In Mexico City, water supply is an increasingly serious problem. The 8.8 million inhabitants of the capital consume, on average, 360 litres per day, but there are people from at least 13 boroughs that have less than this available to them (less than 50%), so they must be supplied through tanker trucks, which affect their quality of life.

While authorities are looking for solutions to the supply problem, such as bringing water up from rivers of Veracruz, reducing the amount of liquid lost through leakage (up to 40% of the 2.181 litres per second provided by the existing infrastructure) and cleaning up the city’s 48 piped and contaminated rivers, society is doing its part and undertaking actions such as collecting rainwater using a Tlaloque, a device created by Isla Urbana.

Isla Urbana is a social enterprise and civil partnership headed by Enrique Lomnitz, which counts engineers, industrial designers, anthropologists, planners, linguists and plumbers among its number. These entrepreneurs created the Tlaloque, a polyethylene unit measuring 1.5 metres high by 0.4 metres wide, which captures the rain that falls on roofs and sends it to either cisterns or water tanks in the home, separating the dirtier liquid from the cleaner ones.

The collected water can be used in bathrooms, showers, toilets, for watering plants and for all other domestic purposes, except food preparation.

To date, 1,300 families in boroughs such as Tlalpan and Iztapalapa have benefited from this device, which has an estimated price of 6,500 pesos and a useful lifespan of up to 20 years, says the entrepreneur, who the MIT Technology Review named as one of their 35 Innovators under 35 in 2014 for this solution.

Enrique Lomnitz indicates that the benefits of Tlaloque become more evident when it works across entire communities because, when they consume less water during the rainy season, the surrounding areas receive more liquid from the network and reduce the amount extracted from aquifers or the Cutzamala System, which supplies water to Mexico City.

In addition to this domestic usage, Isla Urbana has installed Tlaloque in 12 schools, in high water consumption businesses, such as laundries, in rural indigenous communities and even in one of the hangars at Mexico City International Airport, says the entrepreneur.

The company has received support in the form of grants and also from institutions such as the Tlalpan local authority, the Mexican National Social Development Institute (Indesol), the Mexican Secretariat of Social Development (Sedesol), HSBC and the Iniciativa México, among others.

For more information, visit: http://islaurbana.mx/

Angelica.pineda@eleconomista.mx

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