Cloth filter

This article is about decontamination of drinking water. For other uses, see cheesecloth.
For reusable coffee filters made of cloth, see cloth coffee filter.
Women at a village pond in Matlab, Bangladesh washing utensils and vegetables. The woman on the right is putting a sari filter onto a water-collecting pot (or kalash) to filter water for drinking.

A cloth filter is a simple and cost-effective appropriate technology method for reducing the contamination of drinking water, developed for use mainly in Bangladesh. Water collected in this way has a greatly reduced pathogen count. Though not always perfectly safe, it is an improvement for poor people with limited options.

Filtering water to free it from micro-organisms has been an age-old practice among Jains who carefully remove the micro-organisms in the cloth through filtered water in order to follow doctrine of Ahimsa or non-violence, preventing pain to any living creature.