Ingenious Upcycling Turns Discarded Medical Device into Water Filter

Could a medical filter that can remove even the slightest unwanted particle from human blood also work for, say, water purification? 

Every year across the world, more than 250 million dialysis filters are thrown away after only a single use cleansing a kidney patient’s blood of toxins. What if those filters could be recycled for a new use, wondered Tel Aviv University Faculty of Medicine Prof. Yoram Lass.

Lass, whose specialty is in hemodynamics (the dynamics of blood flow) developed a novel patent for cleaning water using dialysis filters. Not only would the quality far surpass existing industrial purification systems, but the raw materials – those millions of discarded filters piling up in landfills – were essentially free for the cost of pick-up and delivery.

Lass is a physician, not a businessman. But Israeli entrepreneur Mino Negrin knew a thing or two about water. In 2010, he sold Nirosoft, the Italian-Israeli company he created with his father to build water softening and desalination systems, to Ronald Lauder’s RWL Water Group.

NUFiltration’s water recycling technology for greenhouses. Photo courtesy of NUFiltration

NUFiltration’s repurposed dialysis filters are currently used in three industries.

The most groundbreaking is purifying water in hard-to-reach rural areas of developing nations. NUFiltration packages multiple filters into a hand-carried machine that costs less than $1,000 and can be operated by a crank.

The unit can take water from a polluted source such a river and purify up to 500 liters an hour – “enough to supply all the daily water needs of 300 to 400 people who didn’t have access before,” Negrin says.

The filters only need to be replaced once every few years and NUFiltration provides a three-year warranty. NUFiltration systems are currently deployed in Ecuador, Colombia, Peru, the Fiji Islands, Cambodia, Vietnam, Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania and Nigeria. 

A second use for the filters is in swimming pools.

“The water treatment technique used in most swimming pools is very primitive,” Negrin says. “There’s no way to cope with micro-biological contamination, so they throw huge amounts of chlorine into the water. With our membranes, what goes back into the pool is completely disinfected water. You only need a very small amount of chlorine. It’s a much nicer swimming experience.”

NUFiltration also works with reclaiming wastewater from treatment plants for irrigating agriculture, public parks and gardens. “You have to remove any trace of pathogens and parasites from the water, otherwise it can contaminate an entire greenhouse,” Negrin says.

Read more about water filters made from dialysis filters at Israel21c

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• Treatment
• Treatment Methods
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• water treatment
• On-site Treatment