Clean drinking water is essential for good health. This is best done with a water filter.
Water filters remove harmful chemicals, biological contaminants, suspended solids, and gases. Most filtration systems use filtering, distillation, or reverse osmosis to remove contaminants.
Some water filters remove plastics, but not all. Most drinking water contains microplastics, which can harm humans. Choose a microplastic water filter. Distillation, ceramic, nanofiltration, ultrafiltration, and reverse osmosis remove microplastics.
Water filters remove microplastics and other contaminants from drinking water, giving you peace of mind. Fill a reusable glass or stainless steel water bottle with home-filtered water to reduce plastic waste.
Microplastics are removed differently by water filters. The Brita filter removes many commercial pollutants and pesticides related to microplastics from tap water. Thus, you must find the right water filter for your needs.
The design of water filters determines their ability to remove plastics from drinking water. When choosing a filter, consider the contaminants you want to remove and choose one that filters out microplastics. You can ensure your family’s drinking water is safe, contaminant-free, and drinkable.
As a water filter technician, I’ve seen how a good filter can change someone’s life. After months of stomach problems, we found microplastics in a client’s water. After installing a good carbon block faucet filter, my client’s symptoms disappeared. I learned how a water filter could affect a person’s health from this experience.
Reverse Osmosis
Reverse osmosis (RO) is an effective water treatment method that removes dissolved solids, ions, and particles. It works for seawater desalination and drinking water.
Small pore sizes in RO membranes keep ionized dissolved salts and other impurities out. These pores work well for other contaminants but not for most microplastics.
Prefilters, post filters, and remineralization filters are available in some RO systems. This filtration improves water taste, health, and efficiency and prolongs system life.
Reverse osmosis is ideal for industrial boilers, food and beverage processing, pharmaceutical production, and other uses because it can nearly eliminate dissolved solids.
Carbon filters
Carbon filters may help reduce microplastics in water. They filter water to remove plastics and other contaminants.
Activated carbon, also known as carbon block filters, filters water. They reduce chlorine, taste, odor, VOCs, pesticides, herbicides, disinfection byproducts, and other pollutants.
Carbon filters remove these contaminants and improve the taste and odor of the water. Water pitcher filters, reverse osmosis systems, and under-sink filters use them.
Unlike air filters, activated carbon filters use adsorption to remove contaminants from water. Due to its porous structure and larger surface area, carbon adsorption is more efficient at liquid removal. It exposes the carbon to more active sites.
Ultrafiltration
Ultrafiltration removes microscopic dissolved and suspended solids with membrane filters. Water filtration like this is used in wastewater treatment and industrial processing.
Many contaminants and microplastics can be removed from water with diatomaceous earth (DOME). This environmentally friendly solution also reduces plastic bottle landfill accumulation by reducing wastewater.
The most important factor in a filter’s ability to remove microplastics from water is its pore size. A pore size of 0.001 micrometers or less is best for this task. Smaller pores mean more efficient filtering.
Ultrafiltration can remove particles as small as 0.1 nanometers from water, unlike reverse osmosis, which can only remove particles larger than 0.0001 micrometers. Ultrafiltration removes microplastics from the water most effectively.
Microfiltration
Microfiltration (MF) is a membrane separation process that removes unwanted materials from liquids. Wastewater treatment processes often use it as the first pass or clarification step.
Plastics can be removed from drinking water by multiporous filtration (MF) filters. Very small pores are used to filter toxic substances like microplastics from raw water.
MF membrane pores range from 0.1 to 10 mm, allowing water, monovalent and multivalent ions, proteins, salts, and sugars to pass through while retaining suspended particles.
Microfiltration membranes can operate in dead-end or cross-flow modes, sending fluid directly to the membrane and passing through. The filter cake must be periodically backwashed.
