Roughly 1 billion people in the world have no access to safe drinking water, and contaminated water kills more people worldwide than all forms of violence combined. Seeking to provide a solution to this problem, South African researchers have created a water-purifying nanotech tea bag that costs half a cent. Portable, instantly effective and with no chance of recontamination, the tea bag sounds like the best idea since sliced bread.
Here’s how the nanotech teabag works: it combines ultra-thin nanoscale fibers to filter harmful contaminants, while grains of activated carbon to kill bacteria. Simply put the tea bag in the neck of a water bottle and drink the water through it.
Marelize Botes, a microbiology researcher at South Africa‘s Stellenbosch University says “The nanofibres will disintegrate in liquids after a few days and will have no environmental impact. The raw materials of the tea-bag filter are not toxic to humans.”
Even at half an American cent, the tea bag may be too expensive for the world’s poorest to afford — but that’s what NGOs are for, right?
Via Good and io9
and where can we buy this?
Great product. Hope it will be used very often.
My one worry is that the form factor will mislead people about how to use it—assuming users are familiar with tea bags, it\’ll be a weird and unfamiliar use to drink through it, and people may, instead, just steep it in their water, to much less effect.
[...] areas every year from exposure to contaminated drinking water. The challenge is to create processes that work cheaply and reliably and uses materials that are light enough to transport. The pass-through filter is less [...]
A much needed product in areas of the world where people are still otherwise forced to drink contaminated water.
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