This is pretty cool. It's a big piece of coal that you can put inside of a bottle of water. The coal filters out the chlorine, and adds other minerals to it in the process. You don't have to stick something on your faucet or have a huge (ugly) pitcher sitting in your fridge.
I suppose some people would find having a huge piece of tubular coal in their water bottle offensive. These people are irrelevant and have gotten off the Awesome Train many stops ago. Choo Choo.
I also like the idea of using coal to make our lives better. I think coal's gotten a bad rep lately (and rightfully so, as when it's burned it causes quite a mess and doesn't help our global situation much). Here's a positive way of using it that utilizes cheap materials to facilitate a necessity of human survival (clean water). Now, the link below is selling this for 60-something dollars. Am I going to buy this for 60 dollars? Fuck no. I'm fine with tap. However, maybe someone could figure out a way of putting a piece of coal into a nalgene-like bottle, producing them en masse, and distributing them in countries and locales that have difficulty purifying water. Small investment, huge impact.
I believe that something of this nature has been suggested and perhaps implemented in a limited capacity (and alternatives to this idea have certainly been proposed) but let's face it, we really need to address a lot of the problems happening domestically and globally in a more aggressive way. I hope the innovation from this novelty will trickle down and help the people who need it. There's a long history of this "novelty to practicality" transition and perhaps this will be yet another example.
