The ‘Drinkable Book’ contains pull-out pages that are laced with bacteria-killing silver and copper nano particles which can make even the most highly contaminated water sources drinkable.
Designed by Dr Theresa Dankovitch from Carnegie Mellon University in the US, the incredible invention could prove invaluable in providing clean drinking water to third world countries.
Users of the book can take the pages out, fit them in to a special holding device and then simply pour the dirty water through it to produce liquid that’s fit for human consumption.
“One day, while we were filtering lightly contaminated water from an irrigation canal, nearby workers directed us to a ditch next to an elementary school, where raw sewage had been dumped,” said Dr Dankovitch. “We found millions of bacteria; it was a challenging sample.”
“But even with highly contaminated water sources like that one, we can achieve 99.9% purity with our nanoparticle paper, bringing bacteria levels comparable to those of US drinking water.”
Each page of the book can clean 26 gallons of water and a whole book can last four years.
Dr Dankovitch is now working on using the same technology to build commercial water filters.
