81–90 of 99 posts
Great idea. What are the sachets made of though? Lined with plastic and destined to be burned on cooking fires and ditches along with all the other single use, single serving P&G product plastic packaging formats targeted at the developing world I'd wager.
Amdahl’s law, and what not.
This is great, but what happens to the sachets? Are the biodegradable? When I was in India a few years ago I was struck by all the newly introduced non biodegradable packing strewn about EVERYWHERE. The old unfired clay cups used by road-side tea vendors were great, but they were rapidly being replaced by little white plastic cups. Plastic is a scourge on the land and water resources.
This is a product designed for somewhat demanding conditions.
If anything your good argument really asks why a more biodegradable approach is not used in places that could afford it (I don’t mean economically but in “having the affordances for”). Western countries can manage to reliably package and use flour in biodegradable paper packages, why not other products? And the plastic bags that are a scourge upon the landscape not just of India are formthe most part not really needed.
As hinted by the article this is not news. PG has been doing that for almost 2 decades by now.
An the technology is really old school. Flocculant has been used forever to remove fine particles and bleach to disinfect.
I think this gets at the heart of the issue. If stiring in a powder and straining your water to prevent disease and parasites is too complicated to understand or too time consuming to do consistently, imaging how difficult it will be for these people to build water treatment plants and ultimately build an industrialized economy. Which is why they haven't done so while other nations did it without any assistance centuries ago. There simply is no easy solution to poverty in the third world, and obsessing over it will get you nowhere.
Saw this stuff on Mark Robers channel. Pretty amazing stuff. Been thinking of finding some for an emergency kit.
You could also ask your local water provider what their emergency plan is. Some parts of their emergency plan are confidential, but they are required by law to have a plan. The larger operators already have their Risk and Resiliency plans in effect, and smaller operators have a July deadline for their R&R plans. It's been my experience that water operators take a lot of pride in their work and are happy to educate th…
I have both stored fresh water as well as a filter in case of emergency, I'm not counting on my local water authority being able to pump water uphill to where I live for long during a disaster.
How does it work if water has dissolved salts?
It's not going to be much use in distilled water, so it pretty much exclusively works in water with dissolved salts.
I'm not sure which the OP was asking about.
What's the difference between this and water purifiers for camping, such as https://www.potableaqua.com/products/pa-with-pa-drinking-wat...
The flocculant agent in this product binds with the sediment, making it easier to filter out with a simple cotton filter.
What's the difference between this and water purifiers for camping, such as https://www.potableaqua.com/products/pa-with-pa-drinking-wat...
This is 1 cent per liter. Your link is 50 cents per liter.
Admittedly, I don't know how much that ingredient costs in bulk, but I bet if an agency wanted to produce it in bulk for widespread water purification, it'd cost a lot less than 50 cents/L
Great idea. What are the sachets made of though? Lined with plastic and destined to be burned on cooking fires and ditches along with all the other single use, single serving P&G product plastic packaging formats targeted at the developing world I'd wager.
A better question is how much plastic waste is the end user producing, and what percentage of that is the sachet. Amdahl’s law, and what not.
Thanks for educating me about Amdahl's law. Some interesting reading to do around that.