There have been many fine types of drink invented over the years; wine, beer, champagne, fizzy stuff that rots your teeth. None of them involved human sweat as a principal ingredient. Not until now, that is.
If you were going to design a machine to process drops of sweat into something drinkable then you would call is something like The Sweat Machine, wouldn’t you? Hey, that’s exactly what Andreas Hammar did. The Swedish inventor and all round wacky dude came up with a machine which uses membrane distillation to turn a piece of soggy, sweaty clothing into a glass of refreshing water. He pointed out that they use something similar in the International Space Station to distil urine but that making sweat tastier is easier.
Cleaner Than Tap Water
The first step is to spin the clothing round in the way a washing machine would. This gets all of those lovely fluids out of it. The perspiration is then heated and distilled through a recently invented type of membrane similar to Gore-tex.
Hammar say that the water which his machine produces is cleaner than the stuff you get from the tap. To make his point he handed out more than a thousand cups of heated and distilled sweat in Gothenburg recently.
There is a noble side to the Sweat Machine. It could provide some much-needed water for the millions of children all over the world who don’t have access to suitable drinking water. In fact, the device was built with the backing of UNICEF to bring home the fact that clean water is such a scarce commodity for so many families.
