Water that reaches our glasses each day has been around in one form or another since dinosaurs roamed the Earth, hundreds of millions of years ago. The amount of fresh water on the earth has remained fairly constant over this time because the nature could recycle this easily but with the constant pollution in the atmosphere there has been a rapid decrease of this once abundant source.
Wherever they are, people need water to survive. Not only is the human body 60 percent water, the resource is also essential for producing food, clothing, and computers, moving our waste stream, and keeping us and the environment healthy.
We as city dwellers take this Safe water for granted, but did you know that 663 million people - 1 in 10 - lack access to safe water. It’s a grave problem with solution which is either too expensive or practically impossible for most to achieve.
The scarcity of fresh water has reached at an alarming situation; the time is ripe to find a solution for fresh drinkable water for the ever growing world population. The Faircap Project is one such collaborative initiative which aims to create affordable open source 3D printed water filtration device. This device could provide clean, safe, drinkable water at an affordable price.
The project has now unveiled a working prototype, and is calling engineers, designers, microbiologists, or anyone interested in further improving the current device or developing their own variant of the solution.
Faircap Project is led by a social entrepreneur Mr. Mauricio Cordova. It is said that he got the inspiration for such a device during an adventure tour to the Amazon Rainforest. There this Peruvian thinker got amazed to see the extent of damage done to the once flawless water. He said “I realized that no matter where you are in the planet, we all will be suffering from more contamination from human and industrial activities in rivers, lakes and natural water reserves,”
Mr. Cordova, who was well aware of open source and maker’s community as he had worked extensively with them during his stay in Barcelona, decided to use the advantages of this new community to create a device that would provide fresh water to the needy.
Faircap 3D printed water filter prototype has been created with extensive research and testing, the said device is said to be capable to filter particles, chemicals, bacteria and viruses from the dirtiest of water, all while fitting onto a standard sized water bottle. To made the device safe for use, its printed with food-grade, FDA approved PET plastic filament.
Faircap, has also released free STL files so that anyone who has a 3d printer could take part in making the device better. Once water cap is printer it needs things like charcoal from a BBQ, cotton swabs to complete the filter. This filter can fit onto a 5-8 liter water jug.
Faircap inventor and incubator said "Water is the operating system (OS) for life, without clean water we would not be able to survive; clean water technologies should be shared and open sourced, to innovate on design and make them easily accessible for the people who need them most."
To take the project to the masses he has also announced a crowdfunding campaign where you can pre-order the first Faircap filters and help get the first 1,000 units manufactured. The 3D Printable file of the Faircap file is available on instructables.com which also includes the assembly instructions. The approximate cost of making such a filter is around $1 which makes this a perfect solution for developing countries. We have already downloaded the files to make one for ourselves, what about you ?