.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we\u2019re looking to do is take our irrigation system and move to places where it\u2019s not possible to irrigate today,\u201d said the system\u2019s designer Mark Tonkin of Design Technology and Irrigation<\/a>. \u201c[We] stumbled across a way of effectively desalinating water. We put pipe in the ground which lets water vapor to escape and the waste element is what gets left in the pipe.\u201d<\/p>\n

The overall system is gravity fed and needs minimal maintenance while the pipes must be periodically flushed to clean out accumulated salts and dirt, Tonkin told Wired<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Approximately 70 percent of the world\u2019s freshwater is used for agriculture. Wide use of salt water for irrigation would free freshwater for other uses and increase food security for people living in dry coastal areas.<\/p>\n

Brackish water is already being used to grow saltwater-tolerant plants for biofuels<\/a>, but DTI is growing plants to eat–such as tomatoes, strawberries, peppers and beans as well as cherry and olive trees.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere are no plants that we\u2019ve tried to grow that can\u2019t survive simply by using water vapor as opposed to having wet water put on them, and that is a major change,\u201d Tonkin said in a promotional video for LAUNCH<\/a>, a forum for innovation. \u201cIt\u2019s made it possible to put an irrigation system in the ground where there is no freshwater and no likelihood of anybody building a desalination plant and grow plants where you couldn\u2019t grow them today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Pilot projects were carried out in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. DTI chose an extreme environment for its first field-scale trial–the raw desert in the United Arab Emirates, Tonkin told Circle of Blue via email. The company grew 200 prosopis trees–a species that thrives in arid places–from saline groundwater.<\/p>\n

DTI is now in the transition phase between testing and commercialization, Tonkin wrote. It is setting up supply chains and forming local partnerships for manufacturing component parts, marketing and installation.<\/p>\n

Source: Wired<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new system, which uses sub-surface pipes to remove salts and deliver water to plants on demand, grew 200 prosopis trees in the United Arab Emirates’ desert during a test-run. Photo courtesy bookgrl A British company has developed an irrigation system that allows saline and brackish water, which contains more salinity than freshwater, to be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5528,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-528658","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528658","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5528"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=528658"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/528658\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=528658"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=528658"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mereja.media\/index\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=528658"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}