QUESTION: If I coke bottle can be a secret piggy bank, why can’t it become a purifier?
As far as trashing the earth goes, the rules are pretty straight forward:
1. Buy into planned obsolesence
2. Support cheaply-and-toxically-made things
3. When you’re done, throw that shit in someone else’s backyard!
But where does all the trash go? Into the ocean’s great Pacific garbage patch? A landfill? The streets of Haiti and India? In an ironic attempt to make good use of this garbage, I’ve decided to transform it into treasure. One of my first projects took an ace bandage, bike inner tube, and fishing line to create a simple H20 incubator. This time, I will be looking at more applications for a scenery in which an aid volunteer is in a pinch in the field and needs semi-scientific equipment to complete the job.
Initial idea: Take coke bottles and turn them into water purifiers so that all the poor has clean water. Create a flat screen from 2L PET bottles for an distillation process.
Final state: Distillers actually take out the good water ions for you! Uh oh. Additionally, the through-put isn’t sufficient to provide water for a family in a short period of time. So instead, I’ve looked at low-volume operations such as health testing on the field which requires perfectly pure, distilled water which is the right pH. For example, a shot glass could provide for a couple hundred rehydrations of culture mediums for cholera tests.
What I’ve learned from the prototype:
-Cans will break if you bend them too much
-Plastic is hard to cut straight
-Single material would be ideal
-Many interesting parts discluded
-There is a clumsy interaction between the plastic and aluminum
