We’re Democratizing Drinking Water

I’d like your thoughts on how we ensure that everyone, everywhere owns their drinking water asap

If you’re reading this post, you probably have the ability to walk a few steps to a faucet and, with the flick of your wrist, get clean water. Chances are good that, conscious human though you may be, you have no idea what an incredible privilege this is. And if you do know this privilege, then you- like us- are looking for a solution that protects everyone’s right to water, today.

Guaranteed access to quality drinking water is a fundamental human right. But it is also humanity’s greatest challenge:

● One person dies from waterborne illness every ten seconds

● 40 billion hours a year are spent fetching water, on the African continent alone

● 54,000 Navajo in America have no water

● DAPL

● Flint

And the list goes on. Even in the wealthy parts of the world, almost no one “owns” their water. Like most of us in the US, you probably depend on a municipal water agency or water company for the infrastructure that delivers your water, until it fails. For security and convenience, many of us Americans purchase bottled water with dubious quality and a massive chemical/carbon footprint. Neither of these options are ideal- for us or for the world.

The Vision: Democratizing Water

In 2004, I realized that giving individual people worldwide permanent water ownership, access and security was probably possible, with technology. Later, in my lab at ASU, we set about developing the materials science, fluid dynamics, and thermodynamics it would take. Of course, we failed a lot of times before we succeeded. But ultimately, we found an incredibly efficient way to use solar energy alone to produce clean, great-tasting drinking water from air.

Meet Source

Source uses sunlight and air to produce great-tasting drinking water. No water company, water mains, or other infrastructure required. It’s that simple- if the sun is shining, our Source technology makes drinking water. This sounds like sci-fi, but this technology is here, now.

We created and have since been building our company — Zero Mass Water — to bring Source to the world.

Today, when you think about solar, you probably associate it with renewable electricity. If we do our jobs right with Source, soon you will also associate solar with water abundance for everyone. It is still early on in the business, and we have a lot to do to execute on our vision, ensuring that drinking water is, in fact, democratized — accessible, secure and available to everyone, everywhere. Things are off to a great start. We have already deployed Source on three continents in six countries. And we are using the massive quantities of data streaming in from those arrays of panels to learn fast and evolve the technology, the product, and the team fast, too.

Our recent media coverage has sparked massive in-bound interest in Source. We’ve had calls from individual Americans who want better water quality, or want to break their dependence on their city or water company for water. And we’ve had a stunning outpour of requests from distributors, charities, and NGOs around the globe interested in partnering.

It’s clear at this point that we could simply turn on online sales in the US and build a valuable, sustainable business. But this would leave one critical component out. Our mission is to democratize water for everyone, everywhere. For most people in the world to have access to Source, we’ll have to hit a level of scale where our price point matches their ability.

Maybe. But maybe not. We’ve been challenging ourselves to develop a business model that will allow us to get Source to everyone, everywhere- now, not later. And we think we’re onto something. The concept we’re developing will amplify the number of places and people we can go to now, while accelerating the rate at which we leapfrog old, tired, dysfunctional city, state and corporate water infrastructure.

Next week, I’ll publish another post laying out this model for democratizing water now. We aim to launch it in the next few months, but are seeking your feedback on it before we do. We at Zero Mass Water consider it incredibly important to get the model right, we want you to help us think it through.