“COVID-19 is a once-in-a-century health crisis. But it also gives us a once-in-a-century opportunity to shape the world our children will inherit – the world we want.”
– Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Director-General of the World Health Organization
This is Camp Moria on the island of Lesbos in Greece. Conditions here are said to be among the worst of any refugee camp on earth.
Queuing is an integral part of life for those living in Camp Moria. They must queue for everything from food to personal protective equipment, often for hours at a time. These queues provide the perfect conditions for the spread of coronavirus. However, the refugees have no other choice.
Every day they queue for clean water, which is provided in single-use plastic bottles. The camp lacks a proper system for disposing of the bottles once they have been used. As a result, the piles of plastic waste in a round the camp are growing every day.
In September of 2020, the number of confirmed coronavirus cases in the camp was 246. Cramped living conditions and lack of access to clean water for handwashing have allowed the virus to spread rapidly.
To design an effective solution, it is essential for us to understand the context of our stakeholders. Where are they from? What influences their decisions? What can they do? What can they not do, and why? These are some of the questions that guided our research and inspired our design. They led us to theories and frameworks such as the Capability Approach, Sustainable Development, local and regional norms and regulations, and theories of Design Ethics such as Technological Mediation. Each of these elements made an impression on our final design.
Our solution is a solar powered water desalination and purification device. If regularly filled with unclean sea water and left out in the sun, each device will provide 5 litres of potable water every day. This will shorten queues for water and allow refugees to wash their hands more often, empowering them in their fight against COVID-19.
Our solution is a seawater distillation device, a solar still, that through evaporation, filters seawater with only the power of the sun.
It produces safe drinking water, uses clean and free energy, is easy to use and is 95% biodegradable. On top of that, the solution is cheap and low tech, mass-producible, and optimised for a shipment.
It would reduce the need for queuing drastically, therefore, decreasing the transmission rate of COVID-19. We believe that our solution can solve the drinking-water shortage in Camp Moria.
Camp Moria is situated on the Island of Lesbos in Greece. Luca Fontana, a coordinator for Médecins sans Frontières described it as “the worst refugee camp on earth”. It was designed to accomodate 3,000 refugees, yet in the summer of 2020 it was home to over 13.000. Many NGOs have refused to work within the walls of the camp, in protest of the deplorable conditions. The situation is so dire that children as young as ten years old are attempting suicide.
Every day, refugees queue for hours to receive food and drinking water. Drinking water is provided in plastic bottles, for which there is no proper disposal system. The result of this is piles of plastic waste in and around the camp. The queues also provide ideal conditions for the spread of coronavirus. We want to shorten these queues by providing refugees with free potable water, for which they will not need to wait in lines. By doing so we aim to not only slow the spread of coronavirus but to reduce plastic waste in the camp.
To design an effective solution, it is essential for us to understand the context of our stakeholders. Where are they from? What influences their decisions? What can they do? What can they not do, and why? These are some of the questions that guided our research and inspired our design. They led us to theories and frameworks such as the Capability Approach, Sustainable Development, local and regional norms and regulations, and theories of Design Ethics such as Technological Mediation. Each of these elements made an impression on our final design.
We are a team of enthusiastic first year students following the bachelor Technology, Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Twente. As individuals, we all have different strengths and areas of expertise. The unique combination of our different skill sets makes us versatile as a team and allows us to look at challenges from different perspectives. Together, we have used our competencies as new engineers to create Solar Still.
