Tuesday 23 November 2010

LIFESTRAW





I was listening to a podcast last night by 'stuff you should know' from 'www.howstuffworks.com' and they were talking about the 'lifestraw'. Id never heard of it before but it turns out its a life saving piece of product design!

I was horrified to hear that over 6,000 people die each day in developing countries because they don't have access to clean drinking water. We take for granted that we can turn on the tap and an endless flow of safe water will be available to us.

Lifestraw is not the answer to world thirst but it is a great step on the way to preserving life in these countries that need it. The lifestraw works by giving the user their own personal instant water purification system. The user can drink straight from streams, sucking up the dirty water whilst the lifestraw filters out all the dangerous bacterias and parasites which would usually have been ingested.



How it works:
  • Water passes through a mesh filter that removes the larger sediment and dirt. The holes in the filter are about 100 microns in diameter.
  • A polyester filter with a much smaller mesh of about 15 microns -- about a tenth of the diameter of a human hair -- catches bacteria.
  • The next step sends the water through iodine-coated resin beads. Iodine is a halogen (reactive nonmetal) that kills parasites, viruses and bacteria. These halogenated resin beads lie in a specially designed chamber that maximizes the exposure of pathogens to the iodine.
  • The water passes through an empty chamber.
  • The water is pulled through an active carbon filter to remove any taste left from the iodine and block any remaining pathogens. Carbon is the porous result of burned organic material and is activated by a special chemical process that makes it even more porous and more able to absorb impurities.
This product is literally saving lives! you can donate a lifestraw to a developing country at:

 http://www.lifestraw.org.uk/index.html

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