Posted by: AJ Kennedy

Campaign: How can you make drinkable water from the ocean?

Chaitanya Karamchedu, a senior at Jesuit High School Senior in Portland, decided to address the fact that 1 in 8 people don’t have access to clean water by using his high school lab to experiment. ‘Scientists looked at desalination, but it’s all still inaccessible to places and it would cost too much to implement on a large scale.’ He said: ‘The real genesis of the idea was realising that sea water is not fully saturated with salt. It’s not bonding with water molecules, it’s bonding to the salt.’ His teacher, Dr Lara Shamieh, said people have been looking at breaking bonds between salt and the water but Chai came in and thought about it ‘from a completely different angle’. She said: ‘People were concentrated on that 10 percent of water that’s bonded to the salt in the sea and no one looked at the 90 percent that was free. ‘Chai just looked at it and said if 10 percent is bonded and 90 percent is free, then why are we so focused on this 10 percent, let’s ignore it and focus on the 90.’ Source: https://metro.co.uk/2017/02/04/teen-finds-cheap-way-to-turn-salt-water-into-safe-drinking-water-6426659/?ito=cbshare