In the United States, we are largely unaware of the fundamental importance of water. Since 1972, when Richard Nixon, reluctantly, signed the Clean Water Act, every American has a legal right to clean, safe drinking water piped right to their homes and businesses. This is quite remarkable. This Act was the loudest declaration of human rights we’ve ever had since 1776 or 1863. In fact, no other country has adopted a mandate as sweeping and enforceable as the Clean Water Act. Our children have no idea how rare it is on Earth that you can go to any random garden hose in the United States and drink the water from it without fear of diarrhea or worse.
Over 4000 people die each and every day from contaminated water, half are those under 5 or over 80. Safe drinking water is mostly available in single-use bottles. The rural poor often pay over 1/3 of their daily income for bottled water, and there are no infrastructure improvements on the horizon to see piped water deliveries.
The H2OpenDoors project surmises that the only logical, practical distribution method for safe drinking water is in sanitized, multi-use family sized bottles.
By providing the technology, supplies and guidance, H2OpenDoors and the local Rotary clubs offer a ten-year collaboration that delivers water directly to the huts and shacks.
In 2023, the H2OpenDoors project will be working with our impact investment team at Global Water First to retrofit past equipment installations with IoT technology, enabling real-time data uploads to a portal for monitoring system health and water flow production. Now that 98% of the planet has use of smartphones and robust cellular networks, mobile pay platforms make water enterprises in villages more and more possible.
A growing number of regions and major cities are suffering from water scarcity. Drilling into the aquifers are no longer the automatic answers for those areas facing encroaching Day Zero dates when the utilities shut off all water flow. These areas must quickly reuse water in a vibrant “toilet-to-tap” approach as has been successful in Singapore. The SunSpring systems are a perfect answer in many applications, as the membrane technology removes all bacteria, cysts and viruses, leaving the source water 99.999% microbiologically pure.
