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A story about a man who swims to work went viral. Here's what makes his commute possible.

Benjamin David lives in Munich, and he swims to work.

Every morning, David checks the speed and temperature of the water...

[rebelmouse-image 19530356 dam="1" original_size="400x201" caption="All GIFs via BBC Capital/Facebook." expand=1]All GIFs via BBC Capital/Facebook.

...puts on his swim trunks and packs his dry bag with the clothes and gear he needs for the day...

...and swims 2,000 meters, or about 1.25 miles, down the Isar River to work.

Thanks to a great video from BBC Capital, David's story went viral last week. But lost in the surprising and delightful nature of his morning commute is what's making it possible: efforts in major cities to clean up polluted urban rivers and return them to swimmers.

Cities like Paris, New York, Boston, and London have all made an effort to return their rivers to swimmers and beachgoers.

Local governments are partnering with civic nonprofits to raise funds for cleanup, natural pools, and marketing efforts. Why focus on swimming? It's affordable, safe, and fun for residents of all ages, and public access to rivers and lakes is a great way to build community and inspire people to care about their waterways.

Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo has made cleaning up the River Seine a priority and hopes to have open-water swimming events in the waterway for the 2024 Olympics. In July, she opened canal water pools in a section of the Bassin de la Villette canal in northern Paris. These clean swimming zones are sectioned off and filtered to ensure a safe dip.

Photos by Martin Bureau/AFP/Getty Images.

American cities are pushing for river pools too. For seven years, a nonprofit in New York City has been working on +POOL, a floating swimming pool in the shape of a plus sign that can filter impurities through its walls. They have a bevy of backers and great designs but are currently in a holding pattern with the city, waiting for a site to install it.

An artist's rendering of +POOL, the idea of am NYC nonprofit. Image via +POOL.

One city that's seeing the benefits of returning the river to swimmers is Portland, Oregon.

The city is split in half by the Willamette River, a thoroughfare still used to export grain and dry-dock ships. But despite Portland's eco-friendly persona, the river was long neglected and prone to sewage overflows. With the completion of the Big Pipe, a sewage infrastructure project, the Willamette has been remarkably clean and safe for swimming. Yet it was still hard to persuade residents to dive in.

[rebelmouse-image 19530361 dam="1" original_size="750x562" caption="Photo by Ian Sane/Flickr." expand=1]Photo by Ian Sane/Flickr.

That's where local nonprofit group Human Access Project comes in. The group of volunteers pursues its mission of transforming Portland's relationship with the river by creating public spaces like access points and beaches, supporting education and conservation efforts, and, of course, jumping in for a dip. The HAP hosts the Big Float — a floating party in the river — an annual river swim with Mayor Ted Wheeler, and even has a swim team called the River Huggers. Yeah, seriously.

"For us, swimability is a platform for hope," says HAP Founder and Ringleader Willie Levenson. "Our hope is that if we can reconnect people with the river through their own self-interest, through something that will benefit them — being able to get into the water and swim — they will naturally care more about the outcomes of what's happening in the watershed. They'll naturally be more inclined to fight for this thing that they love and enjoy."

[rebelmouse-image 19530362 dam="1" original_size="750x562" caption="The River Huggers take to the water. Photo via Human Access Project, used with permission." expand=1]The River Huggers take to the water. Photo via Human Access Project, used with permission.

Are swimmable rivers and lakes not on your city's radar? There's still a lot you can do.

While most people don't have the time to found and organize their own nonprofit like Levenson, there are similar groups like the Waterkeepers or your local watershed council that are already doing this work. Donate your time or make a contribution to keep the good going.

You can also start using the body of water to swim, kayak, or relax. It's fun, affordable, and close to home. Check the water quality test results online before jumping in, and bring a friend or swim buddy. Let your local elected officials know you want safe access to your water and support candidates that make it a priority.

You may not use it to commute, like David, or create a float party with thousands of your closest friends, like Willie Levenson, but it's your community and your water, and you deserve a clean, safe place to enjoy it.

Beachgoers enjoy Portland's newest river access point, Poet's Beach. Photo via Human Access Project, used with permission.

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

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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."

Family

Old saris have a second use: They can protect people from a deadly bacteria in water.

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For many of us here in the U.S., cholera is something we only know about from a book that we read in high school.

But for millions of people around the world, this disease is a very real threat to their health simply because they don't have access to clean drinking water.

So, what if there were an easy way to filter out cholera-causing bacteria from water?

Image via iStock.

That is exactly the question that marine microbiologist Rita Colwell pondered while she was on a research trip in Bangladesh.

She had been studying the bacterium that causes cholera, called Vibrio cholerae, for decades and had made a series of important discoveries about it with her colleagues. For example, they had learned the bacteria could survive in both fresh- and seawater and that it was the primary bacteria attached to copepods, microscopic crustaceans and plankton that live in water all over the world.

But up until then, their research had focused mostly on the bacteria and the environment where it was found — not on any practical solutions that might help people not get sick.

"It occurred to us, well, my goodness, in all the work we are doing, clearly we could do something for the village families who get cholera," Colwell says.

An electron microscope image of V. cholerae bacteria, which causes cholera. Image via Dartmouth University/Wikimedia Commons.

Cholera is a deadly diarrheal disease caused by the ingestion of contaminated food or water.

While this disease has been rare in the United States for over a century, it is still a serious problem throughout the developing world, including in Bangladesh, where access to clean drinking water can be difficult. In fact, according to the World Health Organization,between 1.3 to 4 million people get sick with cholera every year, and as many as 143,000 people die from it.

In rural Bangladesh, where Colwell was working, cholera was a serious problem because women would scoop drinking surface water directly from canals, rivers, and lakes. There was no filtration, and there wasn’t enough fuel, like firewood, available for families to boil water every day.

Colwell and her colleagues realized that if they could devise a crude, inexpensive filter to strain the copepods (which the V. cholerae bacteria are attached to) from the water, maybe they could help people protect themselves from the disease.

They started by testing out T-shirt material, but that didn’t work. It was difficult to rinse, it didn’t dry, and a lot of debris in the water got through the weave in the fabric.

Then they tried sari cloth —the same cloth that women in India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal have worn for thousands of years. It's also a cloth that women in rural Bangladesh already were using to prepare home-brewed drinks.

Sari cloth has been used as traditional clothing for centuries in the region. Image via iStock.

It worked.

The sari fabric, when it was folded four times over the urns used to gather water, created a mesh filter that was effective enough to remove 99% of the bacteria attached to the plankton copepods that cause the cholera.

Not only that, but the cloth could be reused over and over again, making it a very practical and inexpensive solution. That’s because the cloth is light and porous, Colwell explains. "Because it rains — with monsoons — every day [there], the sari cloth is designed to dry quickly. So, what is nice about it is that you can unfold it, rinse it off, and then hang it up. It dries and then you can re-use it."

Colwell and her colleagues taught villagers how to make their own sari filters in 65 rural Bangladeshi villages, and over three years, she says, "we were able to show a 50% reduction in cholera."

Folded four times over a water collection urn, sari cloth can reduce the amount of cholera in drinking water. Image via iStock.

The team returned to the villages five years later and found that news of the filters had spread to other villages. As many as 75% of the population in these villages were using these filters.

And, Colwell says, they discovered something called the "herd effect" taking place — even if villagers weren’t filtering water themselves, fewer people were getting sick because fewer people were shedding the bacteria back into the water. "By virtue of all their neighbors staying healthy because they filtered," she explains, "they were not exposed to the larger numbers of bacteria themselves."

Of course, the filter isn't 100% effective at catching cholera-causing bacteria. Still, Colwell says there is power in this simple solution.

According to UNICEF, 663 million people do not have access to clean water around the world. Not only that, almost 2.4 billion people do not have access to adequate sanitation.

There are a lot of high-tech solutions out there that try to address the problem of access to clean water, she says, and there are a lot of ways to work to combat the spread of cholera. But sometimes, it is the simple, inexpensive solutions — such as the sari filter — that can do a lot of good.

A view of rural Bangladesh. Image via Balaram Mahalder/Wikimedia Commons.

With more education about how the sari can be used, she says, it can make a difference for public health in regions where there isn’t access to clean water. Sari filters could even be useful in the aftermaths of large hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters all over the world, she adds.

Colwell and her colleagues hope to spread the word about sari filters to other places, such as Africa and other regions in Asia, where inexpensive solutions have the potential to make a big impact.