By Joe Boomgaard | TBL
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GRAND RAPIDS — On a recent trip to Honduras, a local woman invited Christina Keller to come into her hut, where the woman’s family had two months ago installed a HydrAid BioSand Water Filter, a product manufactured by Cascade Engineering Inc., the company founded by Keller’s father. The woman wanted to tell Keller that, because of the HydrAid filter, her eight children no longer had to suffer through bouts of sickness attributed to a lack of safe water.

At any one time before the family had the water filter, two or three of the children would have been laid up sick with waterborne illnesses, but now they were healthy and able to help the family eke out a living.

“That increased her ability to clean house, and she now had a little workforce of people to help her,” Keller told TBL.

The family had been in the same boat as the 800 million people across the globe who currently lack access to safe water. While various aid organizations and NGOs can often muster enough funds to build large-scale projects and water wells in the developing world, Keller said a host of local factors like ownership claims and lack of parts can often pose problems for the success of those projects. Even some cheap products that could help the people aren’t successful because they’re hard to use or don’t fit with the people’s culture.

“The answer may be much smaller and remote and distributed, but people (funding the projects) want big concrete and tangible and centralized systems,” Keller said. So while more focus has shifted to increasing access to safe water, “the number of people dying from waterborne illness rose. … What more people need to do is identify a need locally and design something that works in that culture.”

Keller said that’s where Canadian inventor Dr. David Manz got it right when he developed the technology behind the HydrAid BioSand filter. The filter takes a slow sand filtration process employed at many municipal water treatment plants and downsizes it for home use. The original design used a concrete housing for the filter, but the product was heavy and that posed problems for transporting it intact into remote reaches of the world. In 2005, Safe Water Institute formed to distribute the filter and tapped Cascade Engineering to design and engineer a plastic container to house the sand filter to make the product lighter and easier to distribute.

Christina Keller, business unit leader at Cascade Engineering, said the company faced some tough challenges with the HydrAid water filter, but ultimately linked up with the Windquest Group to form Triple Quest, which markets the filters to numerous organizations across the globe. PHOTO: JOE BOOMGAARD

Cascade invested into a mold to make what’s essentially a plastic tub for the filter. While the company had the capacity to build 250,000 filters a year, it didn’t feel the institute had the capacity to distribute anywhere near that number of filters. That led Cascade to reach out to Spring Lake-based International Aid, which joined the team in late 2006, to expand the distribution reach for the products.

The partners at the time would get backing from various NGOs to fund efficacy studies of the filter, in which the filter scored very highly, even at the head of the pack comparatively. They got Dow to donate the resin to make the tub and went on ship the first filters in early 2008. But the group again ran into issues in mid-2009 when International Aid experienced financial troubles and suspended operations.

That left Cascade Engineering with a significant investment in tooling and a mold to make a product that had no distribution channel.

“We got the notice and had to make the decision — do we write this off and say that was interesting and learn from our mistakes, or do we try to breathe new life into this?” Keller said. “It was the middle of the downturn. Being an automotive supplier, our appetite for cash to invest in opportunities at that time was not big, … so we looked externally for funding.”

The company found a willing partner in West Michigan with The Windquest Group, the DeVos family private investment firm, and the partners purchased the international distribution rights to the filter.

“We put in the assets of the tooling and the knowledge and they put in the cash, and we ran it with their capital,” Keller said. “Rather than just sell to one NGO, we decided we would have a model where it would be sold to multiple nonprofit organizations. Since then, we’ve had a lot of success and momentum.”

Keller serves as the business unit leader for Triple Quest, part of the Cascade Engineering family of companies. Since the partnership, Triple Quest has continued to sell the filters to NGOs like USAID, Rotary International and others that distribute them around the world, particularly in the Americas and Africa. They also worked with the U.S. Navy’s Project Handclasp, which allows humanitarian products to ship for free on Navy vessels and be delivered to nonprofits. Sailors can even install the HydrAid filters in users’ home, in some cases.

While many of the filters end up being given to families — “There’s only so much you can ask of people, but we do strive for empowerment,” Keller said — Cascade and Windquest are also developing a micro-entrepreneur program in Honduras to sell the products directly to the people who would use the filter.

“We’re working on a direct-to-end-user model, but it’s slow,” she said. “Some of them have not ever had a job and many don’t know how to manage money at all. With nonprofits, we know they’ll pay and buy (the filters) in high quantities. The deal with end users has more risk and variability. We’ve worked at it in Honduras (and tried) to make it work, but it’s not moving as quickly as we’d like. … It’s core to what we do in terms of empowerment, but it’s not where we think we’ll sell the most filters in the next year.

“It’s not the same as selling something to GM or Herman Miller or Ford, but it’s not erratic. There are patterns and things to learn and incorporate into the product from the local culture. It’s good to get in a country and have a level of respect for the people. They work very hard and are very diligent and motivated.”

But don’t let that imply that the company is looking at HydrAid as charity work.

“We’re setting up systems in place to be sustainable. We’re working at it, but are we profitable? No,” Keller said. “If we stopped when International Aid stopped, it would have definitely been a loss. We’re working ourselves out of a hole. … We want to be a sustainable business unit.”

The filter product exemplifies Cascade’s triple bottom line approach. Keller said it’s unfortunate that many people drive a wedge between economics and being environmentally and socially conscious. Triple Quest aims to bridge all three legs of the triple bottom line to bring a much-needed environmental solution to poor people across the world, and at the same time have the company be viable. She’s adamant that it will be because the economic, environmental and social pieces are all necessary for the success of a business.

“It’s not ‘either/or,’ it’s ‘both/and,’” she said. “There are 800 million people that lack access to safe water. There are 800 million opportunities. It’s just about getting filters to those people. The need is there and the product is there.”