Drinkable Book’s Pages Eliminate Bacteria in Drinking Water

At first glance, it looks like a normal book with a gray cover. But after one look inside, it is clear the thick orange pages contain something special. The pages of The Drinkable Book, as it’s called, are embedded with silver nanoparticles and could provide enough clean drinking water for one person in a remote area for four years. It was invented by Theresa Dankovich, Ph.D., Carnegie Mellon University, and is able to filter contaminated water to 99.9 percent purity. At the American Chemical Society [1] (ACS) National Meeting and Expo in Boston on Sunday Dankovich reported the results of recent field studies done in Africa and Bangladesh.

Silver nanoparticles eliminate a wide variety of microorganisms, including bacteria and some viruses. Copper nanoparticles, which are less expensive than silver, can also be used, but more is needed to achieve the same amount of purity, so in the end the copper and silver are comparable. Dankovich assured that while some silver and copper will seep from the nanoparticle-coated paper into the water, the amount is minimal and is well below metal limits put in place by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and World Health Organization (WHO).

There are benefits to using paper as a filtration system, including that it’s cheap and lightweight. The main cost comes not from the metals but the paper itself – which is still an inexpensive option.

Each sheet of the book contains what is essentially two square filters, which can filter 100 liters of water each. At an ACS press conference Monday, Dankovich said that field testing showed the book is just as effective as other filtration methods out there. “We’re aiming to have the price of this be less than 10 cents – or a penny if possible.” She said that would make The Drinkable Book an option that can filter 10 times the amount of water at one-tenth the price of current coagulation-based filtration systems.

The book also provides education on water filtration through a couple of written pages of text, both in English and the local language of the people using it.

The system is easy to use.

“People seem to be interested in the fact that it’s a very simple thing,” Dankovich said at the ACS press conference. “It doesn’t involve pump, it’s just pouring into a container.” During her field studies, she said many people were excited to know when this might be available.

Dankovich wants to do a much more in-depth study that involves health monitoring of people in villages using the filtration system and water quality monitoring. She would also like to develop an indicator system that informs people when it is time to change the filter.

The next step is figuring out how to scale up production, and one challenge is getting a paper company on board. “You really need to convince them that it’s worth their time,” Dankovich said. Currently the pages are made by Dankovich and volunteers, who sometimes utilize a church kitchen which has large ovens, for the heating portion of the paper preparation. Dankovich’s nonprofit company pAge Drinking Paper [2], works together with the nonprofit WATERisLIFE to produce the nanoparticle embedded paper.