No, the Life Straw does not purify seawater. On Amazon, you can purchase desalinators for around $250-300 that convert salt water to drinkable water.
Regrettably, Life Straws are incapable of removing salt or harmful chemicals from contaminated water.
ALSO SEE: Does Brita Water Filter Remove Fluoride?
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Can You Drink Salt Water Through A Life Straw?
That depends on your expectations. Yes, if you mean it literally. You can drink seawater from it. It will continue to remove algae, fish feces, microscopic plant matter, and microplastic.
While this method will not remove chemicals, you may drink purified salt water.
If, on the other hand, you’re asking “will it remove the salt and make it safe to consume,” the answer is a resounding NO.
While there are survival tools that enable you to convert salt water to drinkable water, this is not one of them.
There are personal desalination/emergency hydration kits available (HTI’s SeaPack is available on Amazon, for example) that can be used to make sea water drinkable.
You should be able to locate them by conducting a web or Amazon search for ‘personal desalination.’
Additionally, you may wish to consider an emergency solar water still for the purpose of producing purified, desalinated water.
Can a Person Safely Drink Ocean Water with a Life Straw?
No.
A life straw is essentially a tube-mounted Hollow Fibers (UF) filter.
A UF filter typically has a pore size of about 0.1 micometers, making it suitable for filtering all types of bacteria and pathogens. Regrettably, it has no effect on dissolved solids, which are what render sea water unfit for human consumption.
A reverse osmosis membrane would be required for this. Your lungs can generate a maximum of about 1 bar of pressure.
This is approximately 1/4 of the amount required to make it work. Thus, these systems make use of either manual or electrical pumps.
