Pure drinking water, the most sought after commodity on the planet, could soon be within reach of millions of people thanks to the ingenuity of Kiwi Russell Kelly, backed by space age technology developed for NASA.
His recently designed filter system can turn sewage-polluted water into drinking water. International patents and trademarks protect the various processes.
Having lived in Kashmir on the India/Pakistan border, and having travelled widely through Asia, Kelly and wife Sue set about inventing a simple filter system that was portable, required low maintenance and that could be operated by gravity, bicycle power or a generator.
“We have also had 17 years practical experience in the water treatment business in New Zealand which assisted us in developing the necessary technologies that were efficient, robust and practical, and in most cases did not require electricity to achieve the goal. We were always confident in our ability to come up with the appropriate solution to the problems and knew what was required, but it has taken a long time to get there,” he said.
Source and more info: scoop
A water filter system designed by a Christchurch couple is being touted as a tool that can turn sewage-polluted water into drinking water.
Russell Kelly and his wife Sue, who have 17-years of experience in the water treatment business, have spent four years developing the filter system for third world countries.
Mr Kelly says NASA has given them the rights to use the iodine technology which it developed, and also given them approval to use NASA’s logo.
Source and more info: newstalkzb
Russell Kelly yesterday put his water filter system to work, with a rough mix of foul water.
He collected water from the Avon River then “took some of the raw sewage from the Bromley sewerage and mixed it and I drank it, and several others did the same thing”.
The system has taken four years to develop.
Kelly and his wife, Sue, say they have had approaches for the system’s use from the nomadic Masai tribes via the Kenyan Government.
Pedal-powered, gravity fed, or generator-driven, his filter systems had no need for electricity, said Kelly.
Having lived in Kashmir on the India-Pakistan border, and having travelled widely through Asia, the Kellys came back to Christchurch to develop the system.
Source and more info: stuff
In very poor countries, the family that has to walk miles to fetch drinking water from a well or a stream may be the lucky one. In many villages, the water source is a filthy pond trod by animals and people, or a mud puddle out next to the yam field.
As a result, about 6,000 people a day — most of them children — die from water-borne diseases.
Vestergaard Frandsen, a Danish textile company, has come up with a new invention meant to render dangerous water drinkable.
The invention is called Life-straw, a plastic tube with seven filters: graduated meshes with holes as fine as 6 microns (a human hair is 50 to 100 microns), followed by resin impregnated with iodine and another of activated carbon. It can be worn around the neck and lasts a year.
Lifestraw isn’t perfect, but it filters out at least 99.99 per cent of many parasites and bacteria, the demons in most fatal cases of diarrhea.
It is less effective against viruses, which are much smaller and cause diseases like polio and hepatitis. It does not filter out metals like arsenic, and it has a slight iodine aftertaste (not necessarily a bad thing in the large stretches of the globe where people have iodine deficiency).
Source and more info: thestar
In the wake of oyster-bed closings in the Okatie River, the Coastal Conservation League and local environmentalists are calling on the state to enforce water-quality violations originating from a development they say is polluting the river.
Portions of the Okatie were closed to shellfish harvesting recently because of high levels of fecal coliform bacteria stemming from stormwater runoff.
The environmental groups say the problem is originating from Berkeley Hall, the residential development that borders a large stretch of the river. The community, they say, consistently has been in violation of water-quality standards established in its state-issued permit and reinforced in a 2001 lawsuit settlement agreement.
They also say the state and the community knew of the problem for years and did nothing to stop it.
But the S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control says there isn’t enough evidence to show the problems are coming from Berkeley Hall.
Scott Irwin, the general manager of Berkeley Hall, declined to comment. He referred questions to the community’s stormwater-management plan developer, Savannah-based Thomas & Hutton Engineering. Several members of the firm didn’t return messages left at their offices Friday.
Source and more info: islandpacket
The Environmental Protection Agency reports that 84 percent of Americans believe that their home’s tap water is polluted. While many consumers treat their drinking water using filtration pitchers or faucet filters, PurePlex has developed a whole-house solution that produces clean, filtered water from every tap. The PurePlex Whole-House Water Filtration Systems are offered Factory Direct through an all-new website at PurePlex.com.
(PRWEB) October 13, 2006 — Consumer awareness of the potential for sediments, chlorine and other contaminants in common household tap water continues to rise as more water filtration products are promoted through nationwide advertising. Though most consumers who filter their water do so with faucet filters or filtration pitchers, there exists technology to clean all of a home’s water at the source, producing clean, filtered water from every faucet in the house. With an all-new website at PurePlex.com, water treatment systems provider PurePlex is leading the charge to bring these whole house water filters to the approximately 80 million American households that can benefit from complete whole-house water treatment.
Source and more info: prweb
