NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Monday, January 13, 2014

If you live in Bangladesh, you have a 1 in 5 chance of dying from chronic arsenic poisoning. In a misguided attempt to provide fresh drinking water in the 1970s, aid agencies dug wells across the entire country, accidentally exposing millions of people to dangerously high levels of the poison that happen to occur naturally in local soil. Now a social enterprise called PurifAid hopes to help with a technology inspired by Scotch whisky.

The idea, called a “DRAM,” was originally created by a Scottish researcher who discovered that by mixing a byproduct of the whisky-making process with a secret ingredient, she could clean pollutants from water. The technique is now in use in the U.K. to clean water at industrial facilities.