Light up your world within a bottle
By Carmela Mende
The top five economic problems of the Philippines are poverty, corruption, health care, unemployment, and lack of education but there more to that problems here in the Philippines. Under that is the high rates of billing and high costs of goods while the employed Filipino people have a low cost of salary. Budgeting and balancing payments of our daily activities and expenses is really hard to do. What more else to the people who are on the poverty level. Focusing more on the problem in paying bills, the Myshelter foundation comes up to a solution on how to help reduce electricity bills especially for the people who are in most need of low expenses and bills. This foundation does not only focus on the electricity bills of the Filipino citizens but also taking sustainable building solutions to the grassroots level.
The Myshelter foundation had their latest project called the Liter of light or the Isang Litrong Liwanag. It is a plastic bottle filled with only distilled water and bleach. The liquid inside the bottle attaches the light from the sun, capturing and spreads the light to all parts of the room. It is equivalent to a 55 watt light bulb. It consists of a 1.5L bottle filled with purified water and bleach (10 ml). A special adhesive is used to bond and seal the bottle to the roof. Adding the bleach to the water makes sure that the water stays clean and transparent without algae growing inside and turning the water green. A properly installed solar bottle can last up to 5 years before being replaced. The foundation wanted to share thoughts, help the slums light up their dark homes and give eco-friendly bottle light to the communities living without electricity at home and be able to reach each and every home, educate people on how to recycle things and again at the same time help the people on saving electricity costs.
Liter of light teaches us that there are alternative sources of light not only through commercial electricity but through natural resources and teaches us simple basics about electronics without being a technician. These also teaches us not to depend on commercial electricity but to make use of the natural resources that we have. The sun is always around but the commercialized electricity can be absent anytime now. The liter of light without solar bulb is useless during night time since the liter of light can only light up if the sun is around. What is more important is during night time. Therefore, the foundation made up some revisions to the original liter of light. They designed a simple circuit where every night the bulb is triggered to light up. The circuit was made available and easy to understand for everybody. When the sun is not around it automatically turns on and what is more astonishing to this is that it can light up a 15 square meter room by itself and people will be able to read with the help of this liter of light bottle. People from different communities had a great feedbacks about this movement.
The solution was first launched in the Philippines by Illac Diaz under the MyShelter Foundation. As of July 2011, the organization had installed 10,000 bottles in the Philippines and shortly thereafter reached 15,000. On the recent update, the liter of light movement grew to light up 28,000 homes and the lives of 70,000 people in Metro Manila alone. Now Liter of Light is present in India, Indonesia, and even as far away as Switzerland. Additionally a Liter of Light office has been established that conducts volunteer workshops. The liter of light can help a lot of unfortunate people in the country. Not only that, it is a global open source program with the goal to provide an ecologically sustainable and free-of-cost source of interior light to rooms in simple dwellings with a thin roof. In less than a year since beginning, over 200,000 bottle bulbs were installed in communities around the world. The Liter of Light group wants us to spread this movement because their foundation has a goal to light up 1 million homes by the end of 2015.
