Our Filter Factory Setup Team is on their way to Davao City, Mindanao in the Philippines today. They will be helping complete the set up of the Filter Factory for Clean Water International (CWI). This last week was spent finishing preparations for the trip which included making sure that the factory has all the equipment staged and ready so that they can help put on the finishing touches and start producing filters as soon as possible.
This last stage of producing filters can be a bit tricky as they narrow down a filter recipe (proportion of clay to "burn out" material ) and firing temperature that works best for the native materials at the preferred flow rate which we recommend. One of their first projects will be to build a kiln as CWI has been experiencing some difficulty with preparation due to recovery work from Typhoon Ursala.
This work has been made possible by a generous grant from the Dominican Sisters of Peace and the Wheaton Franciscan Sister's Ministry Fund.
I appreciate the blog and photos/videos of the trip to the Philippines. To what extent do the local potters end up making clay manually as shown in the video? Hope the trip met its goals and look forward to learning more details. Thanks for what you're doing.