Changing the world, one sip at a time

Global - A portable, personal, water-purification tool from Switzerland, called LifeStrawR, has won the fifth Saatchi & Saatchi Award for World Changing Ideas, and picked up the US$100,000 (S$141,110) prize.

The prize consists of US$50,000 (S$70,555) cash and the equivalent of US$50,000 in Saatchi & Saatchi marketing consultancy.

About half of the world's poor suffer from waterborne diseases and LifeStrawR's ability to provide safe drinking water for those individuals was deemed to have the potential to change the world.

It is a 10 inch long portable device and contains specially developed halogen-based resin that kills 99.9999% of bacteria and 98.7% of viruses that can cause deadly diseases. One LifeStrawR lasts for about a year.

"The winner of the Award is an absolutely outstanding idea. The promise of LifeStrawR to bring safe drinking water, for the first time, to more than one billion people on earth is genuinely world changing," Bob Isherwood, Saatchi & Saatchi's Worldwide CD, said.

Vestergaard Frandsen, the inventor of LifeStrawR, said the win would help drive awareness and distribution of LifeStrawR to the poorest areas in the world.