Drinking water to be derived from waves… and faeces

Even from a distance of six billion kilometres, Earth high levels of water are made evident by the planet’s deep-blue colour. In such remote images, taken by the Voyager probe on its way out of the Solar System, Earth still renders as a blue dot. No less than 71% of our planet is covered in water. If it were all bottled, it would fill 2670 billion billion half-litre bottles. But we couldn’t drink much of it. Ninety-seven per cent of the world’s water is bound in salty oceans.

Still, ocean water has become a vital source of drinking water in many places in the world, where desalination plants are used to convert salt water into drinking water. In the future, desalination could prove to be an important part of the solution to the general pressure on