Coca Cola is the David that the Slingshot Needs.

"The Slingshot is the little tool that David needs to defeat Goliath"—Dean Kamen.

(3BL Media/Just Means)- Inventor Dean Kamen, best known for the Segway, is referring to the global water crisis and the world's fight for clean water. Contaminated water kills two million people each year, most of them children under the age of five.  However, it wasn't the war for clean drinking water that inspired Kamen to create the Slingshot. He simply realized how easy it was. Through his invention of a home dialysis kit, he found that the same device could purify anything. Just like sunlight, the Slingshot purifies liquids through distillation, making it as pure as rainwater. It is designed to distill all types of contaminated water, including the ability to desalinate salt water. It has the capacity to purify 800 liters of water a day, using less energy in a day than it takes to blow dry your hair in ten minutes. And if this wasn't world-changing enough, the Slingshot can be powered by solar, methane and other renewable energy sources. The device has been around since 2008 and it's making the headlines again this week because the world's leading soda producer has picked it up.

"We are excited that we have the attention of a company who has the kind of scale and scope as Coca- Cola. With our technology and their scope, I believe this little machine will have an enormous impact on global health," said Inventor Dean Kamen.

Coca-Cola's big, hairy and audacious goal is to bring 100 million liters of clean, safe drinking water to 45,000 people across 20 countries by 2015.  This goal is tied to their even bigger goal of providing as much water as they use, "safely returning to communities and nature an amount of water equal to what they use in their finished beverages and their production." The Slingshot fits perfectly into achieving these goals, particularly in regions like Kazakhstan and Romania where water infrastructure and governance are lacking. It will also be part of larger hubs called EKOCENTERS. Coca-Cola and its partners are installing a couple of thousand of these sites, each EKOCENTER offering a contextualized variety of safe drinking water, sustainable energy, wireless communications, refrigerated vaccination storage, health education options and other functionality to jump-start entrepreneurship opportunities and community development.Kamen is convinced that the Slingshot has the capacity to create enough clean drinking water that50% of the world's hospital beds would be emptied.

Coca Cola might just be the mighty David that the Slingshot needs.

Sources: Marketwatch, Coca-Cola, Focus Forward Films.