Drinkable water from air

Often billboards do no more than clog up the sky with uninspiring advertising. But in Lima, in the midst of the Peruvian desert, one has been made that does nothing less than create drinking water from thin air. There’s a dire lack of clean water in the region and rarely any rainfall. Atmospheric humidity, however, is at 98 per cent. 

The local University of Engineering and Technology (UTEC) teamed up with creative agency Mayo Draftfcb to create this brilliant billboard – generators capture the air’s humidity and turn it into 100 litres of clean drinking water every day which is then stored in five easily accessible tanks. At the same time, it also advertises the kind of engineers UTEC want to be recruiting. The installment was made in December 2012 and is approximately 20 meters high (over 65 feet) and located off of the Panamericana Sur highway (at the 89.5 kilometer marker, a high traffic road that leads to the beach. 

The billboard has five water generators that through an electrical system and a reverse osmosis process convert atmospheric moisture, which reaches 98% in the town of Bujama where the ad is installed, into drinking water. Each tank produces on average 20 liters of liquid that are stored into one tank, which can serve 100% purified water. Alejandro Aponte, creative director of the Mayo DraftFCB said: “The billboard has already produced thousands of liters of drinking water monthly, benefiting hundreds of families, neighboring zones and passers-by in the area, turning the campaign into a technology solution with a social impact.”