From The Grand Junction Daily Sentinel (Katie Langford):
Even before he designed lightweight, biodegradable water pouches, local inventor and entrepreneur Tim Huff had his eyes on a much bigger project.
As the founder of Palisade-based company Colorado Clear, Huff has always dreamed of a way to provide clean water in large quantities to those who need it the most, whether they’re people living in an impoverished country or a disaster-stricken community.
“The logistics of shipping water is horrible,” Huff said. “Water weighs an exorbitant amount.”
It takes semitrailer after semitrailer to bring enough clean water to communities in need, and the waste that’s left behind stays in landfills for hundreds of years.
And even with a water filtration plant built in a community, people might not have sterile containers to haul and store the water safely.
What people really need, Huff said, is an all-in-one water purification and bottling system — a system that will purify water on site, then put it into sterile containers that won’t overwhelm landfills. The system needs components that are small enough to be hauled in a standard pickup or airplane, yet hefty enough to purify and bottle thousands of bottles of water in a day.
Huff didn’t see anything like that on the market, so he created it.
Huff and the Colorado Clear team finished their first model in November and have since received calls from across the country and the world. From Flint, Michigan, to Ghana, governments and organizations are asking for one of Huff’s systems.
Some can pay for it out of pocket, but many others can’t.
People desperately need clean water, Huff said, and he’s looking for public and private investors to bring it to them.
“We want to get the word out to the right people in government or the (non-governmental organizations) who are willing to back this and get this technology out to the people,” Huff said. “It’s something that the world needs.”
It’s also something Mesa County needs, because Huff said he is committed to manufacturing his product in the Grand Valley.
The first mobile purification and bottling system was almost entirely sourced from nine local companies.
“Our goal is to have a global solution for this problem but at the same time put our community back to work with something that is a year-round need, globally,” he said.
While he’s happy that his biodegradable water “amphoras” will mean less trash in the world, Huff said he’s more focused on the people who die every day because they don’t have access to clean water.
“It’s more important to us, getting safe water to people,” Huff said. “I think that’s a bigger issue.”