Greentech Lead America: Coca-Cola has further advanced
its commitment to replenish 100 percent of the water used in its beverages and
their production by 2020 and support sustainable communities by signing a
global clean water partnership with DEKA R&D.
The partnership aims to bring DEKA president Dean Kamen’s
“Slingshot” technology to communities where potable water access is limited.
Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) Group and Africare
are supporting the initiative to bring the Slingshot technology to communities
in need in rural parts of Latin America and Africa.
The Slingshot water purification system uses a
vapor compression distillation system that runs on low levels of electricity.
The system boils and evaporates any dirty water and then allows the pure water
to condense and be collected.
One Slingshot unit can purify up to 300,000 liters of
water each year producing 10 gallons of clean water an hour while consuming
less than 1 kilowatt of electricity, which is less than the amount of power
needed to run a standard handheld hair dryer.
The partnership aims to deliver millions of liters of
clean drinking water to schools, health clinics and community centers in rural
regions of countries within Africa and Latin America which have already been
identified as the areas of focus for the Slingshot placements next year.
Coca Cola and DEKA will form additional partnerships and
expand the effort to also install thousands of units to be operated and
maintained annually in communities in India, the Middle East and Asia, in
addition to Africa and Latin America.
When fully scaled, the partnership is expected to add
more than half a billion liters of clean drinking water per year to the global
water supply.
“By partnering with DEKA R&D to bring the Slingshot
technology to water-stressed communities in remote places, we hope to be able
to deliver and maintain a clean water solution for many remote communities,
changing the daily lives of thousands of people,” said Muhtar Kent,
chairman and CEO, The Coca-Cola Company.
DEKA and Coca Cola are actively working to secure
partnerships with leading non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and development
banks to help fund the projects, identify locations and support placement and
on-the-ground support efforts moving forward.
Currently the companies are in talks with Africare, a
leading NGO in Africa, to field test Slingshot units in health clinics in the
Eastern Cape of South Africa in 2013. The units will provide clean drinking
water to the health clinics, which operate an HIV/AIDS intervention program
that Africare is leading with support from The Coca-Cola Foundation.
Recently The Coca-Cola Company announced that its
philanthropic arm The Coca-Cola Foundation has awarded a total of $10.5 million
in grants for 68 community organizations in 41 countries. These grants will
support sustainability efforts on six continents.