‘Drinkable Book’ With Water-Filtering Pages Shows Promise in Field Testing

A researcher named Theresa Dankovich has discovered a cheap and easy to transport method to purify drinking water. However, before Dankovich, no one tried to integrate such nanoparticles into paper to filter water.

And the usability of the invention is pretty impressive too – with just one page being able to clean up to 100 litres, while a whole book could filter a single person’s water supply for four years.

Trials are done in 25 contaminated water sites in South Africa, Ghana, Kenya, Haiti, and Bangladesh showed the Drinkable book, which contains tiny particles of copper and silver, could eliminate over 99% of bacteria, according to results of the project unveiled at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting that began yesterday (August 16th).

These investigations were meant to test the filters on ‘real water, ‘ because the reactions might differ from the intentionally contaminated water used in the lab experiments. While trying to purify lightly contaminated water samples collected from a local irrigation canal, Dankovich and her team were directed to a sewage dump by nearby workers.

She also cited data that estimated some 663 million people worldwide do not have access to clean water, which American citizens expect every time they turn on a faucet.

However their findings and resolutions were remarkable, as they achieved 99.9 percent of purity with their silver and copper nanoparticles, meaning that the vast majority of bacteria were destroyed, whereas the low bacteria levels could have been compared to those of US drinkable water.

The Drinkable Book doubles as a water filter and an instructional manual for how and why you should clean water before drinking it.

The researchers designed the filter to be useful for bucket sized transports of water, as these are the regular sizes in the targeted communities.

Last year, she formed a nonprofit company, pAge Drinking Paper. So it may seem the woman happen to develop a very easy system to filter out undrinkable h2o, a novel succesful to be compacted from a place region to another, even though the blogs contain bacteria-killing yellow nanoparticles.

“There’s a lot of interest in developing new products for point-of-use water treatment”, Daniele Lantagne, an environmental engineer at Tufts University, told BBC News. “We have to go from “cool chemistry” to something everyone can understand and use”.