How can we clean our dirty water?

This resource provides a set of videos and a practical investigation aimed at supporting working scientifically in the classroom and relating science to real world experiences. In the first video Professor Brian Cox joins a teacher to find out how to set up and run an investigation to find out how to turn dirty water into clean water. Provided with a water mixture including stones, sand and salt children are asked to separate it to get pure water using sieves, filters and evaporation. In the next video he then joins the class carrying out their investigation. Further videos show Brian Cox visiting a sewage treatment plant to see how sewage is cleaned by various processes so it can be returned to rivers. He also meets a scientist using chromatography as a separation technique.

An accompanying written resource guides teachers on how to run the investigation in class.

This resource has been provided by the Royal Society.

Filtration set up video

Filtration experiment video

Real world sewage filtration video

Science filtration chromatography video

This resource has been provided by the Royal Society.