$3 Water Filter gadget for a year without spare parts, electricity or maintenance

With his rimless eyeglasses and natty suit, 35-year-old Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen looks like the kind of CEO who enjoys a fine red. Less likely is the image of him slurping that Bordeaux through a bright blue straw the size of a fat kazoo. But slurp he has, and not just wine: he's also tasted soda, pond water, and water from a lake in Nairobi through the gizmo. "You have to suck pretty hard at first to get it moist, but after that it's easy," he says of the LifeStraw, the portable water filter manufactured by his Danish company.

Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen created this device to help the poor, more than 1 billion people in the world lack access to safe drinking water. And the water they have is seldom filtered which leads to many deaths. About 6,000 people die each day due to waterborne diseases such as cholera, dysentery, typhoid etc., Frandsen wants to cure this problem with his $3 LifeStraw water gadget. He says it is a product that can save many lives and doesn’t require spare parts, electricity or maintenance. He has sold so far 2,000 LifeStraw mostly to aid agencies. But his company, Vestergaard Frandsen S.A. is planning to produce it in bulk. They also produce mosquito nets and plastic sheeting coated with insecticide to fend off malaria.

Frandsen used to be an importer of car parts in Lagos, Nigeria, but after the 1992 coup in Nigeria, he didn’t wan to pursue that business instead wanted to involve in humanitarian efforts.

"I wanted to work with Africa as an adventure, not a humanitarian or philanthropic gesture," he says. "That all came later when we realized the enormous impact we were having."

He progressed from selling waste blanket materials to aid organization to selling LifeStraw. He made traps for tsetse flies made with insecticide laced fabric, expanded the concept to water resistant mosquito nets called PermaNet, plastic sheeting for temporary blankets and temporary shelters called ZeroFly. World Health Organization said the use of PermaNet helped reduce childhood mortality rates by 25 percent in sub-Saharan Africa.

Vestergaard Frandsen S.A. then developed LifeStraw in partnership with Atlanta’s Carter Center, which was working on a filter that blocks guinea worm, a waterborne parasite. The first prototypes were sent to Kashmir after the devastating earthquake in 2005, which killed more than 73,000 people and left more than 3 million homeless. Each of the LifeStraw contains layers of fine mesh filters that block bacteria. The mesh has finer holes; if the size of the bacteria is larger than these holes it will be blocked. Those that pass through these mesh filters encounters iodine beads that kill the remaining bacteria along with the viruses and many parasites. Active carbon neutralizes the taste of iodine and knocks out the remaining parasites.

The LifeStraw currently does not filter out Giardia lamblia, a common parasite (making it a bad choice for U.S. backpackers looking for a way around boiling their camp water), but Vestergaard Frandsen says the company is working on solving that problem. The nine-inch-long straw filters up to 185 gallons of water—about a year's worth of use—after which it needs to be replaced.

Vestergaard Frandsen is also planning to produce a large capacity household water filter based on the above principle. They are also working on an insecticide coated fence to protect crops. Mikkel Frandsen is extremely happy to do this job business and charity with equal zeal. He visited recently to a clinic in Western Kenya a few months ago; he saw thousands of people lined up to get their Vitamin A shot, measles vaccination and mosquito repellent bed nets. He said:

“As a businessman, I can be proud to get a contract for 2 million bed nets and fulfill it on time," he says. "But as a person, I can be proud that over the lifetime of the nets they will prevent the deaths of 400,000 children.

Great job by Mikkel Frandsen, hope he is successful in this venture and help save thousands of lives.