Los Angeles: It started out modestly enough: David Hertz, having learned that under the right conditions you really can make your own water out of thin air, put a little contraption on the roof of his office and began cranking out free bottles of H2O for anyone who wanted one. Soon he and his wife, Laura Doss-Hertz, were thinking bigger, so much so that this week the couple won the $1.5 million XPrize For Water Abundance.
They prevailed by developing a system that uses shipping containers, wood chips and other detritus to produce as much as 2,000 litres a day at a cost of no more than 2 cents a litre. They settled on creating rainstorms in shipping containers by heating up wood chips to produce the temp and humidity to draw water from the air and the wood itself. If you don’t have wood chips to heat them with, coconut husks, rice, walnut shells, grass clippings or just about any other such waste product will do just fine.
