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| The sweat machine in action |
(Scroll down for video) Are you in desperate need of some water? Now, you can turn your sweat into delicious drinking water.
A group of Swedes decided to build a machine that takes the sweat from gym clothes and turns it into drinking water.
Stefan Ronge, creative director at Deportivo, an advertising agency that supported the project together with UNICEF, said the idea of the invention was to highlight the shortage of fresh water in some regions of the world.
Countries like Sweden have plenty of fresh water per person and the infrastructure is there to deliver it to the people, but in many parts of Africa and Asia, that is not the case. UNICEF and Deportivo are showing off the machine this week at the Gotha Cup, a youth soccer tournament. Players will receive a cup of water after they turn in their sweaty clothes.
Called “The Sweat Machine”, and built by engineer Andreas Hammar, the high-tech component in the filter was developed at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm.
To remove water from sweat, which is 99 percent water itself, the group put sweaty clothes in a dryer. The dryer then spins and squeezes the sweat out of the clothes. The sweat gets heated, exposed to UV light and pushed through high technology filters in order to remove salts and bacteria. The water then passes through a coffee filter in order to remove fibers. The result: distilled water.
It takes a full load of sweaty shirts to make a pint of water. The group said that 500 people have already tried it out.
Ronge said the idea came from NASA. Long space travel requires recycling everything including urine and sweat.
Leaving aside the ick factor, the water seems to taste good.
"One person, who had a taste, said it was sweet," Ronge said.