The new Katadyn Exstream Personal Water Bottle Purifier is a self-contained filtration system in a handy bottle. Drinking plenty of water is important, but to buy bottled water every day is to throw your money and harmful plastic into a landfill. We reported recently on paper water bottles as a way to cut down on the dangerous level of plastic being tossed into seas and landfills, but remember that reusing is always better than replacing.  Paper bottles are reusable to a point, but the whole biodegradable design is based on the assumption that you are going to throw it away, right?

Having a filtration system at home is great.  You can get clean, crisp drinking water any time you want for minimal cost.  The average cost of a bottle of water when using an at-home purifier is about five cents (USD).  However, if you like to have clean, filtered water at work or on the road and don’t have access to your home filter for refills, what are you to do?  In the past you could either suck it up and force down tap water, which isn’t so bad if you live near a Rocky Mountain stream but can be utterly foul if you live in a large city.  Or you could buy bottled water.  At least you don’t have to carry around all that heavy money, right?  Fret no more, for the dilemma has been solved by the Katadyn water bottle purifier.

The Katadyn Exstream Personal Water Bottle Purifier website boasts that it is the only EPA registered purification bottle that is able to remove all organisms from your drinking water, including viruses. Keep in mind that being registered by the Environmental Protection Agency does not automatically guarantee that a product’s claims are true, but does give us very strong reason to believe so.

The Exstream has a capacity of 26 oz, which is about 40 percent of the water you need per day according to the Mayo Clinic, depending on size and lifestyle of course.  So, it should be fully capable of supplying your water needs until you can find a tap to fill it up again. For longer excursions, Katadyn offers a variety of camping and survival oriented filtration systems.

The Exstream’s filter can process about 26 gallons before needing to be replaced, which corresponds to 128 full refills.  The filter utilizes the pressure created by gravity to push water through and requires no pumping or special effort. Unfortunately, there is no indication as to whether the bottle comes with a gauge to let you know when it is time for replacement.

The bottle itself is listed for 40 Euro on the Katadyn website, but can be easily found elsewhere for $40 USD.  Replacement filters run $17 for a pack of two.  That means the cost of your first 128 bottles of water will be about 32 cents (USD) per bottle and 11 cents for every bottle after that.  Compared to buying a bottled water every day, this product would pay for itself after two months.  It would then save you about $25 per month thereafter.  This is all not to mention the mountain of plastic.

Ink and toner cartridges are expensive, non-recyclable, toxic and energy intensive.  It’s not a problem only of the ink itself but also the plastic containers they must be housed in. The housing prevents the liquid solvent from evaporating and acts as the delivery system to the printer heads. For many years, this has been an unchanged paradigm that has produced untold waste.

Finally, and to the great relief of the green gadget community, Xerox is launching a new series of models within its high-end multifunction copiers that solves these issues.  The new printers use solid blocks of ink that playfully resemble huge crayons and do not require plastic cartridges. The printers themselves are also much more energy efficient, faster and cheaper to operate than their wasteful competitors.

The ColorQube 9200 multifunction copiers draw their ink by melting solid blocks of ink that don’t have to be housed in wasteful plastic. A single block of ink can print 9,250 pages.  The ColorQube solid ink blocks come as four colors. The printer head uses a small amount of energy to melt needed ink (an amount of heat that a printer would produce anyway).  The ink travels to the 3,000 print heads, which each have 900 ink nozzle.  Each nozzle is 37.5 microns wide; human hair is 100 microns wide. The result is more dots of ink in a minute than there are people in the world and still the ColorQube 9200 prints 85 pages per minute. Xerox claims the technology can cut printing costs by 62 percent and eliminate 90 percent of the waste.

According to Xerox, a traditional office laser printer produces about 815 pounds of waste over its lifetime, while the ColorQube produces only 88 pounds; a 90-percent difference. It also cuts energy use by powering down the device when it’s not in use. The ink is a polymeric resin that is solid at room temperature and resembles a misshapen crayon. There is no water solvent to evaporate or need for plastic casing, making it cheaper and far more eco-friendly.

It may be a very long time before you can get these into your home as there are no plans for consumer models. The ColorQube 9200 is a hulking $23,500 hallway copier seen in large corporate offices. If Xerox can cut down the operational expenses of these copiers with solid ink, they will further their reputation as innovators while also attracting large competitors to develop similar technologies.  This kind of competition is sure to lead to maximum efficiency, minimum costs and an acceleration toward home and small office models.

The technology is actually not terribly new.  Xerox had been developing conceptual models utilizing solid ink as far back as 1991.  However, a number of technological limitations and disinterested consumers caused the copier giant to be less than aggressive.  Part of those limitations were addressed by spending a reported $23 million on a solid ink production plant.  Xerox also reports having spent five years developing the ColorQube printer in order to achieve its amazing speed and reliability in addition to its environmental and economical factors.

Hey, look at this cool paper bottle from BrandImage! It may be leading the revolution against plastic.

The “forever in a landfill” environmentalist slogan is quickly becoming cliché and lost on the general public. Each day, Americans continue to throw out 60 million plastic bottles. Only 14% of which actually get recycled.  So, forget landfill slogans.  We aren’t getting it done.

Try this on for size: there exists an island of garbage out in the Pacific Ocean the size of Texas?  Texas! Due to some interestingly dull oceanographic factors, nearly all of the refuse jettisoned into the Pacific meanders its way over to become trapped in the same area.  Also, plastic is incapable of degrading. Not only has this resulted in a pile of trash larger than I am even capable of comprehending, but it will apparently never go away. Ever.  Plastic does, however, break down physically into smaller and smaller bits until it resembles tasty krill. Krill is what a very large portion of sea life eats.  So, you see the problem.

Plastic is an amazing substance that makes our activities more convenient and saves perhaps billions of lives through food packaging and medical equipment. Plastic has a variety of wonderful properties and high up on that list is the fact that it doesn’t break down.  It doesn’t whither or turn bad.  It doesn’t chemically react with food or medicine or anything really.  But there is the problem.  A substance that cannot be broken down by any environmental exposure and cannot be eaten by anything will fill its little nook in the world FOREVER.

A few decades of intense marketing for plastic made it out to be the end-all miracle material (which, it may be), but many great designers and high-end businesses are finally breaking out of that rut and embracing paper.

We are beginning to realize again that there is no loss of class in paper products.  Even glass is seeing a packaging decline. Many fine mid-range wine makers have begun adopting boxes in addition to or instead of glass bottles.

The 360 Paper Bottle, for example, is a far more sustainable approach to water bottles and packaging in general. It is totally recyclable paper made from 100% renewable resources. The lining uses biodegradable PLA film. The end result is entirely food-grade material. The 360 Paper Bottle meets all criteria for all liquid categories and is sturdy enough for a variety of applications and multiple reuse.  The paper bottle design has had a good critical and market response, including having received an IDEA (International Design Excellence Award) for this design.

Eco experts and enthusiasts will always stress the value of reusing, so keep in mind that filling the same bottle every day is far superior an option than even the most environmental paper alternative. However, we still applaud this great paper design and hope that it sparks the about-face of old industry packaging standards across the board. If we can get all packaging to be made from eco-friendly materials in the first place, then the collective hazardous waste and energy consumption could go down dramatically.