The Sweat Machine Turns Your Sweat Into Clean Drinking Water

Although you may be able to walk to your kitchen sink at any time to get a glass of water, or you can buy it at the corner store, there are still 780 million people in the world who don’t have access to clean drinking water. It’s an ongoing devastating problem, and I’m always happy to write about it to hopefully raise awareness surrounding this issue.

UNICEF, PR agency Deportivo and Gothia Cup, the world’s largest youth soccer tournament, wanted to raise awareness about children not having access to clean drinking water around the world. To do that, they created the world’s first sweat machine, which turns sweat into clean drinking water. It is a thought-provoking idea, and one that will really make you pause for a moment in gratitude for the water we have available. It’s this kind of thing that will make you think twice before wasting even a drop of water.

The way this sweat machine works is simple. You just toss some sweaty shirts (or gym rags or whatever) in one end, the sweat gets extracted from the cloth, and then clean drinking water comes out the other end into a glass. It kind of reminds me of a modified washing machine. When they demonstrated how it works, they had an exercise bike close by so people could really build up a nice amount of sweat. Would you drink water that had just come off someone’s sweaty body? If you were thirsty enough, I’m sure you would. I know I would.

Children can develop a long list of illnesses and diseases when they don’t have access to clean drinking water. In some parts of the world, mothers will walk for 8 hours a day just to get clean water for their children, and even then, it’s not clean according to our first world standards. Clean water should be a right that every person on this planet has, especially children.