Cheap clean water for millions

As seen on (and many, many more!):

 Bug-killing book pages clean murky drinking water

Filtering a new idea: A book that's educational and "drinkable"

Background

The most recent United Nations figures are that 663 million people do not have access to clean drinking water.  The silver nanoparticle filter paper technology in the Drinkable Book was invented by Dr. Theresa Dankovich for her Ph.D. research at McGill University to try to help with this problem. 

Teri started working on this in 2008 and its been incredibly exciting to see it move out of the lab. Teri's Ph.D. showed that the technology kills 99.9999% of bacteria under the ideal circumstances of the laboratory.   

Out of the lab and into the field

Next, Teri went to the University of Virginia for a postdoc at the Center for Global Health to test her papers in Africa.  Field studies in South Africa showed that the papers work with the more complex chemistry of real world water. The papers were even able to reduce bacterial levels in the dilute raw sewage serving one community down to the levels found in U.S. tap water.  

Around that time the nonprofit WATERisLIFE approached Teri to make the Drinkable Book video. Most scientists never get to tell the world about their great ideas so the video was an incredible opportunity.  We've been amazed at how many  people have responded and been interested in  solving the global water crisis!

Partnerships and pAge Drinking Papers

Donations to WATERisLIFE and to our related crowd-sourced funding campaign allowed us to test the papers in Ghana, Haiti, India, and Kenya with WATERisLIFE.  These preliminary field studies showed that the papers kill bacteria in a variety of waters from throughout the world.   

The work with WATERisLIFE was featured at an exhibit at the United Nations headquarters earlier this year!  The Drinkable Poster!

The video also led to our being contacted by the nonprofit iDE, International Development Enterprises. iDE has thousands of people working in dozens of countries and specializes in human centered design and providing products to the poorest people in the world.  This summer Teri and her students traveled to Bangladesh to work with a team from iDE-Bangladesh to learn what Bangladeshis from a dozen communities with a variety of backgrounds thought about the technology. 

We were really amazed at how positive everyone was about the technology. Its very important to us that we not impose what we as outsiders believe is an answer, but rather that we engage local communities and provide ethical and community accepted solutions.  

Finally, we were contacted by Luke Hydrick, an incredibly talented design student from the University of Cincinnati School of Design. For his senior thesis project, Luke created a variety of filter holder designs and made prototypes for testing in Bangladesh.  Luke joined our team for the trip to Bangladesh and is refining his designs based on the feedback from the communities.  For the project to be successful the filter holder design must not only effectively hold the papers but also much be easy for users to understand and use correctly.

To handle all of this activity we've created a nonprofit called pAge Drinking Paper.  We've registered in the state of Pennsylvania and filed 501(c)3 paperwork with the U.S. IRS.    

The work has garnered a lot of positive exposure in places all over the world: Canada, the US, Mexico (below), the Netherlands, Germany.  We even had someone raise money for our work with a dogsled race!  

The Next Step: Scaling Up

While we ultimately want to be able to provide water to 10s to 100s of millions of people, we must first do development work to create a practical product and to demonstrate that it works in the hands of users in faraway countries.  Right now all the filter papers are made by hand by Teri or a student in a local church kitchen.   The next step in the project is scaling up production and field testing to distribute filter papers to 100s to 1000s of people.  

The biggest limitation to the project at this time is funding.  Paper manufacturing costs money.  Travel to far away countries costs money.  In-country personnel require salaries.  Most of all, since Teri completed her work at UVa, the project has entirely been funded by crowdsourcing, and all our work on the project has been done on a volunteer unpaid basis. 

Ideally we would like to perform a field trial of the papers for 1-2 months in about a dozen villages.  We will work with other nonprofits with local expertise and in-country staff to evaluate the papers' performance.   We will evaluate source water quality, the quality of the filtered water, and the effects on human health.

Project Funding Goals

$30k, two villages, one month: for $30k we can get the equipment, paper production, travel funding, and personnel time to test the papers in two villages for about a month. 

Additional money would allow us to test papers in more villages and for longer amounts of time. 

$150k, about a dozen villages, 1-2 months each village: our ultimate goal is to test the papers in a variety of locations to demonstrate that they work with a variety of waters and in a variety of communities. 

$10 is about how much it costs to manufacture one book by hand.  We're aiming for a price of <10 cents per filter paper after scale up, so ~100 papers.  We expect pilot scale production costs will be higher.  

$20=2 books, ~200 papers
$50=5 books, ~500 papers

$100=lab supplies

$1000=a bacteria incubator and related supplies, a substantial portion of the salary for in-country personnel, travel to the project country

The largest costs for this project are the time and equipment for planning and executing the pilot scale paper production, the human health assessment, the water quality assessment, and travel to- and operations in- a country on the other side of the world.  That is, the majority of costs at this time are not the physical paper itself or the paper treatment, but rather the necessary work that must be done to assess that the papers are effective.  We do not sell the papers at this time because without such a proper assessment we would not find this ethical.  

The Impact

Someday we would like to have these papers in the hands of the poorest people throughout the world.  But before we can get to 1 million we have to go through 1,000.  We will be applying for governmental research grants but the turnaround time will leave us unable to move the project forward for half a year to a year.  If we can raise money through crowdsourcing the project will be able to continue moving forward: the first pilot scale production run will be made and field trials to evaluate the effect of the papers will be performed.  

Risks & Challenges

Scaling up from bench scale production and small field trials to a pilot plant and a dozen villages will require overcoming a variety of unforeseen challenges.  Working in countries on the other side of the world creates a variety of challenges.  Over the past several years we have developed partnerships with a diverse array of very talented people and organizations. Each is highly qualified in its own area, whether paper manufacturing or community health field projects.   We also maintain the flexibility to engage additional experts with abilities outside our own area.

Other Ways You Can Help

Unlike software projects, we cannot deliver health benefits without providing physical papers to kill waterborn pathogens and paper costs money.  But some of the most important advances to the project have come from social media sharing.  We have been introduced to all of our remarkable partners through word of mouth and online social sharing.   And just as importantly, we believe that clean water should be provided to everyone in the world, and we hope that sharing our idea will lead to more projects like ours. We are in competition only with sickness and encourage support for any and all public health and WASH - water, sanitation, and health - campaigns and technologies.