Traditionally, if you are in a water-poor region that has access to desalination technology and seawater, you were in luck. Israeli cleantechnology company ROTEC has developed a reverse osmosis system designed to remove salts from brackish groundwater. In other words, nowhere near the sea.

According to Dr. Jack Gilron of the Zuckerberg Institute for Water Research, the ROTEC clean technology solution exploits a physical process on the surface of the desalination membrane before it can be fouled.

Gilron says that “the process will be tuned to reduce brine volumes to 33%-50% of those generated in conventional reverse osmosis. This greatly reduces the environmental burden and improves the economics of the inland desalination process.

“Water scarcity and the need to develop new water resources for populations not on the seacoasts are driving efforts to desalinate brackish water and municipal wastewater with ever-increasing efficiencies,” he notes.

Designed to be added to pre-existing water purification plants, the technology can increase recovery rates up to 95%. I’ll drink to that.

Image: Hypergurl’s Flickr stream, via a Creative Commons License.

Reprinted with permission from CleanTechnica