The James Dyson Award recently recognized a team of Malaysian designers for their sustainable desalination pod concept called WaterPod. It’s designed to be floated at sea, and therefore accessible to sea nomads.
It works on a self-cleaning solar desalination system that uses a wick structure to absorb seawater from underneath and transport it to the black fabric placed on top of the aluminum plate. As the sunlight passes through the transparent cover, the seawater evaporates from the fabric onto the dome cover.
The desalination pod will function as a cost-effective alternative to existing desalination plants. To tackle plastic pollution at the same time, the proposed full-scale WaterPods themselves would be made of recycled plastic waste collected from the oceans.