Moulded plastics for safe water worldwide
Onshore manufacture of moulded plastic components that help to provide access to safe drinking water worldwide
Onshore manufacture of moulded plastic components that help to provide access to safe drinking water worldwide
Charity & not-for-profit – Utilities
UK & international
The Safe Water Trust is the not-for-profit manufacturing arm of registered charity Grifaid, which works to provide access to safe drinking water in developing countries and disaster zones through the development, manufacture and supply of water filters used by families and their wider communities.
Grifaid coordinates with small charities and larger NGOs to deploy filters manufactured by the Safe Water Trust wherever they are needed. Established by local North East entrepreneur and designer John Griffith over a decade ago, the Safe Water Trust operates from facilities in Tyne and Wear. OF Bell supports the organisation’s manufacturing with simple-to-use moulded plastic components that achieve reliable performance in the field, delivering safe water for communities in over 50 countries globally.
“OF Bell have supplied us with plastic moulded parts for so many years that we consider them to be long term partners. Always found their team to be quick to respond to our need for tooling changes and the quality of parts continues to meet our high standards.”
OF Bell is a long-term manufacturing partner for the Safe Water Trust, delivering a reliable, consistent supply of quality-assured, UK-made moulded plastic components to this important regional charitable organisation.
The water filter component was developed alongside the Safe Water Trust team through our collaborative Product Design and Development phase, creating a hard-wearing, maintenance-free design which would continue to perform well in the field during regular, repetitive use and which can be manufactured cost-effectively to scale using our in-house injection moulding equipment.
Our water filter moulded plastic component forms an essential part of the Safe Water Trust’s family and community water filter products. Placed in a bucket of water, the Grifaid Family Filter is pumped by hand to produce water that’s free from particulates and safe for drinking. The filter features gauze and membrane, cross flow cleaning, and built-in back flushing and purging housed within a tough plastic casing that’s designed to last.
OF Bell’s moulded plastics and injection moulding engineers developed a detachable component which is a perfect fit for the Family Filter. The component features a gauze filter, which is fed from a roll into the tool and overmoulded, together with two living hinges used to attach the filter component to the base of the Family Filter.
Using product designs created by our team, and state-of-the-art CAD software for pinpoint accuracy, OF Bell’s in-house tool room designed and built bespoke injection moulding tools from scratch before testing the product, its tooling and FDA-approved plastics compound, which is suitable for food contact, for durability to ensure the finished component would deliver excellent in-situ performance.
OF Bell designed and manufactured a roll feeding machine specifically for this project, which feeds gauze into the tool during the injection moulding process. The gauze is then overmoulded to create the pre-filter component. The Safe Water Trust’s water filter component is manufactured by OF Bell using a shot weight of 45g, with around 8000 units produced annually.
OF Bell’s specialist moulded plastics, injection moulding and complex component engineering team in Bishop Auckland, Co. Durham, delivers robust, reliable and cost-effective components for our not-for-profit client, produced by a specialist team with ISO-certified quality assurance processes for unbeatable consistency.
The Safe Water Trust benefits from great access to OF Bell’s experienced local team of product design, tooling and plastic moulding experts, collaborating to create a component which is Made in Britain to short lead times, with low minimum order quantities, competitive production costs and no expensive shipping or storage costs, getting vital water filters out to the communities that need them without delay.