20 Ways to Save the World
"How to Tackle the Third World's massive travails? One small piece at a time"

Potable Water. Clean drinking water is one of the Third World's scarcest commodities. Half of the world's population is exposed to contaminated water, and, in India alone, as many as 300,000 children die every year from infected drinking water. Ashok Gadgil, a physicist at California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, has helped develop a $500 device that purifies water during ultraviolet light. Made mostly from sheet metal, it channels water past a UV lamp and can disinfect 1 metric ton of water each hour.

This means it costs only 7 cents annually to disinfect a typical villager's daily drinking water. The old-fashioned method of boiling water requires 20,000 times as much energy.

-By Kevin Whitelaw

As printed in U.S. News & World Report, "Special Double Issue", December 30, 1996 / January 6, 1997, p.69

Updated 04-21-99:rac