Water, Water Everywhere: Does your green hotel have the stomach for THIS water conservation solution?

Leave it to those wacky kids at NASA to come up with an innovative way to deal with a potential water shortage…

According to a recent Associated Press article, NASA engineers have perfected a method for transforming urine, sweat and exhaled moisture into safe and delicious drinking water.

Cheers!

Astronauts aboard the International Space Station were the first to publicly toss back a few shots of the clear liquid, with a video camera as their witness. One astronaut declared, “The taste is great!” before toasting other crew members and their NASA teammates back on Planet Earth, who responded by raising their own cups full of tasty recycled wee.

If you can stop yourself from shuddering and gagging long enough to really think about it, it becomes clear that this is really a big deal for all of us. Imagine if each of us could quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively recycle our own household’s liquid waste – or that of our eco hotel’s guests – and turn it into potable water. Heck, why not?

Because it’s absolutely disgusting, you say?

Listen, the truth is that we already recycle water from our toilets and convert it into drinking water – it just takes a long time to do and the path from toilet to tap is such a convoluted winding road that we lose track of it. This new technology is fast enough to allow six astronauts to make six gallons of drinking water from their urine in just six hours, according to space station lab manager Marybeth Edeen.

The system takes the crew’s combined urine from the toilet and puts it into a tank where the liquid is boiled off. The machine collects the resulting vapor and discards the nasty urine brine. The vapor is combined with water from air condensation and the resulting liquid is filtered repeatedly until it is clean enough to drink.

This technology will have a huge impact on space travel – especially for long term missions such as a manned trip to Mars. And it has great potential here on Earth, too. Edeen pointed out that the same technology was already used to purify water after the Asian tsunami in 2004, and it saved countless lives.

So belly up to the bar, and let’s drink to our good friends at NASA who have developed a water recycling system that will undoubtedly change the world – and possibly, the Universe – for the better!

Have you heard about a new environmentally-friendly technology? Tell us about it by sending a message to info@EcoGreenHotel.com. We may spotlight it on our website, in our newsletter or on this blog!

For more information visit: www.EcoGreenHotel.com