About Us

 

How Natural Filters was Born

Founder Igor here. Back in 2018 I lost all of my hair literally overnight in the midst of my travels in South America (in the midst of Carnivale in Rio De Janeiro to be exact). I cut my travels short and flew back home to Melbourne.

My functional medicine practitioner (Steve from New Health) recommended many lifestyle changes, with one of them being limiting my exposure to plastics. This was due to the synthetic estrogens that all plastics, including BPA-free plastics leach into our food, water and onto our skin constantly. So I embarked on a journey of cutting plastics out of my food and drink, replacing everything from my Tupperware containers with ones made from glass, even investing in a plastic-free kettle and blender, since these are appliances I use daily. 

Once I had cut out plastics from my kitchen, the next step was my water, since beer and wine were already naturally plastic free. Since I have always used water filters of some sort, I started looking around for a plastic-free water filter. I searched both online and off yet I was not able to find anything suitable. I was met with dumb-founded faces from all of the department stores I visited. I wanted a natural solution that was plastic free to begin with, yet I was all out of luck until I stumbled upon some articles describing how Binchotan charcoal can filter water easily and naturally. Eureka - this was it!

The Natural Filter Vision

Looking into the future, I eventually want Natural Filters to be produced domestically on land utilising regenerative agriculture principles to heal and restore the land the bamboo is to be grown on. Furthermore, the gases produced during the production process could be captured to produce electricity—eventually making the entire production process carbon neutral and even potentially carbon negative.

 Once we have established local production in Australia to minimise the distance our products travel to reach our customers, we would like to eventually replicate this model globally, thus leading to cleaner drinking water, healthier soils and healthier people globally. 

The Binchotan Charcoal Story

The Binchotan charcoal story traces its origins back to one of the oldest civilisations in the world, approximately 14,000 years ago, during the Jomon period in Japan. Back then charcoal was mostly used for cooking and stoking fires for heat. High quality Binchotan charcoal, also known as ‘white charcoal’, was perfected during the 17th century in the very same area known as Kishy then and  Wakayama today. This miraculous innovation was renowned for its natural purifying qualities and became so valuable that producers exchanged pieces of Binchotan charcoal as payment. 
 

The production process of Binchotan charcoal has changed little since its innovation centuries ago. Natural Filters honour these traditional production practices by following them very closely in the production of our bamboo charcoal water filters.