Bottle Purifies Water with Solar Power
by Matthew Sparkes, London, UK on 09. 7.07
The solar bottle is designed to get the maximum effect from a natural phenomenon that can purify disease-ridden water. Water in transparent PET bottles, left in direct sunlight, will be purified to a certain extent, due to heat and irradiation from UV-A rays. This bottle maximises that effect, and aims to create a cheap and simple way of providing clean water to developing countries.
It was designed by Alberto Medo and Francisco Gomez Paz, after they saw a similar system at Milan's International Furniture Fair. The bottle is designed to be easily stackable, and each can hold 4-liters of water. One side is transparent, to allow sunlight in, and the other is dark to absorb heat and speed up the heating of the water. The handle helpfully doubles as a stand, to allow perfect placement to catch the most sunlight.
Although this is a very simple idea, it should be able to increase the quality of water considerably. It may not create perfect drinking water, but the effect would be massive nonetheless. There is no word yet on whether this design will be put into production, but it would help the very high number of people who don’t have access to safe drinking water. There has been previous projects to simplify water sterilisation, including this one, which informs people when the water has reached a high enough temperature to be safe. I think that the obvious solution would be for these two projects to take a leaf from each others books - and create a bottle which heats up quickly, but also informs people once it is hot enough to be safe to drink. ::Pop Gadget
Is there not some sort of danger in leaving water-filled PET bottles out in sunlight when the water is intended for drinking? (antimony, catalyst residue, plasticizer migration?)
there is probably a danger of all of those, but their ill effects are probably better than something like river blindness. You're right, ideally we would want a glass bottle to do the same thing
Should it be PET bottle? Or a a bottle made of glass serve the same purpose? I think glass bottle is safer than PET bottle.