Water: A Vision for the Future

Yesterday, Dean Kamen, prolific inventor and founder of DEKA Research and Development, spoke at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars about his company's new water filtration system. Mr. Kamen is perhaps most famous for inventing the Segway, but he has in fact made an entire career of inventing equipment to help the infirm and disabled.  (For an overview of Kamen's previous inventions, check out his first interview with Stephen Colbert). Kamen's idea for a water purification system began with his work on the portable dialysis machine.  Peritoneal dialysis requires incredibly pure water so that it can be injected into the body. Kamen realized the same technology used in a dialysis machine to help patients with renal failure could be used to purify water for the 1 billion people around the globe without access to safe drinking water.

While the idea seems fairly straightforward, such a technology faces several challenges. The first is that not all dirty water is dirty in the same way. Some water is polluted with arsenic, some water is too saline, some water is just too full of debris. The challenge to Kamen was to develop a single machine that could remove all these various impurities but was still affordable. The second challenge was in powering the machine. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the areas of the world without clean water are also those with little or no access to electricity. Kamen showed a satellite image of the world at night saying that those areas of the globe in the literal dark are also those in the metaphorical one. This is especially true in the case of water. So, additionally, Kamen needed to develop a generator that could power the water purification system, and in turn the water purification system itself needed to be fairly energy efficient. Kamen’s company eventually developed a generator that could run on manure, an innovation that had an added public health benefit of removing a major waterway pollutant. For a demonstration of how the machine works, again check out the Colbert Report.

Ostensibly, the science works very well.  However, Kamen emphatically states that the science is not the problem but rather that the policy is the stumbling block to implementation. When he presented his idea to the World Bank, the resident water experts were nonplussed. Compared to other technologies – reverse osmosis, chlorine pills – Kamen’s invention was much more expensive per liter of water produced. But, as Kamen pointed out, while these technologies may be cheaper, they haven’t successfully eradicated the problem. Furthermore, if you look over the long-term, Kamen’s technology is most likely the most cost effective option. It requires electricity, yes, but it does not require the continued importation of water treatment chemicals (that may have to travel great distances) and the construction of a large, centralized water utility like the ones in the West. In Kamen’s words, “a 21st century problem needs a 21st century solution,” meaning that we need to employ what we in the West normally see as personal use technologies for public use in the developing world. In poor countries, people often live far apart, and as such it makes little sense to build a water utility modeled after one in the West that would supply a dense metropolis. A point of use system, like Kamen’s, while limited in scale would be the quickest to implement and has the potential to be very successful, if we are only willing to let the developing world chart its own path. Cell phone technology is helping the developing world catch up to the developed one and the former has never had to put up a landline.  Why can’t the same be true with water?