Samsung Electronics announced its new Less Microfiber filter, an external washing machine filter designed to significantly reduce plastic microfiber emissions during laundry cycles. The new washing machine external filtre has been designed with inspiration from apparel maker Patagonia and the global ocean conservation organisation Ocean Wise. The company says that the filter builds on the success of last year’s Less Microfiber Cycle to substantially cut microplastics and enable sustainable laundry washing. The new filter is now available in Korea and the U.K. and will roll out to other countries in the third quarter.
The Less Microfiber filtre comes as an external filtre that’s designed to stop microplastics before they enter the ocean. Samsung claims that its Microfiber Cycle helped reduce microplastic shedding by 54%1 in part by leveraging Samsung’s proprietary Ecobubble technology.
The Less Microfiber Filter takes this a step further and it claims to prevent up to 98% of microplastics released during laundry from escaping into the ocean, equivalent to eight 500ml plastic bottles per year when used four times a week. In addition, to help more customers get involved in cutting microplastic emissions, the Less Microfiber Filter has a mountable design style that allows it to be used with standard washing machine models.
Samsung Less Microfiber Filter is made using recycled plastics — to help incorporate sustainability at every stage of its lifecycle – and was designed to be long-lasting and easy to maintain. The filter’s blades capture the microplastics with a 65-70 micrometre wide mesh, then redirect and compress these microplastics to one side, meaning the filter only needs to be cleaned roughly once a month. The filtre can also be connected to SmartThings to check the capacity level of the filtre and when users need to clean it and even address other issues related to it.