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.”

Dairy farms still draining the Colorado river dry

[Delia Johnson/Cronkite News]
The report warns that factory farming is not only accelerating our climate crisis,

but the industry will also need 'more and more water' in the future,

 thanks to extreme heat and other weather changes fueled by the climate crisis.

From The Tucson Sentinel

A new report warns that a vital U.S. waterway depended upon by more than 40 million people is facing severe decline, as the Colorado River is being ‘drained dry.’ Agriculture is largely to blame for the “water crisis” in the western U.S., particularly industrial meat and crops raised to feed livestock, says Food and Water Watch, the environmental advocacy group responsible for the new findings.

Factory farming fuels Colorado River crisis

Last year, a study found that the U.S. west was facing the worst drought it had seen in 1,200 years. Since then, the extremely dry conditions have modestly improved — especially after unusually heavy rains hit California — but the problem of water scarcity remains. And the stakes are high — Colorado River provides drinking water to seven U.S. states and two Mexican states, and two reservoirs fed by the Colorado River — Lake Mead and Lake Powell — play an important role in the nation’s power grid.

Despite being the largest drain on the river, factory farming hasn’t been held accountable. “Huge agribusinesses remain unphased by this crisis, continuing to abuse water supplies to feed animals on factory farms that, in turn, worsen the climate crisis and associated drought,” write the authors of the report. The Colorado River Basin is “Ground Zero” for the industry’s water and climate harms, according to the nonprofit, and 218 million gallons of water are used daily from the basin in order to feed and water 2.5 million dairy cows.

Alfalfa also requires a massive amount of water from the river. In 2022, over 2 trillion gallons were used for 2.7 million acres of land for alfalfa crops. For comparison, just .63 trillion represents all of the indoor household water needs for Basin residents, according to the report. And alfalfa is largely grown just to feed meat and dairy farm animals. In April, Vox explored which crops account for the most water from the Colorado River, concluding that 70 percent went to alfalfa, hay, grasses and corn ultimately used in cattle feed on beef and dairy farms. Other crops, such as soy, wheat and barley, may also be grown and used for feeding livestock in the region.

The way we eat creates a disastrous climate cycle

States along the river’s basin exceed the national average for irrigation water usage by 70 percent, finds Food and Water Watch, and this use is creating a vicious cycle. The report warns that factory farming is not only accelerating our climate crisis, but the industry will also need “more and more water” in the future thanks to extreme heat and other weather changes fueled by the climate crisis.

Research published in 2020 estimates that the Colorado River’s flow declines by over 9 percent with every degree Celsius that the Earth’s temperature rises, a loss that is too high to be countered by expected increases in precipitation.

States take action to address water crisis, but is it enough?

Earlier this year, Politico called the uphill battle to reduce usage of the Colorado River “the first climate brawl” faced by President Joe Biden. In May, three river basin states agreed to, in total, reduce their use of water from the river by 13 percent, with Arizona, California and Nevada farmers and communities receiving $1.2 billion in Inflation Reduction Act funding in return for taking steps to conserve water.

Taking action to limit states’ use of the river is complicated, however. For example, Southern California’s Imperial Valley and its approximately 400 farms account for the largest percentage used, reports the Washington Post, and here there are farmers who “have some of the oldest legal rights to that water, dating back more than a century” — older than the Bureau of Reclamation, established in 1902 and now responsible for overseeing the use of the Colorado River.

Indigenous communities are greatly impacted by the river as well and, as the report points out, have inhabited the surrounding land since before the passing of federal and state laws. Despite their senior water rights in some cases, tribes have been largely left out of talks and decisions when it comes to the river. “This has led to a patchwork of rights across the basin, where some tribes have officially quantified water rights while others are still working to achieve them,” reads the report.

‘A history of bad policy’

To Food and Water Watch, though, it is crucial that “a history of bad policy” is now corrected — and the agreement between these states and the Biden administration does not go far enough.

The agreement lasts through the year 2026 and is therefore “not a permanent solution,” write the authors of the report. “The proposal also does not cut nearly enough water to restore the Colorado River — states need to cut four times as much annually for the reservoirs to recover.” Food and Water Watch is calling for both state and federal regulation of water usage, along with aid for small-scale farmers to facilitate their transition to more sustainable practices.

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

Plentiful drinking water from thin air

 From New Atlas

Water scarcity is a major problem for much of the world’s population, but with the right equipment drinking water can be wrung out of thin air. Researchers at the University of Texas at Austin have now demonstrated a low-cost gel film that can pull many liters of water per day out of even very dry air.

The gel is made up of two main ingredients that are cheap and common – cellulose, which comes from the cell walls of plants, and konjac gum, a widely used food additive. Those two components work together to make a gel film that can absorb water from the air and then release it on demand, without requiring much energy.

First, the porous structure of the gum attracts water to condense out of the air around it. The cellulose, meanwhile, is designed to respond to a gentle heat by turning hydrophobic, releasing the captured water.

Making the gel is also fairly simple, the team says. The basic ingredients are mixed together then poured into a mold, where it sets in two minutes. After that it’s freeze-dried, then peeled out of the mold and ready to get to work. It can be made into basically any shape needed, and scaled up fairly easily and at low-cost.

In tests, the gel film was able to wring an astonishing amount of water out of the air. At a relative humidity of 30 percent, it could produce 13 L (3.4 gal) of water per day per kilogram of gel, and even when the humidity dropped to just 15 percent – which is low, even for desert air – it could still produce more than 6 L (1.6 gal) a day per kilogram.

That’s a huge improvement over other water harvesters we’ve covered over the years. The highest previously was 8.66 L (2.3 gal), but that was in air with much higher humidity. Others have topped out at 5.87 L (1.55 gal) at 30 percent humidity, or as little as 1.3 L (0.3 gal).

And the new gel film's efficiency could be improved even further, the team says, by creating thicker films, absorbent beds, or other array formations of the material. Perhaps most importantly, the material is extremely inexpensive to produce, costing as little as US$2 per kilogram. That’s another major factor in scaling up the technology and getting it to remote areas and developing countries, where it’s needed the most.

The research was published in the journal Nature Communications.

Source: UT Austin

A sample of the new gel film, which can pull huge amounts of drinking water out of thin air

University of Texas at Austin