IMAGE CREDIT: emerginggreen.wordpress.com

You wake up one morning,  head to the kitchen and place a tea bag in your cup. Are you drinking green, black, oolong? Or is that tea bag filled with activated carbon, leaving you not with tea but with clean drinking water?

The newly designed “Tea Bag Water Filter” does just that. The filter uses a basic tea bag design to contain activated carbon, which can remove chemical contaminants. This is why so many of our water filters use some form of carbon. Carbon can adsorb (not absorb) chlorine, lead, mercury, zinc and more, and it is  used in Brita pitchers, inline filters, fridge filters, RO systems and even air filters.

But the tea bag water filter doesn’t stop there. The prototype, designed by Stellenbosch University’s Professor Cloete, also uses a biocide on the outside of the bag to kill off bacteria. Cloete cautions that “all technology has its limits,” but he also says that they have yet to find a bacteria the tea bag water purifier can’t kill.

Perhaps the most attractive aspect of the water filter is its ease of use. The filter attaches to the neck of a standard water bottle, so you have only to place it in your bottle, fill it up, and you’ve got filtered water at your fingertips.

So where can you buy the tea bag water filter? Not at FiltersFast— yet. The tea bag water filter is currently in production, though Cloete is working with manufacturers and hopes to have a version ready for sale by next month.

When you do purchase the teabag filter, you might be able to take comfort in the fact that your purchase also supports clean water initiatives in developing countries. Cloete hopes that a surcharge can be added to the purchase price so that a portion of all sales will lessen costs of the units for citizens of developing countries who may not otherwise be able to afford them.

Update: It appears this filter is not widely available at online and retail stores. We will keep you posted.