Nonprofit Turns Rainwater Into Drinking Water for Schools

Access to clean water is essential to life. Whether it’s for quenching our bodies from thirst or bathing to feel refreshed, water is crucial. It provides us with our basic needs.

However, for many people obtaining clean drinking water is not a matter of just turning on a faucet. Not only does it sometimes involve a lot of physical work, clean drinking water is also becoming a limited resource in many places in the world. Happily, Gravity Water, a global clean water nonprofit has found an ingenious way to harvest rainwater and turn it into drinking water.

From Nepal to Taiwan
According to Vietnam Insider, rainwater collection technology is one of the oldest technologies. “Rainwater harvesting is not new in Vietnam. It’s one of the world’s oldest technologies. I’ve seen schools using split bamboo stalks to collect water from roofs,” Danny Wright, the founder and CEO of Gravity Water, tells Vietnam Insider.

Despite this, in many places in the world, despite ample amounts of rainwater, access to clean drinking water has been a struggle, Fast Company reports. The life-changing solution to this challenge came to Wright while on a trip to Central America. As he sat in his tent at night, he sketched out a plan for a system that could filter rainwater that is channeled down from a roof using nothing but gravity. 

Now, years later, a more complex version of Wright’s original idea is installed in more than 270 schools from Nepal to Taiwan, giving students access to the world’s most vital resource.

Providing Water and Changing Lives
So how does it work? Gravity Water uses a fairly simple system in which downspouts on the roof of a structure channel rainwater into tanks and then into a “rain box” which connects the tanks to the building’s plumbing system. Along the way, the water gets filtered and made suitable to drink. “We were pretty much building gigantic Brita filters,” Wright told Fast Company.

Some of the more advanced systems now also include sensors that allow the system to run automatically and switch seamlessly between utility water sources and collected rainwater. 

In rural areas, the system’s benefits are obvious. But in urban areas, there are additional hidden benefits of this technology. Because large cities can be filled with pavement and buildings, rainwater cannot drain into the ground, leading to flooding. So not only does Gravity Water’s system help harvest the water, it also essentially gives it a place to go, thus reducing floods. 

As climate change wreaks havoc on the environment, and access to essential resources becomes more limited, it is important to note that simple solutions can be discovered to save humanity. Sometimes the most powerful solutions come from nature itself — such as using Earth’s own gravity.