Interesting water purification testing

Australian scientists figure out effective way to remove arsenic from water:
Bugs and slime to clean water

Just wonder if it can clean pollutants as well.

Fascinating! I love how they use basically a self-sustaining combination of algae and bacteria to convert the dissolved arsenic into a form that can more easily be filtered from the water. Arsenic is certainly a major problem in many countries, and the problem will only get worse as populations increase and climate patterns change. For example, in a country with a huge arsenic problem like Bangladesh, I believe the major reason why arsenic is a problem is because the flow of surface water from India has been reduced, forcing the downstream people in Bangladesh to turn to groundwater, where the soil is high in arsenic and leaches into the water. If the river flow reduces even more or as the population increases, the problem just gets worse.

This algae-bacteria technique may work for other pollutants, but you'd need to find bacteria that will do something useful for each specific pollutant, and that's not easy, unless you can genetically engineer something specific. Note that this technique does not remove arsenic. It just changes it into a form that can more easily and cheaply be removed from the water.

Recently I saw a show on one of the cable channels; think it was Discovery or Science, which showed bacteria growing in an old flooded copper mine, in water with a very high concentration of copper. Point of the show was, the organisms had adapted to the high Cu+ levels and were precipitating the metal out of the water. (Naturally I can't find the article/show now).
Another show from years ago dealt with use of water lilies used to treat raw sewage. Sewage waste was pumped into one end of a long. shallow trough and slowly moved through water lilies growing hydroponically (SP?) in the trough. as I recall, the water only needed a basic filtering at the other end to be fit for consumption.

On a recent This Old House - recent as in last season - they were rehabbing a house built on top of a rocky hill with almost no room for a leach field. Instead they had about a 15x5x3 tank set up in the basement for treatment of grey and black water. It had bacteria, filters and pumps. The water at the far end was potable, as the tech drank from a bottle allegedly filled from the system. It was over my head on how it worked, but this seemed pretty cool for an area with arid conditions. Worst case, I'd use it to water the garden.

It sounds like a miniature pond system or maybe a thin film bio system.