Turn sea-water into drinking water – just add sunshine

Today sees the launch of a campaign to bring an end to the world water crisis by providing sustainable, pure drinking water to up to a billion people without a clean water source. Desolenator, an award-winning British-based company, has developed a product that uses just the power of the sun to turn sea-water into drinking water.

Already making waves in the clean-tech sector, Desolenator recently took second place at the recent Climate-KIC’s CleanLaunchpad awards in Valencia, winning them a grant towards development and a place on the Climate-KIC Accelerator programme, the first real-life business school specifically for clean-tech entrepreneurs, run by Imperial College.

Desolenator’s product uses a patented technology to transform salt water and other dirty waters, from inland sources, into pure distilled water. Capable of producing up to 15 litres a day, the product requires no power supply, other than the sun, and has no moving parts or filters, making it incredibly easy to maintain. The unit uses no consumables and a one-off payment will provide water for households for up to 20 years, providing a vital source of water independence to those who need it most.

But the product isn’t ready quite yet. Whilst the team have assembled a fully working prototype, Desolenator needs help to take it from prototype to production. Today sees the launch of an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign that calls upon socially-minded citizens and businesses to take a step towards addressing the global water challenge and support the development of Desolenator to help bring about this enormous change.

William Janssen, CEO, explains: “Climate change and population growth are setting the stage for a global water crisis. A massive 97% of the world’s water is salt water and our plan to tap into this valuable and available resource to disrupt the global water crisis in an unprecedented way. The process is called desalination and today whilst 0.7% of the world’s water comes from desalination, existing technology is expensive, inefficient and disproportionally drains 0.5% of the world’s global energy supply.

“Desolenator is different from existing desalination and home water technologies – it harnesses solar power in an elegant new way, maximising the amount of solar radiation that hits the technologies surface area through a combination of thermal, electrical and heat exchange, creating pure clean drinking water through the power of the sun.”

Getting involved in the Desolenator movement is easy. Incentives start at just $10 raising to bigger rewards for people who can afford to spend more, or for corporates who want to put their weight behind the campaign.

Andrew Burford, Entrepreneurship Lead, Climate-KIC UK, who recently awarded Desolenator a place on its accelerator programme commented: “What really sparked the interest of the judges is the massive impact it can make to humanity and the fact that this can be rolled out at real scale. We saw this as a major humanitarian product but also a product that has a real commercial potential.”

Michael Norton, an Honorary Director and a Trustee of CIVA said: “I love Desolenator because it takes the simple source of energy, the sun and a simple mechanism, which is solar and turns water into clean water. So anyone living by the seaside can use it, and anyone living anywhere near dirty water can use it.

He continued: “So the challenge is to create a business model for delivery, a mechanism through which people will feel that they want to use it, and whether that’s through micro-credit or payment to find a way of getting it to them. And if it can do all of that you’ve got something that can be world-changing.”

About Desolenator

Desolenator was founded in 2012 when William Janssen came up with a new idea for utilising the full potential of solar energy to turn sea-water into drinking water in water-stressed areas of the world.
Since 2013 the company has been working with Innovation Experience to make William’s ideas a reality, culminating in the creation of a prototype and a recent award from ClimateKIC, which sees the company become part of Imperial College’s accelerator programme for clean technology companies.
On 1st December Desolenator launches a crowdfunding campaign to take the initiative into production.
Desolenator is a UK venture, with a Dutch CEO and teams in India and Abu Dhabi.

For media enquiries, please contact: desolenator@sutrodigital.com