This is great, but what happens to the sachets? Are the biodegradable? When I was in India a few years ago I was struck by all the newly introduced non biodegradable packing strewn about EVERYWHERE. The old unfired clay cups used by road-side tea vendors were great, but they were rapidly being replaced by little white plastic cups. Plastic is a scourge on the land and water resources.
This is amazing. As someone who has lived in conditions where safe water isn't freely available, this costing 3.5 cents and being manufactured in an emerging market is life changing.
3.5 cents per sachet seems very expensive in bulk. A sachet probably only contains a gram or so, meaning these ingredients are being sold at $35/kilo.<p>$3/kilo sounds far more reasonable, and it should be sold in 1kg containers and users instructed to use a teaspoon per large bucket.
I worked as an extraction metallurgist in semi desert mines and we used an aluminium based flocculant (alum) to clarify water in dams with rotating stirrers.
Quite an old concept and not expensive.
Great idea. What are the sachets made of though? Lined with plastic and destined to be burned on cooking fires and ditches along with all the other single use, single serving P&G product plastic packaging formats targeted at the developing world I'd wager.
What's the difference between this and water purifiers for camping, such as <a href="https://www.potableaqua.com/products/pa-with-pa-drinking-water-germicidal-tablets/" rel="nofollow">https://www.potableaqua.com/products/pa-with-pa-drinking-wat...</a>
-Multiple steps are necessary—requires training or demonstration
-Requires a lot of equipment (2 buckets, cloth, and a stirrer)<p>I think this gets at the heart of the issue. If stiring in a powder and straining your water to prevent disease and parasites is too complicated to understand or too time consuming to do consistently, imaging how difficult it will be for these people to build water treatment plants and ultimately build an industrialized economy. Which is why they haven't done so while other nations did it without any assistance centuries ago. There simply is no easy solution to poverty in the third world, and obsessing over it will get you nowhere.