This invention makes polluted tap water around the world drinkable By: Romy de Weert The tap water in the Netherlands is of good quality and therefore very drinkable. But that is not the case everywhere in the world. More than 50 percent of all tap water is not safe to drink. Inventor and entrepreneur Marius Visser designed a revolutionary home-garden-and-kitchen appliance that makes tap water drinkable for everyone: The Opresso Machine. The Netherlands is inextricably linked to water. The country is surrounded by it and it is bursting with expertise. Wherever we are, the tap is always a safe source of drinking water. But that is not the case everywhere in the world. More than 50 percent of global tap water is polluted. It is not safe for one in three people to drink tap water. As a result, these people buy water in plastic. Worldwide, water is drunk from about 1 million plastic bottles per minute. And that will probably only increase in the coming years. From 2004 to 2016, the number of plastic water bottles sold increased from 300 billion to 480 billion. Last year, around 583 billion bottles were bought worldwide. The Netherlands and Scandinavian countries are doing well Water from plastic bottles is therefore widely drunk, because in many countries it is better than water from the tap. Italy tops the list (188.5 liters per person per year), followed by Germany (177.3), Hungary (131.1) and Belgium (126.6). The European average is 109.9 liter bottles of water per person per year. The Swedes consume only 10 liters of water from plastic bottles per year and we in the Netherlands 24 liters. The Netherlands and Scandinavian countries are at the top when it comes to the quality of tap water. But millions of people don't have access to it. Two billion people in water stress More than two billion people live in water stress. This means that they have little or no access to clean and safe drinking water. Chemical companies still discharge polluting waste into the environment that even reaches drinking water sources. Although, according to experts, the best quality drinking water comes from the tap in the Netherlands, the question is increasingly being asked how we can maintain this in the future. For example, recent research by the RIVM showed that Dutch drinking water made from river water increasingly contains PFAS, the collective name for countless harmful chemicals. In addition, the Netherlands is increasingly faced with a drinking water shortage. For example, water company Vitens does not have sufficient permit space to pump up extra water, which means that availability is stalling. Making tap water worldwide drinkable Development company Sterwater says it has the solution for this. Inventor Marius Visser, 79 years old, spent about ten years working on a solution to make contaminated tap water worldwide drinkable again, without having to filter minerals from the water. “That makes the Opresso technology unique,” ​​he says in his office in Oud-Beijerland. Visser worked for many years for Suzi Wan – the company behind the ready-to-use satay sauces and Asian products. “Before that, I've been to Asia a lot and saw with my own eyes how much misery there is in the world. I resolved: if I ever have the opportunity to do something good for society, I will do it.” That moment came in 1999. Visser was now working for an international water treatment company when the legionella outbreak in Bovenkarspel took place, where more than 30 people died. The cause was a contaminated fire hose used in hot tubs. It became Vissers' mission to ensure water safety worldwide. After years of sitting behind the drawing board in his office in Schilde, Belgium, he can finally launch his product: a water purification device for the kitchen counter. Filter cups instead of coffee cups The device, the Opresso machine, looks like a coffee maker with coffee cups. Instead of a coffee cup, there is a water filter cup in the device. Although there are already an enormous number of drinking water filters on the market, this technique distinguishes itself because, according to Visser, it only filters the polluting elements and bacteria from the water. “The healthy minerals stay in it.” Source for bacteria Visser's device filters the water in such a way that the minerals are preserved and bacteria are prevented. “We regularly have our water tested to see if what we are doing is going well,” adds his son Maurice. He shows the lab results. “This test was taken with tap water from Belgium. You see that the number of colony-forming units, as they call the bacterial growth, is 770,” explains Maurice. The number of colony-forming units in Dutch tap water is between 20 and 100. “Under 3,000, the water is drinkable. Incidentally, the Dutch standard is much stricter and is capped at 100 colony-forming units per milliliter," says son Maurice. Father and son had the same test performed again with the water that was purified with the Opresso machine. “There you see that the number of colony forming units is four. It should have been zero, but some contamination may have occurred when taking the sample.” Mineral Preservation The number of minerals in the drinking water was also measured in the laboratory tests. “Minerals that are standard in our drinking water, such as calcium, magnesium and zinc, remain the same after filtering with the Opresso machine”, he shows in the results. “We filter out what doesn't belong in it, and everything that does belong in it stays in.” Visser emphasizes that the Netherlands is not the market for his invention in the first instance. “The tap water here is perfectly drinkable. But even in Belgium the taste quality decreases due to the addition of chlorine. In America the quality is disastrous and in Asia it is even worse.” This is how the Opresso technique works Water 41 A water tank at the back of the machine is filled with tap water. The water goes through three filters. The first step is prefiltration. “In this step, all chemical and biological pollution is removed from the water. In the second step, the bacteria and viruses are rendered harmless. The latter takes place in the capsule with membrane filtration and all residual particles are filtered out. There are many water filters on the market, but they all only take the first step,” says Visser. “If you assume that every person drinks two liters of water a day, an average family therefore 10 to 15 liters, then one filter against 10 to 15 plastic bottles per day makes a huge difference.” Striking power “We worked for ten years to put this technology in a small kitchen appliance. Sometimes with one step forward and then two back. Ultimately, the result is a product that can change the world. Now the time has come when we have to bring it onto the market,” says Visser. And he can't do that alone. “You need a lot of strength to do that. We are therefore looking for partners to actually put this product on the market. People and companies who dare to take this step and understand that if we continue in this way, the planet will not be well.”