In an age when 663 million people globally live without access to clean water, and one person dies from a waterborne illness every minute or two, it’s no wonder that H2O has been dubbed "the new oil."
Cody Friesen, the founder and CEO of Zero Mass Water, is on a mission to even the playing field and bring fresh water to the masses using solar panels that extract drinking water from thin air.
"You take a breath of air and you own the air you breathe, and yet water has its own supply chain," he says of the inherent injustice of a politicized water system.
While this may sound too good to be true, Friesen describes the solar panel technology he’s using to make it happen in saying to think about it like a sugar jar.
"If you leave the lid off of it, that sugar starts to get clumpy after a while because it’s absorbing water from the atmosphere," he explains, the reason being that sugar is what’s known as a hygroscopic material (one that readily absorbs water vapor from the air).
We use sunlight to drive a process that takes water back out of the materials."
From there, the water—up to 10 liters (2.6 gallons) of it a day—is put through a mineralized filter and diverted straight to the kitchen tap, effectively bypassing your community’s system and creating what Friesen refers to as water independence.
The self-proclaimed science nerd with a Ph.D. from MIT was inspired to chase such independence after realizing that the water access problem can be solved using the right technology.
From there, he pooled scientists, engineers, and business developers to launch the first panel, called Source, in 2015.
Now, you can find a Source in eight countries, from poor, underserved regions like Guayaquil, Ecuador, where water cost more than half a family’s income, to highly polluted areas like Mexico City and Jakarta.