One-cup-water-washing machine! You read it right, this washing machine created by the academics at Leeds University uses just one cup of water to wash a load of clothes. The technology used to make this almost-waterless washing machine has been dubbed as Xeros. Apart from a cup of water and detergent, approximately 44lb (20kilos) of chips are added to each load. The water is heated during the washing cycle, which is then absorbed by the plastic chips to effectively remove all the grime from the clothes - the inventors claim that lipstick and coffee stains are also removed very successfully. Though reusable up to 100 times (equivalent to 6 months of washing) the chips should be removed after each wash. If even half the people used such a machine, imagine the billions of litres of water we would end up saving (average UK household uses almost 21 litres of water daily on clothes washing).
So, if you want to have an ecologically friendly alternative to traditional water-based domestic laundering systems, then wait till 2009, for the inventors plan to commercialize their machine, by that time, they will hopefully be done with the prototype stage. The retail cost of the machine is likely to be similar to conventional washing machines.
For one, I would personally like these kind of machines hit the market, just think the amount of water Mumbai will have left to be used for better purposes. A genius idea, but i still see a long way in this machine actually reaching a common man’s home
