PETpla.net Insider 08 / 2014

imprint EDITORIAL PUBLISHER Alexander Büchler, Managing Director HEAD OFFICE heidelberg business media GmbH Häusserstr. 36 69115 Heidelberg, Germany phone: +49 6221-65108-0 fax: +49 6221-65108-28 [email protected] EDITORIAL Heike Fischer Gabriele Kosmehl Michael Maruschke Ruari McCallion Waldemar Schmitke Ilona Trotter Wolfgang von Schroeter Anthony Withers MEDIA CONSULTANTS Martina Hirschmann [email protected] Roland Loch [email protected] phone: +49 6221-65108-0 fax: +49 6221-65108-28 France, Italy, Spain, UK Elisabeth Maria Köpke phone: +49 6201-878925 fax: +49 6201-878926 [email protected] LAYOUT AND PREPRESS Exprim Kommunikationsdesign Matthias Gaumann | www.exprim.de READER SERVICES Till Kretner [email protected] PRINT Chroma Druck & Verlag GmbH Werkstr. 25 67354 Römerberg Germany WWW www.hbmedia.net | w ww.petpla.net PETplanet insider ISSN 1438-9459 is published 10 times a year. This publication is sent to qualified subscribers (1-year subscription 149 EUR, 2-year subscription 289 EUR, Young professionals’ sub- scription 99 EUR. Magazines will be dispatched to you by airmail). Not to be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher. Note: The fact that product names may not be identified as trademarks is not an indication that such names are not registered trademarks. 3 PET planet insider Vol. 15 No. 08/14 www.petpla.net dear readers, Water, water, water... everywhere… ...this element, vital to life, may indeed be everywhere, as the poet sings, but not necessarily in adequate quantities everywhere, and very often not of potable quality. Currently, it is calculated that something like one billion people do not have access to clean drinking water. Hitherto, the most widely used method of purifying water was simply to boil it, thereby killing off all the bacteria, but in many wilderness areas, finding readily combustible material was difficult, not to say impractical. Bottling water in PET, at first sight an expensive solution, may however prove to be the first step in the provision of potable water, and in many of the world’s poorest regions this initiative is being put to the test. How can PET bottles help? A more sophisticated option to kill off harmful bacteria is to subject the water to UV radiation, and this is where the PET bottle comes in. Project Sodis – Solar Water Disinfection – is an ingenious method of subjecting the water to solar radiation by using the PET bottle as the water tank, and the sun as the source of radiation. In 6 hours, 2 litres of water in a PET bottle can be treated. (see page 26) The beauty of this solution lies in the fact that both the sun and PET bottles are plentifully available, making this an effective and cheap way of making water drinkable. The Who (World Health Organisa- tion), Unicef and the Red Cross are therefore recommending the Sodis method as one option for providing potable water in developing coun- tries. As the project was rolled out, follow-up scientific studies were undertaken and these provided evidence of the efficiency of Sodis. Regional awareness campaigns were conducted amongst target popu- lations by means of flyers, brochures and TV advertising. To date, more than 5 million people now have access to pure drinking water thanks to Project Sodis. Encouraging these figures may be, but it should not be forgotten that there are still almost one billion people in the world with- out access to clean drinking water. There is a lot of work still to do. Yours Alexander Büchler