Aisa Mijeno, a young Filipino engineer and environmental advocate, has conceptualized a product that is not only environmentally friendly, but will provide basic lighting to the less-privileged: a lamp that runs on salt water!
Many of us take our everyday luxuries for granted. Things like indoor plumbing and electricity are comforts that a good portion of the world’s population has to do without, due to limited resources and fuel prices that are gradually increasing. After spending some time with the Butbut tribe in the Philippines’ Kalinga Province and seeing how they had nothing but kerosene lanterns and moonlight to rely on once the sun went down, Mijeno came up with the concept of a lamp powered by saltwater, a resource that is quite abundant on our planet.
Mijeno, also a faculty member of Engineering at De La Salle University-Lipa, co-founded the company Sustainable Alternative Lighting (SALT), and presented the innovative saltwater-powered lamp at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Summit on November 18. The SALT lamp can run for up to eight hours to produce light or even electricity for cell phone charging.
Even U.S. president Barack Obama praised Mijeno’s enterprise, which is recognition well deserved. Her invention can make a modern convenience like lighting more readily available to people who otherwise wouldn’t have access to it, and the clean technology it uses can also be expanded on to create more environmentally friendly amenities. We hope the SALT lamps will really take off!
Source, top image: Coconuts Manila
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