Clean water is essential to life. While in many big cities we take for granted that clean water can be accessed easily through the tap, even in the US over 2 million people do not have ready access to clean water. And another estimated 44 million people rely on water systems that have had violations of the Save Drinking Water Act. This problem is even worse in less developed countries. Having cheap, portable methods to disinfect water to make it safe to drink would go a long way to ensuring that people in the US and abroad can have meet their essential water needs safely.

Dr. Ashok Gadgil’s researcher team at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, kick-started by seed funding through United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and later supported by the U.S. Department of Energy and others, took the general idea of using ultraviolet light to disenfect water and realized that current technologies were not easy to build and maintain in the rural communities that lack and need clean water the most. They developed a brand new design that for under $900 and using only 40 Watts (the power consumption of a single light bulb) could disinfect 30 liters of water per minute. Amazingly, this system requires maintenance only twice a year. This incredible advance in the affordability and accessibility has generated huge amounts of interest in commercializing it and bringing it to the world. To date, hundreds of millions of have had their access to clean, safe, drinking water significantly improved, thanks to the inginuity at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs and $10,000 in kick-start funds from USAID.

Fpr these efforts, Ashok Gadgil, one of the scientists at Lawrence Berkeley who led the team developing what is known as “UV Waterworks”, was inducted in 2014 into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.