Clean Drinking Water from Medical Waste

A glass of H2O to quench the thirst is something that many take for granted. Yet clean drinking water is one of the most desperately sought-after commodities in remote rural areas in developing nations. Israeli company NUFiltration is using discarded medical devices to remedy the situation.

NUFiltration repurposes dialysis filters that have been discarded after a single use to clean a kidney patient’s blood of toxins as water purification devices. The end-product, known as NUF™ units, are highly effective, simple and compact mini-systems that filtrate and sterilize waste water from contaminated sources to produce pure drinking water—even under the most adverse circumstances.

The technology behind NUFiltration is the brain-child of Prof. Yoram Lass from the Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Medicine, who pondered the possibility of an alternative use for the more than 250 million dialysis filters that are discarded after a single use yearly.

Lass worked to develop a novel patent for transforming waste water into water of drinkable quality using dialysis filters and then contacted Israeli entrepreneur Mino Negrin to present his idea. “It was genius,” Negrin explains. “The simplicity of it caught my eye immediately. It could filter out every micro-biological pollutant: viruses, bacteria, fungi.”

Negrin bought Lass’ patent and started NUFiltration to design, manufacture and distribute the NUF™ units. The results speak for themselves. The NUF™ unit is highly affordable, functions as a hand-carried machine and can operate without power.

It can purify up to 500 liters (132 gal.) of water from a polluted source in an hour, “enough to supply all the daily water needs of 300 to 400 people who didn’t have access before,” ISRAEL21c quoted Negrin as saying.