You probably never thought you could go to the gym and then rehydrate at the end of a grueling session with your own sweat, but that possibility now exists. Inspired by NASA astronauts, who are required to recycle everything during long journeys out in Space, Swedish designers built a Sweat Machine that squeezes out the water from post-workout clothes and makes it fit to drink!
The Deportivo PR company teamed up with UNICEF to develop the project in order to spotlight the dire scarcity of water that many people around the world confront, Stefan Ronge, chief creative officer, told Discovery News.
Apart from a high-tech filter developed at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, the machine is actually fairly simple to make with basic parts – including a regular clothes dryer. A pile of sweaty clothes goes into the dryer in order to spin out the water. This is then exposed to UV light before it passes through the high-tech filter to remove salt and bacteria. And lastly, the water is funneled through a coffee filter to remove clothing fibers.
Deportivo and UNICEF are showing off the technology at the Gotha Cup youth soccer tournament, where an exercise bike is hooked up to the machine to encourage more sweat/water generation, and 500 people have already given the machine a try. It’s perfectly potable, though one person told the paper that the filtered water tastes a bit “perfume-y.”
Via Discovery News
