The earth contains about 326 quintillion gallons of water (1260 quintillion litres) yet only three percent is freshwater. The vast majority of 89 percent is ocean water and not suitable for direct consumption whilst populations in warm and dry climates struggle to access clean drinking water.
The TIME’s Best Inventions of 2020 winning company, Solar Water Solutions, as their name states, has tried to tackle global thirst by designing a solar powered desalination plant which has the ability to turn four to seven thousand litres of ocean water into drinkable water every hour and can be easily installed near coastlines.
The main trick behind this ‘salt water filter’ is called reversed osmosis (RO). Under great pressure, ocean water gets pumped through a nano-scale Thin Film Composite (TFC) membrane which only allows water molecules to pass and leaves impurities such as dissolved solids, chemical residues, bacteria, and viruses behind.
Although this technology has been criticised for visual and noise pollution, emission of materials into the atmosphere and the discharge of highly concentrated salt in a journal dating back in 2007, it has seen serious development and improvements.
However, according to Solar Water Solutions, their TFC membranes are only cleaned with non-chemical acids. Moreover, recent research was published initiating a positive future for TFC membrane recycling.
Even though Solar Water Solutions might need fine tuning and improvements, they have developed an extremely innovative product that has great potential for sustainably making clean drinking water accessible for thousands of people.
