Would you drink the condensed breath of your coworkers?

The EcoloBlue 28 Atmospheric Water Generator, which I first saw at Ave Natura, is a marvel of green ingenuity. Using nothing but a tiny current of electricity, it’s an office cooler that fills itself up over time, no water supply required.

That’s because the EcoloBlue fills up by wringing moisture from the surrounding air. The device filters the water, renders it bacteriologically safe (according to the water quality lab reports on EcoloBlue’s website) and gurgles the results into your waiting cup.

So while it’s true that you’d be drinking the expelled moisture of Tom in Accounting’s post-lunch burp, it’s really not so bad. (Depending upon how you feel about Tom.)

Consider:

Water from the EcoloBlue is just like what comes out of your tap, only a lot quicker. It’s nature with a small fire lit under her, hurrying along the natural hydrological cycle.

It’s amazingly cost-effective – no pipes or water deliveries required, and a claim-back rate of around 5 gallons of water for every dollar of electricity spent.

It keeps people away from bottled water – and anything that fights against the growing threat of global water shortages deserves our attention.

It’s upcycling the very air around us – a dazzling technical feat!

The biggest hurdle that EcoloBlue has to clear isn’t a technical issue but a cultural one. It’s how we react to a product that shortens the water-recycling loop so we’re intensely aware that the water in our cup left another human being a very short time ago.

The air expelled from our lungs is at 100% relative humidity (think of how quickly your car windows fog up and run with condensation on a cold day). Sweat evaporates off our skin – where does that go? In this instance, into someone else’s next sip. Condensing our office air into drinking water is a kind of refreshing honesty about the way the world works already. We just may not want it poured down our throats.

Images: Clearly Ambiguous and Amazon

The beautiful people – those fabulously wealthy jet-set elite – have often been accused of acting as if they’re on another planet. That’s nothing new. But here’s an example that defies belief.

In Dubai, it can get very hot. At the height of summer the sea itself warms up to around 37°C / 98 F – so you can be sure that the beach becomes screamingly uncomfortable to walk on. This is bad news for beach-front hoteliers…but let’s not forget that this is ultra-wealthy Dubai, a place where a common response to a problem is to throw money at it until it goes away. Instead of issuing beach shoes along with guidelines about how it’s healthy to limit your tan by keeping out of the midday sun, how about changing the beach?

That’s Versace’s solution to the problem. The strip of beach outside their new Palazzo Versace hotel in Dubai will be refrigerated, via a network of coolant-carrying pipes under the sand and chilled air wafted over it by huge blowers. As Jonathan Leake notes in the Sunday Times, this is the place you’d expect such things to happen: around 60% of Dubai’s enormous power expenditure is on air conditioning.

Further details are emerging of an accompanying 820 square meter refrigerated swimming pool – and plans for another 15 similarly luxurious hotels dotted around the world. Meanwhile, new construction projects shamelessly boast in their brochures of following “environmental best practice” standards. Dubai seems to be setting itself up as the ultimate fantasy destination where normal rules don’t apply – and the rest of the world pays.

Image: novocortex