Scientists design plant filtration system that lets you drink your own SHOWER water

Eco-thinkers have come up with an amazing new way to create drinking water - by putting plants in the bottom of a shower.

Designers Jun Yasumoto, Vincent Vandenbrouk, Olivier Pigasse, and Alban Le Henry came up with the concept when looking for new ways to recycle precious H2O.

After you have washed in the special eco-shower the water passes down into a series of physical filters and is treated by plants such as reeds and rushes growing around your feet.

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A new eco-shower concept would recycle water by filtering it using different plants

Yasumoto, 34, said: 'These plants have been proven to be able to remove the chemicals from your shampoo.

'Using a natural filtering principle called phyto-purification, the bathroom becomes a mini-eco-system by recycling and regenerating the wastewater.

''With this project, we tried to combine the pleasure of taking a shower with the satisfaction of recycling water. We wanted the recycling process to actually interact with the use of shower.'

The waste water passes into a chamber below the shower floor where it goes through a maze of filters.

Included in the network is sand, reeds, rushes, a mesh filter, water hyacinths and lemnas, and finally a carbon filter.

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Click enlarge to see how the design works

And the inventors - all graduates from French national design school Ecole Nationale Supirieure de Creation Industrielle - hope that the impact of their concept doesn't just alter the way we bathe.

'We thought that by conceiving this very intricate relation between the recycling of water and the user experience, we could get the users to also re-think the way they use water,' said Yasumoto.

After posting their seven-year-old design on the internet, the eggheads have been inundated with queries about where their shower can be bought.

'No prototype has been made as the project is just a concept for the moment, but it is interesting to see the positive feedback we are getting since we put these images online,' Yasumoto said.

'It has made us think we should keep on developing this idea and start thinking of ways to integrate it and bring it closer to reality.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1208895/Scientists-design-plant-filtration-lets-drink-SHOWER-water.html#ixzz0PK075QP1