That was my personal opinion once we are aware of a public statement regarding the health concern from Health Canada with regard to “disposable graphene masks” last Friday. If you are not familiar with the news, please read the official statement here
The most important unproven hypothesis from my standpoint based on the statement is quoted “However, the potential for people to inhale graphene particles from face masks and the related health risks are not yet known, and may vary based on mask design”.
We want to address immediate concerns for flextrapower’s customers that our mask is safe to use, and we ensure that all the necessary precautions and testing have been performed to make sure there is no graphene particles inhalation risk under normal use. It’s also important for our user to have the graphene side of the filter (the black side) facing outward when re-placing into the mask.
And just to get a bit technical into the construction of the graphene-infused filter, it was multiple layer materials, in which graphene was coated on a hydrophobic substrate (layer 1), followed by a polymer encapsulation (layer 2) and adhered onto a biodegradable filter media (layer 3). These 3 layers together provide the highly breathable, antiviral property and durable filter that can be reused more than a dozen times. Thanks to our partner autonomous.ai to come up with the illustration on how our filter works.
- Layer 1 acts as a water repellent, so most of the virus-containing droplet was blocked
- Layer 2 acts as a dual-use barrier to prevent graphene particles to “leak” out and also to “trap” the virus particles
It’s important to point out that our mask design is different as it’s not a disposable mask, which was the main target of the recall statement by Health Canada. Flextrapower’s mask is rather a reusable one, with a replaceable graphene-infused filter with a premium cloth mask with our first and foremost mission to reduce the waste for single-use products, following the Sustainable Development Goals guideline from the UN.
We finalized our design, after multiple prototype rounds as it was the most sustainable way to reuse the cloth mask while achieving necessary protection from utilizing the filters. As the matter of fact, we effectively “invented” the double mask recommendation by the CDC, which was first published a little over a month ago.
As the founder and CEO of flextrapower, I’m standing behind the quality of our products and I’m confident that we have done enough testing to ensure the safety aspect. And we shared the details of the development process in another blog post, please read more here!
