Vancouver’s Twothirds Water Inc. was awarded the $15,000 Vancity Social Venture prize in the 2012 BCIC-New Ventures Competition.
Now the for-profit social enterprise has launched a campaign on the crowdfunding platform Indiegogo to offer Tapp™ for pre-sale to online customers. Tapp is an extremely simple and versatile water filter designed for some of the most difficult circumstances in the world.
Tapp is a small, handheld water filter that can connect to tubing or bottle threads, making it very versatile for outdoor sports, travel, international development, and many other uses. Using a membrane technology called “hollow fiber microfiltration,” which was originally developed for kidney dialysis, Tapp removes more than 99.9% of bacteria and parasites while letting the water flow through. In addition, Tapp has an innovative, patent-pending cleaning mechanism built into the filter, which makes it quick and easy to flush away dirt and maintain high flowrates.
In an industry where products tend to be quite complicated to operate and maintain, one of Tapp’s greatest strengths is that it is so easy to use that it requires no training or written instruction:
“We’ve designed Tapp for some of the most difficult environments in the world. In these settings, unnecessary complexities can cause all kinds of problems. But Tapp is extremely simple and user-friendly,” says Twothirds Water president Bradley Pierik. “Half the world’s hospitalizations are caused by easily avoidable waterborne disease. We need a product that is easy-to-use and durable under even the toughest conditions — from back country trekking to disaster relief in developing countries.”
Tapp has just launched on Indiegogo, the world’s leading “crowd-funding” platform. Indiegogo contributors can pre-order a Tapp filter, and through a matching program, an additional filter will be donated to a family in a developing country on their behalf. For the coming holiday season, a downloadable gift card is available with each Tapp purchase.