Australia - Water fluoridation to boost filtration demand

Water fluoridation to boost filtration demand
By Melissa Maddison
Posted 10 hours 8 minutes ago
A north Queensland filtration business say it is expecting a surge of new business, with fluoride due to be added to Mackay's water supplies within a fortnight.
Under State Government legislation, the council must have the chemical added to water supplies by the end of the year.
The Mackay Regional Council estimates fluoridated supplies will come online from December 15.
David Dowden from Dowden's Pumping says he is already fielding an increasing number of enquiries.
"Some of that are the health issues they believe in and some are because they just want their water to be free from any sort of contaminant at all," he said.
He says the business used to average one enquiry a month, but it is now getting them on a daily basis.
He says simple carbon filters are not enough to remove fluoride from the water.
"The carbon filter system, the particle filtration only takes down to one micron, where the fluoridation or any other chemical in the water is a finer particle than that," he said.
"It's around 0.001 micron, and a micron is a thousandth of a millimetre."