Ever hear of a Play Pump? I haven't seen it mentioned here, nor had I heard of one until last week. If only we could spend more of our time using our brains to come up with ideas like this. Simple, inexpensive, elegant, and yet it could change people's lives.
It is one of those ideas that immediately grabs you. You can tell intuitively that it is right, and if applied in the right situations, can go far to help people, and in a very organic way.
It involves using a readily available, and virtually untapped, energy resource, and putting it to work in the service of society.
More below...
I guess this was shown on PBS Fronline/World show on October 24, but I missed it then. Just heard about it last night, in a brief mention at the end of the show.
Have you ever watched a playground full of children, and remarked that if only you could harness that energy, you would be rich? All that ceaseless running, jumping, climbing?
Maybe now, in a very simple way, someone has.
It is called The Play Pump
The story is set in South Africa.
Trevor Field, a retired advertising executive, had done well in life and wanted to give back to his community. He noticed that in many rural villages around the eastern Cape, the burden of collecting water fell mainly to the women and girls of the household. Each morning, he'd see them set off to the nearest borehole to collect water. They used leaky and often contaminated hand-pumps to collect the water, then they carried it back through the bush in buckets weighing 40 pounds. It was exhausting and time-consuming work.
"The amount of time these women are burning up collecting water, they could be at home looking after their kids, teaching their kids, being loving mothers," Field tells Costello. He knew there had to be a better solution.
Field sought to utilize the previously mentioned unlimited and untapped source of free energy (who said such a thing doesn't exist?)
Field then teamed up with an inventor and came up with the "play pump" -- a children's merry-go-round that pumps clean, safe drinking water from a deep borehole every time the children start to spin. Soup to nuts, the whole operation takes a few hours to install and costs around $7,000. Field's idea proved so inventive, so cost-efficient and so much fun for the kids that World Bank recognized it as one of the best new grassroots ideas.
In true ad-man style, Field's next idea was to use the play pump's water towers as makeshift billboards, selling ad space to help pay for the upkeep. He reserves a spot for the national loveLife campaign, which helps educate children about HIV and AIDS. "We've got to get the message through to them before they become sexually active," he says. "It seems to be working."
These quotes are taken from the the Frontline/World website . There is also a short video available there, that shows the process of installation of the pumps, and the operation of the system.
In the film, Costello and producer/photographer Cassandra Herrman drive out to a small village where the taps have been dry for a week. There, a crew sets to work installing a play pump near a children's play area, boring 40 meters down until they hit the fresh water table below. As soon as the last colorful piece of the puzzle is in place, dozens of children show up to play -- much to Field's delight -- pumping cool, clean water to the surface as they spin.
One individual in the film said something to the effect that as soon as the first kid shows up at school in the morning, the pump starts running. And with no other resource required than kids having fun. With that kind of freely available energy, the biggest danger might be draining the aquifers too quickly.
Other mentions of the system can be found here and here
For more on sustainable technologies, this site might be useful.
http://www.stepin.org/...