How To Filter Water Without Plastic

Water filtration has always been a necessity of life on this planet. While human beings can, of course, drink untreated water, we do so at our own risk. Throughout human history, water has had a bad reputation as a vector for the spread of diseases. Because they had no means to filter water, many ancient peoples relied on low alcohol-content beer and wine for their daily hydration needs. Indeed, the brewing and distilling processes turned unsafe water into relatively safe liquids.

The advent of widespread clean drinking water is only a bit more than a hundred years old. The single biggest recent advancement to public drinking water safety was the introduction of water chlorination in Jersey City. And this didn’t happen until 1906.

Today, water filtration is a thriving and multi-faceted industry. An industry that draws upon and utilizes a wide array of technological innovations to treat water at a variety of levels, whether this be from the large-scale municipal treatment of water for entire cities, or a small under-sink filtration system or refrigerator filter designed to treat a very local problem.

However, one potentially worrying aspect of modern water filtration is the ubiquity of plastic that is used in the creation of home filtration systems. With more and more attention being devoted to the worrying trend of microplastics, many people are looking for more sustainable alternatives when fabricating filtration systems.

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The Environmental Impact of Plastic in Water Filtration

Plastic has been both a blessing and a curse to human beings over the past hundred plus years. Indeed, human life has totally changed since the development of the first commercially viable plastic in 1907.

The benefits of plastic are too obvious and ubiquitous to require much elaboration. Plastics are cheap to produce, can be formed into virtually any conceivable shape, and as synthetic materials, do not break down normally through the wear and tear of the elements.

This last feature of plastics is what makes them such an ideal candidate for use in water filtration systems. Plastics are typically hydrophobic. This means that they repel water, rather than taking it on.

Water will eat away at many plastics very slowly – it is the universal solvent after all. But All Filters suggests that the rate at which it can make any appreciable dent in plastic is very slow.  Indeed, some plastics do not biodegrade in water at all, but instead simply get ground down over time into ever smaller bits of “microplastic.” These are tiny bits of insoluble material that animals swallow. And these microplastics are now being discovered within human bodies.

Natural and Traditional Water Filtration Methods

Let’s first contrast all of the forms of filtration that do not involve the use of plastics in order to get a sense of the types of filtration available. When you do this you see the relative difficulty we find in moving away from plastics entirely. Some filters are themselves made of plastic (as in the case of polypropylene sediment filters, which are ubiquitous in home, commercial, and industrial filtration systems). While in many cases, plastics simply make for the best housings for other filtration media.

Ceramic Filters

One very old form of water filtration that doesn’t rely on plastics at all is ceramic filtration. A ceramic filter utilizes the naturally occurring tiny pores within ceramic. This is simply clay that is formed into whatever shape, and then baked in a kiln to trap particulate matter, dissolved substances, and even microbial life forms such as bacteria and cysts. Ceramic filters can be pricey, and are prized as camping and survival filters because of their strong antimicrobial filtering properties. These filters are typically not your first line of home defense, however, as the relative size and cost of the media would make a whole-home, or even under sink, ceramic filter somewhat impractical.

Charcoal and Sand Filters

Two of the oldest filtration methods known to human beings involve simply forcing water through a dense bed of sand and/or charcoal.

Sand makes for an excellent physical filtration media for water.  The granules of rock can serve as excellent impediments to the flow of physical particulate through water. Sand filters are commonly used today for filtering pool water, as sand is cheap, easily sourced, and gets the job done.

Charcoal, from which we create “activated carbon,” is another ancient form of filtration. However, this operates differently than the mechanical action of a sand filter. Charcoal formed by burning wood, bamboo, coconut shells, or any other “carbonaceous” material is an excellent chemical filter. This means that the mechanism of the filter’s action is chemical in nature. The carbon matrix in the charcoal will actively pull dissolved chemicals out of solution within your water. Thus adhering the contaminants to the surface of the carbon in a process called “adsorption.” When we chemically “activate” charcoal by grinding it up and subjecting it to superheated steam, the adsorptive capabilities of charcoal are magnified some tenfold. Steam opens up huge amounts of surface area on the carbon for chemical contaminants to stick to.

Boiling and Distillation

A completely plastic-free way to clean and purify your water that is also highly effective and with a long and proven track record are boiling and distillation.

Boiling alone is an excellent way to kill any microbial threats such as bacteria, viruses, and parasites in your water. However, it will not help to remove any other dangerous contaminants, and will only serve to increase the concentration of any dangerous heavy metals that may be present in your water, like lead or arsenic.

Distillation, by contrast, can separate out clean water from water polluted with such mineral content. It does this by forcing the steam from your boiling water up and into a separate receptacle. Distillation is a difficult, time-intensive process that requires specialized equipment to do effectively.  But it remains a highly effective option for treating problematic water in a completely plastic-free way.

Modern Alternatives to Plastic Water Filters

It is difficult to find a complete home filtration solution that doesn’t involve plastic in at least some of the steps of the filtering process. Plastic is simply too useful, malleable, and multi-purpose to be ignored in creating these systems. However, you can try to minimize your plastic waste footprint by going with a system with as few plastic components as possible. And by keeping up your system with regular cleaning, maintenance, and filter replacement. All these steps ensure that you are getting the most out of it before consigning the plastic housings to the landfill.

Stainless Steel Filters

The problem with attempting to build a filtration system with zero plastics is that we require a suitable alternative for use in filter housings, connections, hoses, and other small parts for which plastic is ideally suited. One material that can be used as a replacement in filter housings, and for certain sediment filter applications is stainless steel. Impervious to rust, stainless is a great choice for filter housings. Plus it is also used as a media for certain sediment filters.

Glass Water Filters

Glass can also be used in some water filtration applications. This is particularly true for things like pitcher filters and countertop gravity-fed filters. There may be some specialized glass filter housings available on the market, but they aren’t common, because of the high risk for glass breaking (especially under pressure).  Typically, therefore, you won’t see glass featured as a major component of system housings.

Copper Water Purification

Copper has long been known to possess properties that make it a good media for filtering water. Not only can copper itself help to neutralize many problematic elements in water, but it can also be combined with other materials such as zinc in the creation of specific filtration media like KDF (kinetic degradation fluxion). This is used in a variety of specific filtration applications.

DIY Water Filtration Methods Without Plastic

Nearly any important form of filtration can be done without plastics. Though oftentimes going that route will require some creativity and DIY solutions. Most of the commercially available water filtration systems on the market will simply involve plastic parts. This is because of the price point involved, and the ease of fabrication. But, with a few extra steps, you can create a home system that minimizes the use of plastics. Or ignores them entirely.

Creating a Gravity-Based Filter

To go completely plastic-free with your home filter setup, you will likely need rely on natural forces like gravity. A simple gravity-fed filter is one of the easiest to set up at home in a glass or stainless steel container. You can incorporate sediment pads and activated carbon into such a system. Alternatively, you could purchase a stainless steel or glass pitcher or countertop filter. Then start filtering using either no plastic at all. Or use the relatively small amount that may be used as housing materials in your filter cartridges.

Using Cloth or Fabric as a Filter

If you need to filter out sediment and physical particulate from your water, you can opt for traditional polypropylene plastic filters. Alternatively, you can rig a DIY filter using any sort of semi-porous cloth, or cotton, or another natural material that can be densely packed into the path of your water. Note that using cotton or other natural materials is dangerous on untreated well water. This is because microorganisms can live off of the natural fibers. This is another advantage that plastic filters have – they are bacteriostatic.

Solar Water Disinfection (SODIS)

One of the simplest ways to reduce microbial threats in water is to disinfect your water with sunlight. Simply leave water in a clear glass container in the open sunlight for a day (six to eight hours). The UV rays of the sun will take care of most of the problematic elements. This method is not foolproof, and shouldn’t be relied upon except in emergency conditions, however.

Benefits of Filtering Water Without Plastic

If you are able to get a home filtration system up and running without the use of plastics or synthetic materials, then that is a win for you and for the planet. While it takes a few extra steps, and may end up costing you more, you can rest assured knowing that you are filtering your water in a sustainable manner.

Conclusion

It will be difficult to entirely avoid plastic in your water filtration journey. And sometimes it may be best simply to accept the reality of the situation, and use plastic in those steps for which it is most convenient. Indeed, for some steps to filter water suitable replacements are hard to find. Even a reduction in the overall amount of plastics used is a good thing. So don’t be afraid to use plastic when necessary, if the net gain is positive ecologically.