• Question: Can you get water from a blackberry? If so how? Thanks Anna :)

    Asked by annabanana123 to Duncan, Grant, Julie, Nik, Rachel on 9 Mar 2013.
    • Photo: Grant Campbell

      Grant Campbell answered on 9 Mar 2013:

      @Anna – Using your Blackberry, go to TescoDirect and order a bottle of water!

      More seriously, you would need to squish it, then evaporate the water, collect the vapour and condense it. This would be an expensive way of getting pure water – there are much cheaper sources – and evaporating water takes an enormous amount of energy. (This is why your washing machine has a spin cycle, to squeeze out as much water as possible so that there is not so much left to evaporate.) BUT – if you were a blackberry processor, producing dried blackberries or blackberry paste or puree, you would need to evaporate the water. In the past when energy and water were both plentiful and cheap, you’d just apply heat and let the water escape. But in the future, when energy and water will both be more scarce and more expensive, you will be much more likely to collect and recycle the water. So yes you can get water from a blackberry, and in the future, doing so will be much more important than it is now.

      Thanks for an interesting question – it got me thinking!

    • Photo: Duncan Gaskin

      Duncan Gaskin answered on 10 Mar 2013:

      If you squeeze blackberries the juice is made up of water with a load of other things in it. As Grant says you could try and use evaporation and condensation to recover the water (this is a process called distillation).

      Or you could use a special plastic that has very very small holes in it that will only let water through and nothing else. You then try and push the juice through this and only the water comes out. This is called reverse osmosis and is used to produce fresh water from sea water in some places.

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