I recently drank water from a tank full of pond scum, desert detritus and coyote scat. It was a stark view into the hardship facing the billions of people that live in water poverty and the danger that everyone faces when disaster destroys access to clean drinking water.
Luckily, my water was clean and delicious. Michael Pritchard, a British inventor, served it to me after running it through his Lifesaver ultra filtration water bottle. Pritchard’s invention is a thrilling example of human ingenuity, and offers hope that a better solution to the life-threatening lack of clean drinking water faced is within reach.
Water is critical for life. Humans can last for a week or more without food but die within days without water. Drinking contaminated water can lead to cholera, vomiting, diarrhea and other ailments that can quickly incapacitate and kill.
When wars, earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, floods, droughts and other calamities destroy access to clean drinking water, the human consequences are almost immediate and enormous.
The problem extends beyond flash disasters. UNICEF estimates that 900 million regularly use unsafe drinking water, and 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation to keep their water clean. Thousands die every day, and tens of millions expend much of their meager energies securing water—rather than lifting themselves out of poverty.
To get a sense of the humanitarian challenges of the problem, and the hope offered by Pritchard’s invention, consider this video created by Operation Blessing about its use of the Lifesaver system in its Haitian relief efforts:
The immediate opportunity offered by the LIFESAVER technology is in the first response after disaster strikes.
The conventional approach is to transport clean water to afflicted areas. But water is heavy, and people need a lot of it, so transporting needed quantities is problematic. The transportation infrastructure is often crippled—cargo planes, helicopters and trucks are sparse while roads are often inaccessible and landing sites are few. Moving all that water is sometimes impossible and, even when possible, very expensive.
(To get a sense of the enormity of the problem, consider that, since 1988, Anheuser-Busch has donated more than 70 million cans of drinking water following natural and other disasters. Between 2005 and 2007, Nestle donated over four million bottles of water to disaster relief efforts just in North America. Coca Cola transported more than one million liters of water by land, air and sea to the Haitian earthquake relief effort in 2010. PepsiCo also regularly donates bottled water to disaster relief efforts.)
Once the water reaches the afflicted area, other problems arise. Camps typically spring up around the distribution points. This causes a host of other sanitation and health problems. There’s the difficult problem of keeping the water clean. And there’s the lesser-of-two-evils consequence of hundreds of thousands of plastic bottles littering the environment. All in all, it is a grim picture.
Michael Pritchard’s LIFESAVER system offers a better first-response approach.
Instead of delivering and storing tons of clean water, relief efforts—like Operation Blessing in Haiti—can deliver lightweight filtration systems that clean contaminated water as needed. Pritchard’s mechanism filters everything larger than 15 nanometers, which includes the smallest bacteria, viruses, cysts, parasites, and fungi. It has been certified as compliant with US, UK, EU and World Health Organization drinking water standards.
One of Pritchard’s “jerrycan” filters can clean up to 20,000 liters of clean water, enough to sustain a family of four for up to five years, at a cost of 0.013 cents per liter.
A standard size pallet of LIFESAVER jerrycans is the equivalent of transporting one million liters of bottled water. The bottled water would weigh more than 2.2 million pounds. The pallet, however, weighs just 441 pounds and can be broken down and transported by car, horseback, canoe or people.
For an imprecise cost reference, the lowest price at Amazon for bottled water is 135 cents per liter— about 100 times more (delivery not included).
The LIFESAVER system doesn’t require electrical power to operate. Training requires just a few minutes. No maintenance is required—simply replace the filter cartridge (the system shuts down when a new filter is needed). There is no water to keep clean and no environmental impact.
Here is how the LIFESAVER system is being used in Pakistan:
The potential of Pritchard’s LIFESAVER system extends beyond first response situations. As I mentioned above, UNICEF estimates that 900 million regularly use unsafe drinking water, and 2.6 billion people lack adequate sanitation to keep their water clean. The chance of most of them enjoying, in their lifetimes, the type of centralized water infrastructure that exists in New York, London or Tokyo is zero.
What if we took a decentralized approach, and distributed LIFESAVER-like systems to the point of need? Michael Pritchard estimates that it would cost less than $17 billion dollars to outfit those 900 million people with LIFESAVER systems—at today's costs, not factoring in distribution costs or potential economies of scale. LIFESAVER systems could also serve as life-saving backup systems for areas with poor sanitation.
To put $17 billion in perspective, it is a less than 10 percent of the $185 billion the US government injected into AIG, the troubled insurer. $17 billion is about the cost of six of the US Air Force’s new, fully loaded Northrup Grumman B-2 Spirit stealth bombers. Chicago has spent about $3 billion over the last several decades on its Deep Tunnel Project to protect its drinking water system, which serves just 5.5 million people. The cost of the full-body security scanners being deployed at US airports is about $1.2 billion dollars per year.
Distributing LIFESAVER systems to everyone who might need them would not be a complete solution, nor a permanent one. The systems only last about 3.5 years, so there would be the cost of replacement filter cartridges, containers, etc. For many, however, it would be a lifesaving bridge to more permanent solutions or better technology.
In the interim, LIFESAVER can help would improve the lives of hundreds of millions of people across the globe—at a cost of about two cents per person per day.
Now, that is remarkable human ingenuity.
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Follow Chunka Mui on Twitter at @ChunkaMui
