LocoTV Dos
Published on Mar 7, 2013
Finally, a Billboard That Creates Drinkable Water Out of Thin Air
I've
never cared much for billboards. Not in the city, not out of the city —
not anywhere, really. It's like the saying in that old Five Man
Electrical Band song. So when the creative director of an ad agency in
Peru sent me a picture of what he claimed was the first billboard that
produces potable water from air, my initial reaction was: gotta be a
hoax, or at best, a gimmick.
Except it's neither: The billboard
pictured here is real, it's located in Lima, Peru, and it produces
around 100 liters of water a day (about 26 gallons) from nothing more
than humidity, a basic filtration system and a little gravitational
ingenuity.
Let's talk about Lima for a moment, the largest city
in Peru and the fifth largest in all of the Americas, with some 7.6
million people (closer to 9 million when you factor in the surrounding
metro area). Because it sits along the southern Pacific Ocean, the
humidity in the city averages 83% (it's actually closer to 100% in the
mornings). But Lima is also part of what's called a coastal desert: It
lies at the northern edge of the Atacama, the driest desert in the
world, meaning the city sees perhaps half an inch of precipitation
annually (Lima is the second largest desert city in the world after
Cairo). Lima thus depends on drainage from the Andes as well as runoff
from glacier melt — both sources on the decline because of climate
change.
Enter the University of Engineering and Technology of
Peru (UTEC), which was looking for something splashy to kick off its
application period for 2013 enrollment. It turned to ad agency Mayo
DraftFCB, which struck on the idea of a billboard that would convert
Lima's H2O-saturated air into potable water. And then they actually
built one.
It's not entirely self-sufficient, requiring
electricity (it's not clear how much) to power the five devices that
comprise the billboard's inverse osmosis filtration system, each device
responsible for generating up to 20 liters. The water is then
transported through small ducts to a central holding tank at the
billboard's base, where you'll find — what else? — a water faucet.
According to Mayo DraftFCB, the billboard has already produced 9,450
liters of water (about 2,500 gallons) in just three months, which it
says equals the water consumption of "hundreds of families per month."
Just imagine what dozens, hundreds or even thousands of these things,
strategically placed in the city itself or outlying villages, might do.
And imagine what you could accomplish in any number of troubled spots
around the world that need potable water with a solution like this.
MAYO DRAFTFCB / UTEC
Mayo
DraftFCB says it dropped the billboard along the Pan-American Highway
at kilometer marker 89.5 when summer started (in December, mind you —
Lima's south of the equator) and that it's designed to inspire young
Peruvians to study engineering at UTEC while simultaneously illustrating
how advertising can be more than just an eyesore. (Done and done, I'd
say.)
"We wanted future students to see how engineers can also
solve social needs in daily basis kinds of situations," said Alejandro
Aponte, creative director at Mayo DraftFCB.
The city's residents
could certainly use the help. According to a 2011 The Independent piece
ominously titled "The desert city in serious danger of running dry,"
about 1.2 million residents of Lima lack running water entirely,
depending on unregulated private-company water trucks to deliver the
goods — companies that charge up to 30 soles (US $10) per cubic meter of
H2O, or as The Independent notes, 20 times what more well-off residents
pay for their tapwater.
Read more:
http://techland.time.com/2013/03/05/f...
