Access to water in Africa, and in all parts of the world where this emergency exists which causes the death of over 840 people every year who are forced to drink and wash with dirty or contaminated water, could be facilitated thanks to the initiative of an Italian, Mauro Gazzelli, who together with his wife Shairin Sihabdeen founded the startup GratzUp in Switzerland. The startup has developed an advanced, innovative and sustainable technology that will be tested this year for the first time in Rwanda and which will guarantee access to safe water for school pupils and hospital patients, around 1.000 people in all thanks to an agreement with the Rwandan government.
The plant, called G Plant, is completely autonomous and needs neither filters nor chemicals: to sterilize the water, it just needs to use a clean and renewable energy source, solar energy. The initiative was presented in Milan and during 2019 a team of biologists from the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart of Piacenza will monitor the results of the planned pilot test, at the end of which, if successful, the a large-scale installation plan is already ready for the African continent and beyond (Tanzania, Ethiopia, Egypt and Indonesia would be the first countries to benefit). Furthermore, GratzUp technology allows to achieve not only a total sterilization of the water, but also a total sterilization of its containers, the innovative “G Bottle” and “G Tank” – signed by the Italian designer Giulio Iacchetti – and of any object in they content.
“We worked hard – commented the founder of GratzUp Mauro Gazzelli – to pursue what at first it seemed like an unrealistic goal to say the least and thanks to the support of our investors, today we can say that we are very close to our initial goal: to offer a concrete solution that could guarantee simple and immediate access to safe water wherever in the world it was needed”.
“It rarely happens – added the industrial designer Giulio Iacchetti – to design something that could concretely be a survival tool, it is clear that in these cases, joining the project escapes the confines of a normal professional request, to lap the territories of our sense of living and of solidarity towards our fellow human beings”.
