About three years ago, Iheb Triki went on a four-day camping trip in the Tunisian desert. After a six-hour drive through mountains of sand, he and nine friends arrived at their destination with 100 liters of bottled water. Then three things happened: Triki saw the sheer volume of bottles laid out in front of him; he noticed the piles of empty plastic trash left over from previous campers; and the next morning, he spotted tiny droplets of dew on the surface of his tent. So Triki, an engineer by training, had an idea.
For now, three devices have been deployed in Tunisia and Paris, where they’re being tested. But in the three weeks since it started taking pre-orders, the startup has already received more than 100 of them, worth around $700,000, from clients in France, Italy, Mexico, and Uruguay.
The Kumulus team isn’t the only one trying to harness water out of thin air. Since 2014, water technology startup Source, formerly known as Zero Mass Water, has been using similar technology to pull moisture from the air with solar-powered “hydropanels,” though it can only produce three to five liters of clean water per day. Meanwhile, earlier this year, researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed a prototype for a suitcase-size machine that can turn saltwater into potable water. And last year, a team at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology devised a prototype that pulled vapor from the air and condensed it into water clean enough to grow spinach in the Saudi Arabian desert.
A spout on the outside lets people easily access the water. A screen, meanwhile, displays how much water is available inside the machine; it can be linked to an app that lets users monitor things like water quality and when to change the filter. Triki envisions that eventually it will be a highly customizable device with which users can control the kinds of minerals they can add, like magnesium for people running a marathon.
Ben Jannet, whose portfolio skews more architectural than industrial design, drew inspiration from amphoras that were once used by Greeks and Romans to transport anything from wine to olive oil. “When I was a child, people used to put water in clay jars in front of their houses for passersby,” Ben Jannet says. “Its form hasn’t changed for centuries. I tried to modernize [it].”
Now the device sports round shapes and a futuristic white coating reminiscent of Eve’s glossy body in Wall-E. The current version is made of the same composite plastic material used to make yachts, but at 77 pounds, it’s heavier than the team would like. The final version—the one that those 100 preorders will come in when they ship in October—will be made of injection-molded recycled plastic, which is much lighter, and makes sense to use in larger quantities due to its cost.
The team is working on a smaller model that could fit in the trunk of your car. It would produce considerably less water, about 10 liters per day, but next time you go camping in the Sahara—or the Sonoran desert, for that matter—you could leave your plastic bottle behind.