What does one do when clean drinking water is scarce, bottled water is expensive and carbonated drinks are much cheaper?
If you are lucky then you live in the remote jungle village of La Mancalona on the Yucatan peninsula of Mexico which now has a reliable source of purified water and a profitable business in a mere two years.
This has been possible thanks to an MIT-designed solar-powered water purification system. It is a reverse osmosis filtration system that is made up of two photovoltaic solar panels that power a set of pumps. The pumps drive both slightly salty well-water and collected rain water through semi-porous membranes that filter and purify the water.
The system can produce approximately 1,000 litres of clean water for the village’s 450 residents every day, and it has also helped create a profitable business as a spinoff.
La Mancalona village was the first to take the system for a test drive. It was chosen as a test site due to its lack of clean water sources and its ample year-round sunshine. Another asset that made this village the perfect test-site is the fact that its residents are mainly subsistence farmers; these are individuals who are very handy and were quite able to operate the system on their own, and they could easily fix it should something go wrong too. This is important because of the remoteness of the village.
This made it very easy to train the villagers as to how to operate and maintain the technology by themselves; this includes changing out ultraviolet lights and filters, testing the water quality and replacing batteries. Spare parts can be sourced from local suppliers.
Villagers now have access to sufficient drinking water and have turned the system into a business; they sell 20-litre bottles of water to residents for a mere 5 pesos; far cheaper than the 50-peso they previously had to pay from a facility an hour away. This business brings in around 49,000 pesos or $3,600 annually, some of which is kept for maintenance of the system – the rest is ploughed back into the community.
This innovation not only provided the residents with clean drinking water, but also positively affects their health due to the fact that they are no longer drinking so many sugary drinks.
It is hoped that, as the system is adaptable to communities in rural villages as well as crowded cities, it can be rolled out in more water scarce areas around the globe, and because it can be tweaked to suit different sources of water and levels of water quality, it can be used as a nano-filtration, reverse osmosis, or electro dialysis system depending on the area’s needs.
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