Young Innovators Design Solutions to Water Scarcity

Around the world, young people are coming up with new technologies that could enable access to safe, clean water for all.

Much of the world lacks access to safe, clean water, and this problem is projected to get worse: by 2030, 50% of the global population will live in water-stressed regions.

Access to safe water, sanitation, and hygiene is essential for the stability, equity and prosperity of societies. It also constitutes a fundamental human right, one embedded in global development agendas, notably the Sustainable Development Goals.

But there are solutions – and some are coming from the young people who are affected by water scarcity themselves. They presented their ideas at this summer’s international conference on Water for Sustainable Development in Dushanbe, Tajikistan.

Cycleau: Turning greywater into drinking water
Worldwide, hundreds of millions of urban residents are facing the impacts of water scarcity and contamination. This figure that is expected to reach more than 2.3 billion by 2050. 

At the same time, 80 per cent of the pollution in ocean ecosystems around the world come from sewage and wastewater. Untreated sewage from local municipalities is the biggest culprit, particularly in high-income countries.  Different bacteria that can be found in this untreated wastewater accelerates the formation of “dead zones” in oceans around the world and harms our health.

Cycleau combats these problems by turning greywater into drinking water.  As a compact water treatment system, this new innovation can be retrofitted under sinks, showers, and laundry units. It works by processes greywater using four stages of filtration, disinfection, and heat recovery to treat over 200 contaminants. Cycleau can be deployed for many contexts, from urban housing projects to off-grid encampments, and can capture up to 80 per cent of greywater for potable water reuse.

“My work on Cycleau has shown how I was able to transform my personal experience facing water scarcity and contamination into developing an alternative solution for water treatment that breaks regulatory and cultural norms regarding water reuse,” said Noemi Florea, founder and CEO of LÆRO Design Studio.  “I’ve personally witnessed the impacts of divestment on water quality in low-income urban areas, and Cycleau developed out of my vision to build an accessible, grassroots-level water treatment alternative. Cycleau was designed to offer a middle-ground solution between emergency relief and long-term infrastructural development, a nexus often neglected by most commercial and public ventures.”

Cycleau was designed to offer a middle-ground solution between emergency relief and long-term infrastructural development, a nexus often neglected by most commercial and public ventures.

Noemi Florea, founder and CEO of LÆRO Design Studio

When installed in buildings, Cycleau can reduce a building’s water footprint by up to 80 per cent, while reducing the energy footprint of water utilities by 40 per cent.

“We’ve gotten requests to pilot our system in a variety of settings including RVs/camper vans, hydroponics containers, and disaster relief operations,” said Noemi. “I now envision Cycleau inspiring a new paradigm of water resource management that creates clean water access through reuse strategies.”

(Photos: Cycleau)

HurRain: Collecting water from arid skies
Finding solutions to the large impacts of water scarcity and discovering new ways of purifying water sources are is a big priority in Central Asia.  HurRain, a new innovation, looked at creatures of the desert to see how they effectively collect and use limited water sources. In particular, the team was inspired by the micro-nano structures on the surface of desert beetles and cacti.

From this came technology which can efficiently harvest pure, high-quality drinking water from the air, even under low-humidity conditions. For five years, the team worked this project’s research and development at Tsinghua University, where the team developed an adsorbent functional nanocomposite material that can rapidly and continuously absorb moisture at very low humidity. The team has already spoken to some people who say they could benefit from the technology.

“We have visited many water-scarce areas in China. In some mountainous areas of Yunnan, there are villages where people only have access to water during the rainy season,” said Tina Tan, marketing director of HurRain NanoTech who runs planning and development of product innovations.

“They collect rainwater in their cellars and live on this water for the remaining six months. Once the water reserves are exhausted, they have to go a dozen kilometers away to fetch water from mountain springs.

With our atmospheric water generation technology and equipment, we bring hope to the local people. The local government, seeing our empirical evidence, has also begun to pay attention to this project and plan budgets to invest in water management.

Tina Tan, marketing director of HurRain NanoTech