Solar Oven Converts Salt Water into Fresh Water

Solar oven being tended by owner. Photo courtesy: © Gabriele Diamanti

Anyone who reads this blog knows that I have several hobby horses that I like to trot out on a regular basis. One of those issues that is near and dear to my heart is the accessibility of fresh water to all who live on this planet. I am delighted to say that another small step in bringing affordable, clean drinking water to all peoples has been taken. Read on.

As a graduate student, Italian designer Gabrielle Diamanti's travels exposed him to the global water crisis and the issue became a fascination for him. Fortunately he's been able to use his skills as a designer to create something that could make a big difference for those with little access to clean water. The Eliodomestico is an open source design for what is essentially a solar still, but with thoughtful details to make it even more functional and easy to use for those in coastal areas where salt water is abundant, but fresh water isn't.

Technology doesn't always have to be complicated, sometimes the simplest materials and concepts are the best. The Eliodomestico works like an upside-down coffee percolator to desalinate salt water. The ceramic oven has three main pieces. The top black container is where the salt water is poured. As the sun heats the salt water and creates steam, the pressure that builds pushes the steam through a pipe in the middle section. The steam condenses against the lid of the basin at the bottom and then drips into the basin, where it is collected.

The oven can make about five liters of fresh water a day. The UN refugee agency states that refugees need a minimum of 7 litres per person per day, just to survive. In the arid regions where many of the displaced are forced to seek shelter, they need more. And to ensure minimum standards of health and sanitation, they need 20 litres of water per person each day.

The design can be built for about $50 and although Diamanti used terracotta for his prototypes, local craftsmen can use whatever materials are most abundant where they live. The basin is also designed to be comfortably carried on the head, which is common in sub-Saharan Africa and other places around the world.

Solar still technology is old and not uncommon to find in developing nations, but it's often on a much larger scale, like at hospitals or water desalination plants that serve entire communities. Diamanti wanted to create this open source project so that individual families could have access to the same desalination process in a simple-to-use format.

Back The Pack

Women using the water pack. Photo courtesy: © Back the Pack

Water has long been an issue with me. I believe everyone should have reasonable access to fresh, clean water without fear of rape, beatings or worse. Women and female children should not have to walk for miles/hours to find water to bring back to the family. In some countries, men wait by the water for people to collect it. The women and girl children are raped as are some of the male children. If there are any young men, they are severely beaten.

While these packs won't help much with those problems, they will make the collection of water a faster, more efficient, less painful chore. Hopefully, by drawing attention to the lack of clean, fresh drinking water in these countries; and, the dangers involved in collecting it, light will spill over onto the other problems as well.

A partnership between a major industrial packaging manufacturer and a group of social entrepreneurs has produced an innovative product - a water-carrying backpack to help transport clean water safely and with less effort. And one of the best parts is that they cost just $10.

In many parts of the world, the water crisis is an in-your-face daily issue, with lots of time and energy spent just providing the basic water needs of a family.

"The burden of water transport can be huge for women and children in developing countries. The average person needs 8 to 15 liters of water per day; a family of six needs up to 90 liters daily. And in Africa, for example, women walk an average of 3.5 miles each day to get water."

And on top of that, the containers used to transport it (usually a repurposed container) may be responsible for contaminating the water because they aren't designed to store potable water.

The solution, courtesy of a partnership between Greif and Impact Economics, is the WaterWear backpack, a sanitary, collapsible, and easier-to-carry container capable of making a big impact on the lives of those affected by the water crisis. 2000 of the WaterWear packs have been distributed in Haiti, with plans to distribute many more throughout the world, both for disaster relief and daily use.


Photo courtesy: © Back the Pack

"The WaterWear™ pack is the lowest cost, ergonomically correct way to manually transport water from source to home. It is the first for purpose designed water transport product that is economically viable for developing economies and disaster relief conditions."

The following video gives an insight into the problems women and children face collecting water.



The WaterWear packs are capable of holding up to 5 gallons of water, can be carried either on the back or on the head, and stand upright for filling.

Find out more about how you can help make these water containers more widely available: Back the Pack.

Miracle Trees Live up to Their Name Again

Photo courtesy: woodleywonderworks/CC BY 2.0

Lack of access to clean drinking water is a huge problem for many people in the world, and their only recourse is to drink the water at hand, which may be contaminated and dirty. One of the big issues in supplying clean water to those communities is the cost of the technology to do so, but a new method for water purification using just sand and tree seeds could be the answer to inexpensive and sustainable drinking water.

Researchers from Pennsylvania State University knew that earlier studies showed that a substance from the seeds of the miracle tree, or Moringa oleifera, was able to clean water, but that the processes used in those studies were either too expensive or not feasible for producing water which could be stored. The team set out to develop a less expensive and simpler way of using the miracle tree's seeds to purify and clean drinking water that would also be more sustainable.

Their new study found that by using an extract of the Moringa seed (containing the positively charged protein) to bind to sediment and kill microbes, in conjunction with negatively charged sand, they were able to produce potable and storable water without expensive or complicated technology.

“The resulting ‘fictionalised,’ or ‘f-sand,’ proved effective in capturing lab-grown E. coli and damaging their membranes. The f-sand was also able to remove sediment from water samples. The results open the possibility that f-sand can provide a simple, locally sustainable process for producing storable drinking water.” - Stephanie B. Velegol, Ph.D., lead author

The miracle tree, Moringa oleifera, is already grown for biofuel, food, and medicine in some equatorial regions, so this purification method could also make that natural resource that much more useful.

Moringa seed pods. Photo courtesy: Forest & Kim Starr/CC BY 3.0

Sustainable and inexpensive drinking water using just seeds and sand? Sounds like a winner. With over 1 billion people lacking regular access to clean drinking water, this new method could be a life-saver for many of our fellow world citizens. Here's hoping it goes beyond the study stage and gets scaled up for implementation in the real world.

For more information, click here.