Water safety remains a significant risk in much of the world, and I’ve written about a number of interesting projects that hope to improve matters.  For instance, uMed offer a mobile phone based testing kit, with an Indian project then aggregating this kind of information to secure a more detailed picture of water quality in the country.  Or you have the Israeli project that is using IBM’s distributed computing grid to improve water purification processes.

The book that can purify water

Another interesting venture along these lines is the Drinkable Book.  Whilst the device looks like a regular book, albeit one that’s a funky color, it is in fact anything but.  The book contains a message about water safety, with each page perforated so that it can be easily ripped out.

The pages are infused with silver and copper nanoparticles that can filter out bacteria in water.

It’s currently been trialed in Africa and Bangladesh, where highly toxic samples were tried out on the pages, with a filtration of 99.9% achieved.

“One woman said, ‘If my husband doesn’t want to buy it, I would write poetry and sell it so I could buy it myself,’ “ the makers, from Carnegie Mellon, said of one trial in Bangladesh.

The drinkable book

They hope that each half page of the book can provide a few days of filtration, before then being replaced by another, which will hopefully render the book a very affordable solution.

The book has undergone successful tests thus far in Ghana, Haiti, Bangladesh and South Africa, and now that it has been proven to work in the field, the aim is to make the manufacturing process smoother.

Suffice to say, whilst the book is undoubtedly very clever, it is only a stop gap in the process of ensuring people drink clean water.  Whether it’s greater efforts to ensure water is clean to begin with, or concerns over ensuring the water remains clean after filtration, there are many issues still to resolve.

Whilst that is quite probably the long-term goal however, this book provides a nice short-term solution to a problem that has huge implications around the world.