Producing drinkable water from air

Hydropack, produce drinkable water by pulling moisture from the air. (Image courtesy of Aquaria.)

From Triple Pundit

(This story originally appeared in Reasons to be Cheerful.)

Blistering suns, endless dunes and almost no water. This is the imagined world on the planet Tatooine in Star Wars. Here, survival depends upon towering vaporators that loom over the sand, drawing in air and condensing its moisture into life-giving water.

But this technology isn’t just limited to the world of science fiction. “That reality is here. We’re already making that happen,” says Brian Sheng, co-founder of Aquaria Technologies, whose mission is to transform atmospheric vapor into safe, drinkable water.

There is no doubt that the world needs more water. On a planet that’s covered in approximately 70 percent water, only a sliver, around 2.5 percent, is fresh and safe for humans to drink, crops to grow and industrial use. And that tiny proportion is shrinking as the world becomes warmer and heat waves exacerbate drought conditions.

This isn’t just a problem of the future. A World Health Organization study estimates that 1.4 million deaths could be prevented each year with improved access to safe drinking water, sanitation and hygiene services.

Sheng’s solution, to generate potable water from air, is based upon a natural phenomenon as old as the Earth itself. As water evaporates off oceans, lakes and other bodies of water, it turns into an invisible vapor that drifts through the atmosphere until cooler temperatures condense it into water droplets. To tap into that, Aquaria has invented a twenty-first century version of the vaporator — an atmospheric water generator (AWG).

Aquaria’s AWG units are designed for home use. They suck in air and cool it so that it condenses into water droplets, then purify it to meet health standards. Small enough to be placed in a backyard and connected to a home’s existing plumbing system, large units can produce up to 200 gallons of water daily. To put this into context, while estimates vary significantly, the EPA suggests each American uses an average of 82 gallons of water a day for activities including bathing, drinking and cooking.

Condensing water at scale, however, comes at a cost. Aquaria’s Hydropixel, for example, which produces up to 10 gallons of water a day, costs approximately $3,800. To make clean water more accessible, Aquaria offers flexible payment plans to help ease the initial cost of its systems. And to reduce the expense of running the units on conventional grid electricity, the units can be connected to existing home solar systems.

In Australia, Aqua Ubique, realizing that cost can be prohibitive — especially for First Nations communities — has structured its company as a social enterprise. Through its Drop 4 Drop program, for every five Aqua Ubique AWG water cooler units leased to offices or business, one can be installed in a community that lacks clean drinking water. The units look like and function the same as a regular water cooler, except they are pulling in water from the surrounding air and converting it to drinking water.

It all started when Shannon Lemanski was serving with the Australian army in Papua New Guinea (PNG). There he witnessed first hand how supposedly single-use plastic bottles were being used to capture rainwater so that locals wouldn’t have to drink from a contaminated creek. “Returning to Australia, I discovered that the issue wasn’t restricted to PNG,” he says. “Over two million people in Australia don’t have access to safe drinking water.” In 2023, he co-founded Aqua Ubique.

While some experts argue that the focus should be on preserving the freshwater resources already available to us, communities such as Cherbourg in Queensland, Australia, highlight the need for a more immediate solution. Here, water issues have been systemic, including a nine month boil water alert in 2024 due to E. coli contamination.

“Because of deep distrust in the town’s tap water, it’s not uncommon to see babies drinking Coke from bottles rather than formula, as soft drink is cheaper than bottled water at the only store,” Lemanski says.

In May 2025, Aqua Ubique installed two MG10 AWG water cooler units in Cherbourg, one at a daycare and the other at an elders village. As a result, dozens of children and seniors who didn’t before have access to safe drinking water now do.

Getting clean, healthy water to where it is needed most is also the mission of the Moses West Foundation, based in Illinois. “At our core,” says Colin Hultz, chief business officer and head of partnerships, “we are just trying to get as much water to as many people as possible.”

The organization’s founder, Moses West, a former U.S. army ranger captain, had — similarly to Lemanski — been deployed to areas where clean water was scarce and had seen the impacts. This inspired him to use his background in engineering to design and build patented AWG units able to produce water for thousands.

When Hurricane Maria then struck in 2017, its 170 mph winds ripped apart infrastructure and homes in Puerto Rico. “Moses was out there with our largest AWG 5000 unit for about six months and he gave 15,000 families access to unlimited free drinking water,” Hultz says. And it’s not just the free water, it’s the cost savings that come with it. “When we were in Puerto Rico, we saved the Island about $300 million in the cost of having to ship in plastic water bottles,” he says.

Similar to Aquaria’s home-scale AWGs, Moses West’s AWG800 system, which is capable of producing more than 200 gallons of water per day, can be directly connected to solar panel systems. Roughly the size of a small Fiat, the unit can be deployed quickly and begin generating water even in locations with no connection to the main grid.

As great as it all sounds, Lemanski says context is key to take into consideration when considering the deployment of AWGs. In warmer, more humid climates they will deliver higher yields, while in dry and cold environments production is lower, meaning that expectations must be managed. He sees their current best-case use as one that integrates an AWG system with other water collection and purification systems such as rainwater tanks, greywater recycling and desalination plants. When used together, he says, AWGs can become part of a complete off-grid water system. “This hybrid approach is where AWGs really shine: Safe drinking water, complemented by other sources for washing, irrigation and bulk use,” he says.

Perhaps the biggest drawback to AWGs, argue Lemanski and Hultz, is the lack of public awareness.

“It’s frustrating sitting there with a real solution people still haven’t picked up on,” Hultz says. “Water scarcity is increasing. There are areas in Texas running out of groundwater in stage four drought conditions. The best time to have started to use AWGs was yesterday — the second-best time today.”

How Tory neglect flooded Britain's rivers with sewage

From The Guardian 

As the election campaign rolls on in the UK, our colleagues have been producing a bunch of great data-driven reporting.

This feature traces pollution along the Thames, and reports that for voters, including many in Tory heartlands, the polluting of Britain’s rivers is among the most egregious legacies of 14 years of Conservative rule.

There’s also some great visualisations on which high-profile Conservatives might lose their seats, and how the Lib Dems might double their seats despite fewer votes.

Some of these stories also feature a lovely approach of hand-designed collages, which you can read about here.

The Conservative Party (The Tories, from the Irish word tóraidhe, modern Irish tóraí, meaning "outlaw", "robber") privatised the publicly-owned water authorities, with the consequences we see today.

How tea saved lives

From the BBC

Tea has been many things in its time – a global commodity, a comforting beverage, and even, in the eyes of some Bostonians 250 years ago this week, a symbol of oppressive politics. But one role you might not have attributed to tea is that of a life-saving health intervention.

In a recent paper in the Review of Statistics and Economics, economist Francisca Antman of the University of Colorado, Boulder, makes a convincing case that the explosion of tea as an everyman's drink in late 1700s England saved many lives. This would not have been because of any antioxidants or other substances inherent to the lauded leaf.

Instead, the simple practice of boiling water for tea, in an era before people understood that illness could be caused by water-borne pathogens, may have been enough to keep many from an early grave.

English demographics from this era have long contained a puzzle for historians. Between 1761 and 1834, the annual death rate declined substantially, from 28 to 25 per 1,000 people. But at the same time, wages do not seem to have risen much and standards of living arguably did not increase. In fact, with the rise of the industrial revolution, more and more people were crowding into towns whose sanitation left much to be desired. "I would say it's not a settled debate," says Antman.

The idea that tea might be the missing link here, thanks to the need to boil water for a proper brew, had been floated by historians in the past. Boiling water kills bacteria that cause diarrheal diseases like dysentery, which was often called "flux" or "bloody flux" in death records.

"With people coming into cities to work, you would expect, given the level of sanitation they have, that the big killer is water," says Antman. But it remained a somewhat fuzzy idea, interesting in theory but difficult to prove.

Antman developed a way to test it, using detailed geographical information about more than 400 parishes across England. There is a simple assumption at the heart of her study: more water sources in an area likely means cleaner water. If one source was contaminated, the inhabitants of a parish could go to another. What's more, if people were closer to the sources of rivers – something Antman infers from parishes' elevation – that water was likely safer than in parishes further downstream.

By assigning parishes an inferred level of water quality, Antman could see whether areas with worse water quality saw a bigger decline in mortality than those with good water.

In terms of testing this hypothesis, the key date is 1785, the moment when tea suddenly became affordable for the vast majority of Britons. There were many things already to recommend tea as a drink of the masses: you could make a satisfying brew with just a small amount of leaves, the leaves could be reused for multiple pots, and tea was potentially cheaper than beer, which was rendered expensive both by the complex process required to make it and by a tax on malt.

But when 1784's Tea and Windows Act went into effect, the tax on tea went from 119% to just 12.5% and tea consumption exploded. By the end of the 18th Century, even very poor peasants were having tea twice a day, tea historian Alan Macfarlane writes.

To see if this change correlated with decreased mortality, Antman compared death rates before and after this watershed moment. For this she drew on the remarkable work of demographers E A Wrigley and R S Schofield, who in the mid-20th Century collected parish records from all over England spanning 1541 to 1871, including deaths.

As expected, Antman found that death rates declined in both parishes with good water and those with bad – but there was a significant difference in the size of the decline. Parishes with bad water saw death rates drop 18% more than those with good water.

What's more, she looked to see whether deaths in London from waterborne diseases like "bloody flux", and deaths from airborne pathogens like tuberculosis, or "consumption", were linked to levels of tea imports. Indeed, flux deaths declined when tea imports went up, while TB deaths remained about the time.

She also checked to see whether deaths in children – not known, in this age or any other, for being major consumers of tea – changed in London with tea imports, and found that there did not seem to be a decline in deaths of those ages two to five.

Interestingly, there was a slight decline in infant deaths, perhaps reflecting the fact that if tea-drinking parents had less diarrheal disease, their very young children might have been protected a bit as well – though Antman points out there is no way to know for sure.

For Antman, who primarily works on issues related to developing nations, this natural experiment in England all those years ago reflects a fundamental truth: sometimes people's existing behaviours can make more of a difference to their health than an explicit intervention might.

Building more privies, developing better plumbing and sewage systems, and teaching people to keep drinking water and wastewater scrupulously separate all might have extended people's lives, had such interventions been widely understood and available.

But with relatively little change to their habits, merely an increase in a behavior they already enjoyed, people seem to have protected themselves. All part of the pleasure of a simple cup of tea.

Source:  BBC, Getty Images

Reusable sponge removes heavy metals from water

From New Atlas

Removing heavy metal pollutants from water could soon be easier than ever, thanks to an experimental new sponge. With just one treatment, the device brought contaminated water down to safely drinkable levels.

Building upon two previous studies, the technology is being developed by scientists at Illinois' Northwestern University.

The researchers started out with a cheap commercially available cellulose sponge, and placed it in a slurry of manganese-doped goethite nanoparticles. They then removed it, let it dry, and rinsed it with water to flush out any loose particles.

The result was a sponge with a high-surface-area nanoparticle coating that was just tens of nanometers thick. Manganese-doped goethite particles were chosen not only because they adsorb lead ions, but also because they're inexpensive and non-toxic to humans.

When the sponge was immersed in tap water containing more than one part per million of lead, it sequestered lead ions to the point that they were no longer detectable in the water … this made the water safe to drink.

What's more, the lead could subsequently be removed from the sponge by rinsing the latter in mildly acidic water. That reclaimed lead could then conceivably be utilized in products such as batteries, while the rinsed-out sponge was reused to treat more tainted water – it wasn't quite as effective in later cycles, although it was still able to remove over 90% of lead ions from samples.

The scientists have now developed a platform known as Nanomaterial Sponge Coatings for Heavy Metals (Nano-SCHeMe), to guide other teams in selecting different types of nanoparticles for sequestering different types of heavy metals.

"The presence of heavy metals in the water supply is an enormous public health challenge for the entire globe," said Prof. Vinayak Dravid, senior author of a paper on the study. "It is a gigaton problem that requires solutions that can be deployed easily, effectively and inexpensively. That’s where our sponge comes in. It can remove the pollution and then be used again and again."

The paper was recently published in the journal ACS ES&T Water.

Source: Northwestern University

The sponge sequesters lead ions from water, plus it can be rinsed out and reused

Northwestern University

The Tory water privatisation scam

 Dunno who created this.  Kudos to them.

And the Right wonder why socialism is once again respectable, and why young people are moving Left.

Pollution caused 1 in 6 deaths over last 5 years

 From The Washington Post

Deaths from fossil fuel burning and lead poisoning have risen by 66 percent in the past two decades

In 2015, 1 in 6 deaths worldwide stemmed from poor air quality, unsafe water and toxic chemical pollution. That deadly toll — 9 million people each year — has continued unabated through 2019, killing more people than war, terrorism, road injuries, malaria, drugs and alcohol.

The new findings, released Tuesday by the Lancet Planetary Health journal, shows that pollution continues to be the world’s largest environmental health threat for disease and premature deaths, with more the 90 percent of these deaths taking place in low- and middle-income countries.

Richard Fuller, the report’s lead author, said in an interview that “a lack of attention” accounts for why this grim tally continues unabated.

“There’s not much of an outcry around pollution … even though, clearly, 9 million people dying a year is an enormous issue to be concerned about,” he said.

The analysis, which used 2019 data from Global Burden of Diseases, Injuries and Risk Factors, found that air pollution accounts for the vast majority of premature deaths, at 6.7 million. Water pollution accounted for 1.4 million deaths, while lead poisoning took close to a million lives. The report is an update of a similar analysis done by Fuller and his colleagues in 2015, which also found air and water pollution as the top offenders.

While the total number of pollution-related deaths has not changed in the past five years, the sources have shifted in some regions. In the past, most pollution deaths stemmed from indoor and household air pollution, caused by fine particles of soot released from indoor stoves burning wood or dung. Unclean water and untreated sewage also took more than a million lives.

Fuller said this source of pollution has decreased in recent years, as many households in China and India have switched to gas for cooking.

But that was about the only good news in the report. Instead of those traditional pollutants, fossil fuel burning, automobile combustion and toxic chemical pollution now pose a greater health risk in the developing world.

More than half of the countries and nations worldwide experienced more deaths from outdoor air pollution and toxic chemicals in 2019 than indoor air pollution and water contamination. More than 2 million people died from industrial and chemical pollution in China, for example, compared with about 367,000 from traditional sources.

In Africa, traditional pollutants still rank as the main cause of pollution-related disease and death, although industrial pollution is on the rise.

“When we’re seeing this increase in industrialization, we’re seeing increased urbanization, more people living in cities, and an aging population who are more vulnerable to the health impacts of air pollution,” said Neelu Tummala, a physician and co-director of the Climate Health Institute at George Washington University who was not involved in the study. “All of this sort of combined together just really increases the amount of associated mortality.”

A boy disposes of raw sewage into a stream in the sprawling Kibera slum in Nairobi on Aug. 26, 2011. (Thomas Mukoya/Reuters)