Alfredo Zolezzi: How Water Purification Technology Is Saving Lives
Channel: MERKEN HUB
Date: 27/11/2016

Alfredo Zolezzi, founder and CIO of the Advanced Innovation Center in Chile, discusses how a plasma water purifying system is saving lives Wired Talks conference 2013.

Alfredo Zolezzi: how a plasma water purifying system is saving lives
Full WIRED 2013 talk

Alfredo Zolezzi briefly seemed to be scolding the room when he lamented the waste of great technology and brilliant minds. Pointing to the 2.5 billion people worldwide with no access to clean water, he asked: what good is innovation if we still have a child dying every 20 seconds from microbes in drinking water?

Plenty, he went on to argue. Zolezzi, an industrial designer from Chile, is a passionate believer in the simple solutions technology can offer the world. As part of the Hack Your Senses session, he presented a tantalisingly simple solution to an apparently insurmountable problem – a small, low-cost, energy-efficient system to remove all viruses and bacteria from unclean water.

His plasma water-purifying system works by compressing contaminated water, then feeding it into a chamber where a quick change in pressure and exposure to an electrical field converts it into plasma, a state similar to gas. In the plasma state, the water is ionised – killing, he said, 100 per cent of the microbes it carried.

“We can purify 35 litres of water in just five minutes – using the same amount of energy that it takes to run a light bulb,” Zolezzi said with a touch of pride. He mounted a renegade unlicensed trial in a Chilean slum, he explained with a mischievous grin, and attracted funding from the Avina Foundation to distribute an open-source version.

“It’s a new business model,” he explained as slides showed how many litres of water it takes to make a typical bottle of beer (300), and a pair of jeans (10,000). “Activate demand where there is no buying power…”

WIRED 2013 is the third annual event to bring the values of WIRED to life. Building on experience from groundbreaking previous events, WIRED 2013 will gather pioneering speakers from around the world, to stimulate debate, spread ideas and to showcase the future.

Source: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/17/alfredo-zolezzi
http://www.avina.net/eng/5101/a-meeting-of-minds-the-people-who-made-wired-2013/#sthash.iMADY70U.dpuf
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