Water Filters – it’s all in the book
Ever thought about drinking a book?
According to Page Drinking Paper “The Drinkable Book is both a water filter and an instruction manual for how and why to clean drinking water.”
Photo by Brian Gartside
Page Drinking Paper is a non-profit organization founded in early 2014. The information about how to use the book is printed on paper in edible ink and teaches about taking care of clean water, sanitation and hygiene.
The Drinkable Book is cost effective, very portable and simple.
Most people affected by a poor water supply and inadequate sanitation and hygiene are located in developing countries. According to the WHO 663 million people around the world are without access to clean drinking water drinking water.
Photo by Brian Gartside
The Book filter works by pouring the untreated water through a page of the book which contains silver nanoparticles. The silver kills bacteria in the water as it passes through the filter.
The Page Drinking Paper organization estimates that about 100 liters of water can be purified by one page of the book. They added that the filters can last a couple of weeks to even a month, so the Drinkable Book could provide the tools to filter safe drinking water for about a year.
Dr. Theresa Dankovich, a postdoctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, invented the bactericidal paper for her PhD at McGill University in Canada.
“It was originally just a filter paper that I was researching which I worked on during my PhD. I was doing a lot of laboratory experiments to see if the filter paper could kill bacteria and show that in a lab,” Dankovich said.
Photo by Brian Gartside
“After that, I was contacted by DDB New York Ad Agency who then were interested in taking the filter papers and bounding them in a book. We then started working with them in what became known as the Drinkable Book project,” Dankovich said.
At this time the Drinkable Book is not for sale as they are completing project development however this is a world first and Dr Dankovich and her team should be congratulated on inventing a low cost easily transportable filter for the worlds third world.
A very commendable effort to help give the poor clean drinking water.
