The Drinkable Book
by Tom Bye
on 21/09/2016
The problem of unsafe drinking water effects 100s of millions of people every year. UNICEF estimated that in 2015 there were 663 million people around the world who still don’t have access to clean, safe drinking water.
To help educate people and combat the problem WATERisLIFE teamed up with Dr Teri Dankovich from Carnegie Mellon to create the Drinkable Book. Each half tear out page of the book can be used as a water filter and with a coating of silver nanoparticles can filter out 99.9% of the bacteria in E. coli, cholera and typhoid. One book can be used to filter up to 5,000 litres or up four years worth of drinking water for one person. Each page of the book contains information on how and why water should be filtered.
Work start on this book in 2013 and it was soon award a Cannes Lions and an exhibition in the London Science Museum.
The above image shows the results of testing carried out in a Honduras early this year. The petri dish on the left is covered with E. coli which can be seen as dark blue spots dark blue spots. Water purified using pages from the Drinkable Book is bacteria free as can be seen by the clean dish on the right.
After further development the book has been changed to a round shape so that the filters will fit the holders shown in the image above. These holders have been design to be more convenient to use with everyday household water containers. Renamed to the safe water book it is hoped that this design will help to save thousands of lives. Field to testing started in in South Africa’s Western Cape last month conduct by Folia Water, the company co-founded by scientist and inventor Teri Dankovich.
