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Sunday, 2 March 2008 | Levent OZLER
Lifestraw Wins World Changing Ideas Award
LifeStraw, a revolutionary, personal water-purification tool, for use in the developing world, has won the fifth Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas.
The global Award is made biennially by Saatchi & Saatchi, who established the Award to recognise, celebrate and promote ideas that have the potential to change the world. The US $100,000 prize consists of US$50,000 cash and the equivalent of US$50,000 in Saatchi & Saatchi marketing consultancy.
About half of the world's poor suffer from waterborne diseases. Every day, 6,000 people, mostly children, die from drinking dirty water. In addition, the long journey often required to get clean water, robs millions of young women and girls of their dignity, energy and time.
LifeStraw is a mobile, personal, water-purification tool that turns even the dirtiest water into safe drinking water. It contains a specially developed halogen-based resin that kills 99.9999% of bacteria and 98.7% of viruses that can cause deadly diseases. One LifeStraw lasts for about a year.
LifeStraw is highly portable, just 25 cm, (less than 10 inches) long - reducing the need to travel long distances to central water wells. It requires no power or spare parts and can filter up to 700 litres of water - around one year's supply.
For the more than one billion people who lack access to safe drinking water, LifeStraw could mean the difference between life and death. It has a particular importance for women, children and people with compromised immune systems, who are especially susceptible to waterborne diseases.
Vestergaard Frandsen, the inventor of LifeStraw, commented, "We are absolutely delighted to win this important Award, which will help drive awareness and distribution of LifeStraw to the poorest areas in the world."
Bob Isherwood, Saatchi & Saatchi's Worldwide Creative Director and the convenor of the Award said, "The ten finalists were diverse, extraordinary, and inspiring. The winner of the Award is an absolutely outstanding idea. The promise of LifeStraw to bring safe drinking water, for the first time, to more than one billion people on earth is genuinely world changing."
The high-profile panel of judges included Edward de Bono, Peter Gabriel, HRH Prince Hassan, Malcolm McLaren, Carolyn Porco and Philippe Starck.
They were briefed by Isherwood to choose the idea they believed had the potential to provide the greatest benefit to the greatest number of people or to a group of people with a particular need.
Judge Peter Gabriel, commented, "LifeStraw is a wonderful, simple and elegant solution to a problem that kills millions of people, especially kids, every year. I hope it gets out into the world in huge numbers very fast".
At the same ceremony, Edward de Bono presented his Medal for Thinking to innovator Professor Brian Derby, for his radical Printing Skin and Bones concept, saying that he selected this finalist, "Both for the originality of the idea and the practical application."
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