Liter of Light

Communities in developing countries either lack the infrastructure, or families cannot afford to tap into the grid. Darkness by night is one thing, but darkness by day is another thing that haunts people in the developing world. In the crammed conditions of slums, most homes are windowless, making the interiors dark as night, and erecting obstacles in the way of studying and sanitation.

Liter of Light offers an ingenious solution to the problem of daylight darkness. The project’s innovation lies in the utilization of cheap, durable, and readily available materials to produce high quality lighting; thereby enabling the urban poor to have access to an affordable, environmentally friendly, long-term alternative to electric light for use during the day.

How? Find a disposed plastic bottle, fill it with purified water, add some bleach, and install it on the roof of a house, one half inside, the other exposed to the sun. The bleached water refracts the sunlight lighting up the interior with the whopping equivalent of a 55 watt light bulb. The icing on the cake is that the solar bottle can last up to 5 years. How many of us can say that about our costly and energy consuming electric light bulbs?

The technology was launched as a successful social enterprise in the Philippines in 2011. Remarkably, within a few months, one carpenter, armed with one set of tools, installed 15,000 solar bottle bulbs. The inspirational resourcefulness has taken on a domino effect since one demonstration leads to countless copycats. Altogether, in under a year, over 200,000 bottle bulbs were installed in communities around the world. And the goal of lighting up 1 million homes was reached in early 2015.