Graphene Sieve: Effortlessly turn saltwater into drinking water

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Graphene Sieve: Effortlessly turn saltwater into drinking water

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A revolutionary technology to make water desalination sustainably, providing billions of people with safe access to water.

The Problem

Current efforts at converting saltwater into safe drinking water are extremely inefficient and expensive. Lots of effort had been put in to make the process cheaper and more sustainable. This is an urgent problem because the United Nations estimates that by 2025, 14 percent of the world’s population will have to deal with water scarcity. Cheap seawater filtration would provide safe drinking water for millions of people.

The Solution

The University of Manchester has just recently discovered a way to generate oxidized membranes with pore sizes small enough to filter out common salts and pollutants from our drinking water. The pores are smaller than 1 nanometer, large enough to allow water to pore through freely, but small enough to prevent any salts from passing through. This is incredible news! It means that this invention could could turn saltwater into safe drinking water effortlessly; and with that possibility it would open up an limitless supply of water, our oceans, for drinking.