Water is life, and for some people, it is death too when it’s not safe to drink.
When you take your next sip of branded water, from the plastic bottle of your choice, I am sure you don’t concern yourself with the global water crisis and here is why you should:
Globally, 2 billion people (26% of the population) do not have safe drinking water and 3.6 billion (46%) lack access to safely managed sanitation, according to the report , published by UNESCO on behalf of UN-Water and released at the UN 2023 Water Conference in New York.
Drinking unsafe water is the cause of death for children in developing countries, and a major concern for the many vulnerable communities at risk.
When I met Teri Dankovich in person at a conference in the middle of nowhere Mexico, I had already been captivated by a catchy advert that was circulating online about a “Drinkable book”.
Born from a collaboration between Teri’s company Folia Water, WaterisLife, and BBDO, the Drinkable book was a creative approach to propose a more affordable solution to safe water filtration for home users.
This was back in 2014, and talking to Teri after nine years reveals how complex the process of integrating new solutions is, even when they work, when they are brilliant and could make a real difference.
“The book was an interesting idea, but somehow it was too soon, and not the right product. We wanted to market affordable water filters sold for cents and putting them in a book, buying them all at once was not the right approach for the consumer, and we were not ready yet to scale” Teri said “ but I don’t regret it, it gave us visibility, opportunity, connections that ultimately led us to where we are today” she continued.
Folia Water was born as a concept while Teri was completing her PhD in Chemistry and got involved with the Millenium Goals which then became the Global Sustainable Goals and put her knowledge to test the opportunity for creating a cheap, accurate consumable filter that could be sold for cents and easy to use.
The Folia water filters are made of Folia Paper an antimicrobial filter paper containing silver nanoparticles that kill bacteria and viruses and it filters out iron, dirt, and larger parasites.
One filter provides 20L of safe, germ-free water.
The chemical compound gives the paper a very distinctive bright yellow color making it stand out in the blue funnel with a lid, used to create a simple and efficient system to let the water flow from a bottle to the new clean water container. The funnel is a one-off purchase and the filters can be replaced every few days.
Folia water filters are currently sold in small shops in some areas of Bangladesh where Folia Water has a local company for packaging and distribution.
So far 80,000 units have been sold since the start of 2020, which is a good number considering the market slow-down that covid provided.
“We want to grow, scale, sell more within Bangladesh and branch out to other countries,” Teri said “but we need to scale the teams too, we have about 10 people in our US company and 10 in Bangladesh, but we need few more to be able to take on the tasks needed for entering new markets, and ultimately we need to work to make the product cheaper to be able to grow”.
Teri and her co-founder Jonathan Levine, have also created Folia Materials, to explore more applications for their antimicrobial paper in the packaging industry, one that needs innovation for sustainability at scale as soon as possible.
To learn about the long journey that took Teri from an idea in the lab to test fields in Africa and Bangladesh to ultimately launch Folia Water, listen to the podcast episode below.
