Its products are in use in refugee camps and disaster areas all over the third world: PermaNet, a mosquito net impregnated with insecticide; ZeroFly, a tent tarp that kills flies; and the LifeStraw, a filter worn around the neck that makes filthy water safe to drink.
The NYT article doesn't do justice to how cool the life straw really is. The military had a version of this for a long time, but this company redesigned the life straw to use much less expensive materials.
ReplyDeleteI had never even heard of the life straw before I read this article. Have you seen one, used one?
ReplyDeletethere was an article about it in popular science a few years ago.
ReplyDeleteBasically it's a light-weight ceramic filter built into a straw. It's similar to the filters you see some people have attached to their kitchen sink.
What these guys did that was remarkable was they figured out how to make the technology affordable enough to use in really poor countries.
If you had to you could drink out of the sewer with one of these things and not get sick.