water – brightbuilding

This concept has been introduced a couple of years ago, the result however is very impressive so I’d like to put it in the ‘spotlight’ again. In 2002 Alfredo Moser in Brazil came up with the idea to use bottles filled with water and bleach as a light source. Nine years later in the Philippines Illac Diaz from the MyShelter Foundation and students from MIT further developed the concept. They made the ´solar bulbs´ available to the public by means of a “local entrepeneur” business model. This approach combined two great initiatives: providing light in dwellings without electricity and creating jobs for locals. Within a year over 200.000 bottle bulbs were installed. The goal of the MyShelter Foundation is to light up 1 million homes by the end of 2015. At the moment the solar bottles are being installed in over 15 countries.

The concept of the solar bottle bulb is fairly simple: a used plastic bottle is filled with a mixture of water and a little chlorine – to keep the water clean and transparent. The bottle is sealed and pushed through a galvanized steel sheet that serves as a metal lock to prevent the bottle from slipping. It is then embedded into a corrugated iron roof. Only a small part of the bottle is left outside while the rest protrudes into the dwelling. The sunlight that enters the inside of the bottle becomes omni-directional through the refractive qualities of the water. The effect: an amount of light equal to that produced by a 40-60 Watt electric light bulb.

More info at: Liter of Light.

Designers of studio Skipping Rocks Lab have created an edible water ‘bottle’ using a technique called spherification. This technique originates from the 1940s and has been reintroduced in 2003 by El Bulli chef Ferran Adria. To create the water bottles or Ooho’s as they have been named, water is frozen and the ice is placed into a solution containing calcium chloride and brown algae. When the ice meets the solution a thin, flexible and edible skin is created. The skin consists of a double membrane, which makes it possible to dispose of the (less hygienic) outer membrane before consuming the Ooho. The inner membrane can be consumed together with the water or be thrown away ‘sustainably’: the membrane is biodegradable. Ooho’s are easy and cheap to create, you can even make them in your own kitchen. To provide the Ooho to as many people as possible the team is planning to make the recipe open source. Next to the environmental impact also the financial impact is promising. Producing an Ooho is cheaper than producing a conventional water bottle: the producers claim that the costs are 2 versus 10 cents. At the moment the team works on improving the user friendliness of the design. If a feature like a lid would be added (it is not yet possible to close an opened Ooho) and Ooho’s could be consumed more efficiently, the days of old fashioned water bottles might be counted. More info and a movie here.

Tag: water

Lighten up: the power of water and bleach

The Ooho: ‘edible’ water