Israeli Technology - Germ-slaying ozone creates pure water

News From Jerusalem:  Harmless ozone beats chlorine every time for disinfecting water. Now an Israeli company offers a new technology that makes it affordable, too.

"Clean" isn't always as clean as you think. While the chemicals in cleaning solutions and water purification systems do away with germs, they dirty the environment and aren't healthy for humans.

An Israeli company is offering an alternative: an ozone-based cleaning system to purify tap water. The system, says Ittai Weissberg, CEO of Greeneng Solutions, is better at getting rid of germs, and is a lot safer than chlorine- and ammonia-based cleaning solutions. And it does the job cheaply.

Ozone consists of three oxygen atoms instead of the normal two, generated by ultraviolet light that breaks apart oxygen atoms and allows them to recombine into ozone. It's long been known that once injected in water, ozone is extremely effective at killing bacteria: 50 percent more effective than chlorine and 3,200 times faster. No pathogen can survive ozone, nor can a germ adapt to it. In fact, the US Food & Drug Administration determined ozone to be a completely safe method of water decontamination in 2001.