State of the Planet

News from the Columbia Climate School

Water Pyramid

A Dutch company has created the Water Pyramid to help create safe, clean drinking water in tropical and developing countries.

While traditional reverse osmosis systems are expensive to build and use a considerable amount of energy, the Water Pyramid uses the sun as its primary energy source and has low operational and maintenance costs.

source: www.aaws.nl
source: www.aaws.nl

The World Bank awarded the company the 2006 Development Marketplace Award for small scale water innovation. The company currently has installations in India and Gambia and is starting construction on an installation in Pomana Island, Indonesia.

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Water purifier
14 years ago

This is very attractive. Drinking water safe and clean is very necessary. Given the water needs in an increasingly polluted and contains many contaminants are carried away by the waste and pollute join the existing clean water.

Very simple way, using only natural energy source can reduce the cost and maintenance.

Thanks for sharing it.

Jennifer
Jennifer
16 years ago

This is a really interesting approach to water purifying that could be valuable to look at in regions where water is available, but not pure enough for consumption. Since a system can only produce a little over a liter a day (as seen on the website), this would be a more individual system. Since hey claim salt water and brackish water could both be used, it would work in many different areas, but there is still the issue that is seen with desalinization with what do we do with the waste product? While this system could help developing countries, there would nee dot be proper education and waste removal mechanisms in place to ensure that the highly concentrated byproduct did not pollute additional areas.