Just outside Lima, Peru, a billboard provides drinking water to whomever needs it – mainly, its neighbours.
The panel produces clean water from the humidity in the air, through filters.
Researchers at the University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) in Lima and advertising agency Mayo Peru DraftFCB joined forces to launch it.
So far it’s made more than 9,000 liters of water – or about 96 liters a day. And it goes into a storage vat that has a tap at street level – so anyone can go up to it and get some water. And they need it—because, even though it’s very humid there (up to 98% humidity in the mornings! ow!), it hardly rains at all! Check this out:
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.
Crazy! Let’shope they get a lot more of those billboards!
• Here’s a heck of a related UJBR book you might like to take to the bath some day…