Removal of Bacteria from Wells Water in Erbil City Using Natural Zeolite

Although a body of studies is available on the
classical methods used for preparing drinking water free of
bacterial and other microorganism contamination, a spare
number of such studies were carried out, on testing of the natural
volcanic mineral, zeolite. Therefore, this study intended to
examine the effect of a promising natural zeolite, clinoptilolite, on
the removal of bacteria from water samples taken from two wells
present in two different regions of the province Erbil/Iraq, Nowruz
and Sebardan. Five water samples of each region were tested
before and after treatment with the clinoptilolite to isolate and
enumerate viable microorganisms for total bacterial count (TBC).
A batch system technique for automating and processing the
samples from the wells was adopted. The first experiment treated
the five samples separately with 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 grams of
clinoptilolite for 1 hour. In the second experiment, all five samples
were treated with 1 gram of zeolite but exposed to the treatment
for 1, 1.5, 2, 2.5, or 3 hours. The TBC of the water obtained from
the two regions (Nowruz and Sebardan) before treatment with
zeolite were 19.4 and 8.6 colony-forming units (CFU) respectively,
whereas the results after treatment with zeolite were, 4.8 CFU and
2.00 CFU, respectively. The results also showed that the most
effective treatment caused the highest reduction in the CFU
number which was with 1 gram of zeolite for three hours of contact
time. The result indicated a significant effect of natural zeolite on
removing the bacterial contamination from well water. Also, it
showed that the water of the Nowruz region is more contaminated
than that of the Sebardan region.