Have You Heard of a ‘Drinkable Book’ that Cleans Polluted Water?

Scientist develops inexpensive ‘drinkable’ book; each page can filter up to 100 litres of contaminated water.

The Drinkable Book. (Photo Courtesy: amazing360art)

Here’s a book you definitely cannot judge by its cover! The latest variety of the written copy brought out by a group of scientists can help save water.

That’s right – scientists have now developed an inexpensive ‘drinkable book’ with anti-bacterial metal nano-particles to clean contaminated water – with its pull-out pages acting as filters to make water ‘drinkable’ for up to four years.

Each page can be removed from the book and slid into a special holding device in which water is poured through and filtered. A page can clean up to 100 litres of drinking water. Each page has information on water safety both in English and in the local language of the place.

Filtering Contaminated Water. (Photo Courtesy: amazing360art)

It was while she was studying the material properties of paper as a graduate student, that Theresa Dankovich developed an inexpensive, simple and easily transportable nanotechnology-based method to purify drinking water.

Dankovich also began field investigations of water purification applications in Limpopo, South Africa, as well as northern Ghana, Haiti and Kenya.

In Africa, we wanted to see if the filters would work on ‘real water’, not water purposely contaminated in the lab... But even with highly contaminated water sources like that one, we can achieve 99.9 per cent purity with our silver- and copper-nano-particle paper, bringing bacteria levels comparable to those of US drinking water.
– Theresa Dankovich, post-doctoral researcher at Carnegie Mellon University

The product was developed by her company, pAge Drinking Paper, in collaboration with the non-profit WATERisLIFE organisation.

(With PTI inputs)