Award-win­ning water fil­ter made from bioplastic

It all star­ted with an ​“oops.” When Mike Del Ponte, founder of Soma, hos­ted a din­ner party, he was unwill­ing to place a cheap plastic water fil­ter on his nicely set table. Instead, he decided to pour the filtered water into a glass wine decanter. But as he poured, the lid of the water pitch­er fell off, caus­ing water to gush all over the kit­chen floor. The idea for Soma was born in this moment: to com­bine a pure, mod­ern design with a sus­tain­able and hol­ist­ic approach. How­ever, the require­ments were not trivi­al. Soma’s design­ers spent a long time search­ing for a suit­able mater­i­al for the fil­ter unit. This mater­i­al needed to be func­tion­al, but also made from renew­able resources and bio­de­grad­able when dis­posed of. Soma finally obtained what they were look­ing for from bioplastics spe­cial­ist FKuR. The bioplastic Bio-Flex® S 9533 used in the man­u­fac­ture of the water fil­ter has been developed in cooper­a­tion with Fraunhofer UMSICHT and FKuR and is based on the bioplastic PLA (poly­lact­ic acid). ​“For us it was import­ant to devel­op a mater­i­al run­ning on con­ven­tion­al injec­tion mold­ing equip­ment,” explains Hendrik Roch, Fraunhofer UMSICHT. But pure PLA is rigid with rel­at­ively low impact strength. ​“By means of an intel­li­gent addit­ive pack­age and our spe­cial com­pound­ing tech­no­logy we have been able to devel­op a PLA com­pound meet­ing all require­ments,” says Car­men Michels, Man­aging Dir­ect­or of FKuR. The fil­ter unit is com­posed of a cas­ing made from bio­de­grad­able Bio-Flex® S9533 and con­tains absorb­ent car­bon derived from coconut shells. Cus­tom­ers receive a fresh fil­ter from Soma every 60 days. For each fil­ter sold, Soma donates to the non­profit organ­iz­a­tion ​‘char­ity: water’, which provides access to clean drink­ing water to people in need. Thus, the Soma water fil­ter meets all of founder Mike Del Ponte’s require­ments as a beau­ti­ful and sus­tain­able water fil­ter that gives back. The fil­ter is proven to reduce chlor­ine, taste and odor through its spe­cial fil­ter sys­tem and ful­fils all require­ments of the NSF/ANSI stand­ard 42 of the Water Qual­ity Asso­ci­ation. The Soma water fil­ter with glass carafe has already received sev­er­al awards. Source: idw