Recycling Water Filtration Cartidges (Brita, Pur, Etc)

Both Brita and Preserve have teamed up with a campaign called Take Back the Filter to create a recycling program for filter cartridges, which has already begun with some drop-off locations at Whole Foods Markets and a mail-in setup getting put into place.

Preserve will recycle the plastic components into new plastics while the filter itself will be regenerated to convert for energy (aka burned).

While this is all well and good, you can do something at home, right now, without having to go to the market in your carbon-burning vehicle. :)

Did you know that those filters can be reconstituted? Yep. You can do it at home easily too. Remember the craze for refilling ink cartridges? Well, this is the same idea, but not nearly as messy or costly.

Consider this: the charcoal in your filter is "activated," which means it's got an ionic charge. This charge attracts metals and such in the water and kills some microbes, which improves the taste. Just like the carbon filter in a fish tank.

Now, when the carbon loses its charge, it becomes neutral and stops capturing those impurities. This is normally when you'd toss the filter and get a new one. If you have a water softener, you might understand how the re-activation of carbon works.

Rather than toss it, you can re-activate the carbon. This is done with nature's wonder: salt. The stuff they used to pay Roman soldiers with. A water softener re-activates charcoal by sending brine (salty water) into it, flushing it, and (sometimes) repeating. The salt re-ionizes the charcoal while the water washes away the impurities.

You can do the same basic thing with your old water filters from Brita or Pur too.

Here's an awesome instructable for this.

No more tossing filters!

Note: if you have a fish tank and are using carbon filters and throwing those out too, you can reconstitute them by merely soaking them in a bowl of very salty water, rinsing, soaking, rinsing and then re-rinsing several times to get all of the salt out. Works awesome.