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Amazing WaterCube invention can create up to 100 gallons of water a day out of thin air

Say goodbye to your water bills.

via Genesis Systems and Karolina Grabowska/Pexels

Genesis Systems' WaterCube.

A seriously impressive piece of technology grabbed a lot of attention at this year's CES trade show convention in Las Vegas, Genesis Systems’ WaterCube. It’s a home and office appliance that’s about the size of an A/C unit and can produce up to 100 gallons of water daily from thin air. That’s the amount of water used by a typical family of 4.

The amount of water it can produce depends on the humidity levels, but Genesis Systems says it can even create water in dry environments.

Much like solar panels provide energy independence, this does the same for water.

"Our first mission is to sustainably solve global water scarcity," said David Stuckenberg, who founded Genesis with his wife, Shannon, told Techxplore. "Once you have this plugged into your house...you can turn yourself off (from) the city water."

"One of the challenges that we're facing, in terms of making humanity sustainable, is the stuff we need for life," he said, according to Techxplore. "Next to air, water is the most important thing."

The WC-100 WaterCube stands more than 3 feet tall, weighs close to 600 pounds and will cost around $20,000 to pre-order. So, even though you may not have a water bill anymore, you will have a pretty expensive monthly payment plan on a WaterCube for a few years.

But once it’s paid off, your water is free as long as you own the appliance.

Genesis Systems believes that the WaterCube creates “an infinite water source” that is “democratizing the water supply.”


This article originally appeared on 1.28.24

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Fog harvesting is real — and it's bringing clean drinking water to communities in need.

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P&G

High in the Anti-Atlas mountains of southwestern Morocco, there are several isolated villages where the Berber people have lived for centuries.

The Anti-Atlas mountains of southwestern Morocco. Image via Dar Si Hmad.

The Berber people, also called the Imazighen, have lived in scattered settlements across Morocco and its surrounding countries for thousands of years. As the descendants of the pre-Arab inhabitants of North Africa, their history dates back to prehistoric times. They have preserved their own language and culture despite numerous attempts to colonize them throughout history. Today, about 14 million Berber people live in Morocco.

Over the past 30 years, life has become increasingly difficult for the Berbers living in the Anti-Atlas mountains because of desertification andabnormally intense droughts,including one in 1986 that dried out the region so much that it has never fully recovered.

A Berber woman pouring hot water into a tea pot. Image via iStock.

Before, while it had always been warm and dry there, they had sufficient rainwater and well water to survive and raise livestock. But these long dry spells forced women and children to spend an average of four hours a day on round trips to gather drinking water for their families and cattle. And during particularly dry summers, they had to hike even further.

When the water shortages got dire, water had be hauled in by tanker truck, which was time-consuming and expensive. They urgently needed a solution to their water problem, especially since climate change was likely to make the task of finding drinking water even harder.

Luckily, their unique climate offered them a potential solution.

Fog in the Anti-Atlas mountains of Morocco. Image by Ayman Abdelilah/Wikimedia Commons.

There is a lot of fog in this area of southwestern Morocco because of some interesting meteorological phenomena.

There is a large, stationary high-pressure system (called the Azores anticyclone) that circulates air off the coast of Morocco over a cold-water current from the Canary Islands. This causes air to pick up moisture and form clouds — specifically statocumulus clouds, which are low-lying and full of water. Wind then pushes these clouds from the coast toward the Anti-Atlas mountains, but since these mountains are high and colder than the coast, they form a natural barrier — trapping the clouds and forming fog against the mountainsides.

Fog in the Anti-Atlas mountains. Image via Dar Si Hmad.

This means that while there is very little rain on these mountains, there is a lot of thick fog, which, thanks to some new green technology, can be harnessed and turned directly into drinking water.

Dar Si Hmad, a women-led NGO in Morocco, designed and installed a fog-water harvesting system — the largest in the world to date — on the summit of one of these foggy mountains, Mount Boutmezguida.

The fog-harvesting system being installed on Mount Boutmezguida. Image via Dar Si Hmad.

The way fog-harvesting works is actually fairly simple: On the summit of Boutmezguida, high above the villages, finely meshed panels — or nets — were installed.

The mesh in the fog-harvesting system. Image via Dar Si Hmad.

When wind pushes fog through the specialized mesh, water droplets are trapped. They then condense and fall into a container that collects the water below the nets. This water flows downhill in pipes to reservoirs, where it can be stored until it is needed.

The construction team setting up pipes to capture the fog water. Image via Dar Si Hmad.

From those reservoirs, the water is piped directly to the villages and individual households. So far, this project in Morocco has provided running water to 92 households, or nearly 400 people, most of them women and children.

The best part? Fog water is pure, free from any contaminants and pollutants, so it can be used for drinking water without any treatment.

This makes fog-catching an incredibly affordable, efficient and environmentally friendly way to harvest drinking water, and it can be used in other places where there are few or no viable means to access water.

Image via Dar Si Hmad.

Dar Si Hmad’s project was awarded a United Nations Climate Change prize in 2016, and there are already plans to extend the fog-catching system to other villages and parts of Morocco.

“Where there’s fog, we can harness it for the community, store it when it’s needed and use it later, instead of looking for very expensive and fossil-based solutions like desalinizing water, or digging more bore holes looking for even deeper aquifers,” Dr. Jamila Bargach, director of Dar Si Hmad, told CNN.

Aissa Derhem, the president of Dar Si Hamed. Image by Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images.

The technique could be used in other parts of the world, as well. In fact, FogQuest, a Canadian nonprofit, has already set up fog-harvesting systems in South and Central America, the Middle East, and North Africa.

Where there is fog, this technology has the power to not only deliver clean water, but also to change people's lives — especially women and children — all over the world. And the technology will undoubtedly become more important in the future as droughts and climate change affect water supplies globally.

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This powder is cleaning drinking water all over the world and transforming lives

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P&G

Imagine you grab a cup of water to drink, and it’s so murky that you can’t even see through it. Would you drink it?

For many people around the world, this isn’t a hypothetical question because they don’t have a choice.

All images via P&G Children's Safe Drinking Water.

Right now, 663 million people around the world don't have access to clean drinking water. Some live in rural areas where there is no centralized water system or water treatment plant, meaning that they rely on local river or lake water. Others live in areas still recovering from a natural disaster, such as a hurricane or flood, and the water is contaminated.

Faced with no other water source, they are forced to drink the water they have access to — even if it could lead to sickness or serious diseases, such as cholera or typhoid.

But what if there were an easy — and affordable — way to purify even the most contaminated water and make it clean enough to drink? Well, it turns out there is.

In 1999, Phil Souter, a chemist and an associate director of research and development at P&G, was working on a project to effectively recycle laundry water when he had an idea. He wanted to create a powder packet — like a detergent — that could scrub cloudy and dirty water of anything harmful and turn it into safe drinking water.

So he put together a proposal, got it approved, and went to work.

"What I was trying to do was miniaturize what takes place in water treatment plants," he explains, "and miniaturize that into a packet that a consumer could easily use, that wasn’t expensive, and that was a bit of a one-size-fits-all so that it could literally treat any source of drinking water."

Creating such a solution was no easy feat.

To be successful, the packet would need to be able to kill off any and all bacteria and small parasites found in all kinds of different water sources, from lakes and rivers to wells and flood waters, while also being able to remove heavy metals and other harmful chemicals.

And it would need to do this in an inexpensive, timely way (because who wants to sit around for hours waiting for a drink of water?). Of course,the new, clearer water would also need to taste good (not like a bunch of chemicals — yuck). Plus, all of the steps to do this would have to fit into a small sachet — no special equipment allowed. Oh, and it also would need to have a decent shelf life so that it could be distributed without expiring before it even got there.

"So really, there were a lot of technical challenges to solve," Souter says.

But after a little over two years of testing and development, Souter and his team created a powder that could do everything it needed to do.

It's called the P&G Purifier of Water sachet.

Just 4 grams of the powder can clean up to 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of dirty water in just 30 minutes. The purifying packets are about the size of a teabag, and they have a shelf life of three years, meaning that it is easy to stockpile them in places that need them.

The best part? The water purification process could not be simpler: All you need is the packet, a bucket of water, a stick, and a cloth.

Here's how it works:

First, you stir the water and powder for five minutesso that harmful things — such as heavy metals, parasites, and dirt — are pulled out from the water and they coagulate together to form small insoluble particles. The water immediately starts to look clearer.

Then you let the water settle for five minutes. This is when all those small particles clump together — in a process called flocculation — to form bigger, heavier particles that fall to the bottom of the water container.

Once all the clumps have settled, you can strain the water with a piece of cloth or fabric as you pour it into a new, fresh container.

Then you let the water sit for 20 minutes while the water disinfects and kills any remaining bacteria and viruses. After that, the clean water is drinkable (and it can be stored for later).

So far, the water purification packets have been incredibly helpful in addressing water crises and shortages all over the world.  

The packets remove more than 99.9% of common waterborne bacteria, viruses, and protozoa (microbial organisms) from water, and they have helped reduce the incidence of diarrheal disease by up to 90%.

"For those rural communities that don’t have access to a sustained water solution — like a pipe system — these packets are an excellent solution that can be a bridge to those more permanent options for communities," says Allison Tummon-Kamphuis, manager of P&G’s Children’s Safe Drinking Water Program. They can also make a big difference after a natural disaster.

Since the packets were created, P&G has worked with 150 different partners around the world — including CARE, ChildFund, PSI, Save the Children, and World Vision — to provide 11 billion liters of clean water to those in need.

And the company is continuing to scale up work to help distribute the packets to even more places that need them. In fact, the packets were named one of the world’s most impactful innovations in 2012.

The packets are having a particularly important role in improving the health of children around the world. "I meet so many little girls around the world — I have two daughters myself," Tummon-Kamphuis says, "and to meet young girls who have all sorts of dreams and seeing them have some of the barriers removed that would have gotten in the way of them achieving them is very memorable to me. And it’s not just young girls. It’s boys as well."

While Souter has moved on to other research and development projects at P&G, he still remains proud of the work that he did on bringing these packets into the world.

"My work on this project has been a source of both personal pride and humble understanding," he said in 2012, "as I've come to realize that every once in a while, life puts us in a position — opens to us a door — to make a difference."

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