The Sustainable Water Filter

The Sustainable Water Filter sounds like a lofty title, because after all, aren’t all water filters sustainable?

Rewind the clock back a few years and hardly anyone was talking about the flaws of single-use plastic. Carrying a bottle of water seemed second only to carrying a mobile phone and there was almost no discussion of the damage being done to the planet by disposable plastic.

Jump back to the present day and at long last we are now becoming acutely aware of that damage. Avoiding single-use plastic has gone from niche to necessary and all consumers are now faced with the moral duty to consider if they actually need disposable plastic products at all.

Stainless-steel water bottles are now the millennial fashion statement of the day and everyday objects, like straws and cotton buds - previously consumed by the millions without even so much as the batting of an eyelid - are now banned by Government legislation or being replaced by metal and paper alternatives. The attack on single-use culture is well underway.

For Phox, our version 1 product helped our customer base make the transition away from bottled water by providing the same quality taste out of their home taps. The combination of the filter and our reusable bottles allowed them to ditch bottled water and this benefit featured in scores of product reviews. With V1, we helped people save more than 1 million plastic bottles.

Yet still, there was an element of disposability to the product that we were unable to control. Each cartridge lasted 60 days but at the end of the cycle, it had to be replaced with a brand-new cartridge. While it could be recycled, the process was clunky and we had no way of knowing how many people would even bother going to the hassle of recycling in the first place.

That’s where the process to create the most sustainable water filter possible began.

Going All Out Sustainable

1. Refillable Cartridge

The most vital step to becoming fully sustainable was to design the refillable cartridge technology. Our research uncovered that more 100 million disposable water filter cartridges are going to landfill every year. That’s a pretty big number for all of the talk from the big brands on sustainability and the recycle schemes they have in place.

Making a product ‘recyclable’ doesn’t mean that everyone who uses it is going to recycle it. That’s why with the Phox V2 we’ve taken away the burden of responsibility on the customer by making our cartridge refillable instead of recyclable. The very act of using the V2 makes the customer part of the fight against disposable plastic without even having to worry about recycling.

2. Letterbox Delivery

One of the great knock-on effects of a refillable cartridge is that we no longer have to ship a new plastic cartridge to every single customer, at the end of every single filter cycle.

The new filter delivery simply contains the media contents for you to pour into your refillable cartridge. The little Kraft paper bags can fit inside a slim cardboard box small enough to fit through your letterbox.

No missed deliveries, no awkward trips to the neighbours or even worse the Post Office. Hassle-free.

3. Sustainable Packaging

How often do you receive a shiny new product that comes bubbled-wrapped, inside a plastic bag, inside a cardboard box? Single-use plastic when it’s ‘necessary’ to the function of a product is bad enough, but when it’s needlessly layered onto packaging it becomes a nightmare in more ways than one.

So the Phox V2 arrives in (yes, you guessed it) a recycled cardboard box with no single-use plastic element. We’ve poured hours of tender loving care into the packaging to make the unboxing experience unrivalled in the water filter industry but made sure that the product is snuggly protected too.

4. Manufactured within 30 miles of Phox HQ

Another adverse, environmental issue for a lot of companies is that their products are produced in other countries and, even sometimes, other continents. This makes the production process very carbon intensive as the products have to travel thousands of miles before they’re even sold.

The Phox V2 is made within 30 miles of our HQ in Glasgow. We want the filter to have impact across the globe but manufacturing so close to home ensures we’re keeping the carbon footprint to a minimum.

5. Return Media Program

The final layer of creating a truly sustainable water filter is putting in place a return media program. This is something the team have been working on for many months as it has required a lot of research and development. We're now closing in on rolling out a prepaid return system for all of your used filtration media.

This means that at the end of each cycle, you can simply place the expired media back in the bag and return it to us using a free return postage label. We can then begin the process of regeneration for each of the ingredients and take a huge step towards circular filtration.

Our amazing community of almost 700 Kickstarter backers helped us bring this product to life and now thousands of customers are already seeing the benefits of refillable filtration. Join the fight against single-use cartridges and Learn more about the product.

The key to overcoming the single-use epidemic is having simple, reusable alternatives in all areas. The Phox V2 is equipped to wage war on the waste associated with water filtration and redefine what sustainability really means in this industry.