The Cure For Living in Darkness: Let There Be Light!

It is sometimes too easy to feel that all the news is bad news and that our path to a greener more sustainable future is unbelievably convoluted and too filled with obstacles to properly progress.

And then you hit a story like this one: a simple answer to a complicated question, one that has deeper meaning than that easy solution would imply.

In San Pedro, a small town near Manilla in the Phillippines, the residents struggle with poverty and all that goes with it. Because the homes they’ve been able to build lack proper windows, they also struggle against darkness, even during the day. Adapting an MIT development, the Isang Litrong Liwanag (which means liter of light) Project helps residents create bright indoor light out of easily accessible products. Here’s an incredibly lucid explanation from FM World:

They are made from an ordinary plastic bottle, filled with water and a capful or two of bleach.

A malleable metal sheet, about a foot square, has a whole cut in the centre where the plastic water bottle is tightly fitted. A little grouting goes around the contact area of the bottle and sheeting to keep out rain.

The unit is then inserted into a hole cut into the metal roofs of the breeze-block houses and the metal sheet is moulded to the roof shape for a good fit, aided by a little more grouting.

The bottle hangs about two-thirds into the room below. Sunlight filters through the externally exposed part of the bottle and is diffused through the water, making for a bright light in the room.

According to the Isang Litrong Liwanag website, as of 2009, “3 million households still remain powerless outside Metro Manila. And even in the metro, families still continue to live in darkness,” so this deceptively simple initiative is having an incredible impact on the quality of life for an increasing number of people. From the website:

Isang Litrong Liwanag, is a sustainable lighting project which aims to bring the eco-friendly solar bottle bulb to low-income communities nationwide. Designed and developed by students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The Solar Bottle Bulb is a device based on the principles of Appropriate Technologies – a concept that provides simple and easily replicable technologies that address basic needs in developing communities.

The video embedded below shows this simple but powerful technology in action. It’s difficult not to be moved when you think about the difference this will make in people’s lives. It also gets me thinking, as these things sometimes do, about the simple answers we can find in our own lives to make things better and about how we tend to complicate things for ourselves: making things hard when -- sometimes -- they can be easy.

For me it’s also about moving forward in a conscious way: watching where we place our feet and thinking about how we can live more lightly on the land and with the people we love.

In any case, it’s all good news, and I’m always in favor of that!

If you’re looking for more information on Isang Litrong Liwanag, it’s here.