Puralytic’s SolarBag 3L is a great invention that I stumbled upon while researching another project.  This product, which is basically a thick plastic bag with a filter and nanotechnology coated mesh insert, will get rid of bacteria, viruses, pesticides, herbicides, pharmaceuticals, arsenic, lead, and mercury among other things.  They used a number of organizations to do third party testing and the results are all very positive.  Here’s the report if you’d like to take a look www.puralytics.com/files/solarBagTestReport.pdf.  It’s also very simple.  All you have to do is pour water into the bag through the provided filter (they say this filter is just to keep things like twigs and leaves out) and then leave it in the sun.  It even works on cloudy days.  After you fill it up leave it out for 2-3 hours on a sunny day or 5-6 hours on a cloudy day and the nanotechnology does the rest.  It makes 3 liters per bag and can be re-used 500 times before the insert needs to be replaced making it very efficient and useful in remote places.  Besides purifying the water it’s a great way to transport water between places.

With a tough plastic bag that is hard to tear or puncture, no maintenance, no power needed, and its 500 use life this product seems to have endless possibilities in developing nations.  I’m thinking about the post I did a couple of days ago about Bangladesh and the epidemic of arsenic poisoning and this seems like a perfect solution.  I emailed Puralytic to see how much the SolarBag cost and at $80 US it’s not cheap, but not really expensive either.    Here’s a video from the inventor showing how to use it.

Here’s another video that I thought was funny with some guy drinking his own urine after leaving it in the bag for several hours

I’m going to make this a re-occuring post since there are a bunch of great products out there.  I hope you enjoyed this one.  Please leave a comment and let me know what you thought.