DailyDirt: Water, Water, Everywhere.. In Convenient Forms
from the urls-we-dig-up dept
Drinking water is available in many forms, often for a reasonable cost as it comes out of the tap. But once you put water in a bottle, many of the reasonable prices seem to disappear, and bottled water can get truly expensive in order to get the experience of tasting water — along with a few dissolved minerals — that has been locked away underground for a while (or frozen in a glacier). Here are just a few alternative ways to get drinking water without buying it in a bottle.
- Imagine a water bottle that filled itself by condensing water vapor from the air. A prototype bottle could fill itself at a rate as fast as 3 liters per hour, and this bottle mimics the Namib Desert beetle’s ability to harvest moisture in the desert. [url]
- If you don’t want to waste a lot of money on expensive bottled mineral water, you can try to make your own mineral water by mixing various metal salts with purified water. If you’re not that picky, you can even start with tap water and adjust your recipe accordingly. [url]
- If you’re against the idea of plastic water bottles filling up landfills, someday you might be consuming blobs of water contained in an edible membrane made from brown algae. The Ooho water container is biodegradable, costs about 2 cents per blob, and looks like it could be a useful in an impromptu water balloon fight. [url]
If you’d like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post via StumbleUpon.
Filed Under: bottled water, drinks, food, mineral water, namib desert beetle, ooho water container, salts, water
Comments on “DailyDirt: Water, Water, Everywhere.. In Convenient Forms”
Somehow, bottled water always tastes stale to me and makes me even more thirsty. I don’t find it tasty or refreshing at all unless it comes from the kitchen tap.
Water Wars
I have seen a couple of these hydrophilic projects. One had thirty foot towers, a big plastic bag with a local wood skeleton holding it up that was providing like 25 gal per day, in Eritria, a desert local. I think they might cover most anything, or be really flexible in actual design. The issue is getting enough, say per rooftop, to satisfy the family (or in the case of apartments families) within.
Once the basic technology gets done, distribution channels need to go world wide and inexpensive (probably good looking too). Water, a requisite for life, should not come dearly to anyone.
Probably The Most Common Chemical Compound In The Universe
Just been reading in New Scientist how water actually degrades some compounds important to life (like RNA). So some researchers are working on the idea that life processes got started in the absence of water, and only later evolved to take advantage of wet conditions.
Or, in other words, early Mars was a better place for life to have got started than early Earth.