Local Rotarians have seen how vital supplies of water treatment units are organised for despatch to disaster-hit areas of the world.

Seven members of Kirkby Rotary Club visited the Aquabox depot near Wirksworth, Derbyshire, for a tour of the facilities where the contents of the water filtration boxes are assembled for shipment. Aquabox was invented by, and is administered by, Rotarians.

Martin Crittenden and Colin Lloyd, who led the tour, are members of the Wirksworth Rotary Club and among the trustees of the charity that runs the operation. They explained that apart from one part-time secretary, all the workers are volunteers.

Their job is to assemble the 40-component filter units and fill the Aquaboxes with the 70-plus purchased items of humanitarian aid that go into each family-sized box.These range across toiletries, cookware, toys, tools, bedding, writing materials, etc.

The visitors learned that this smaller water purification unit, the Gold, costing £125, is capable of filtering a minimum of 18,000 litres of potable water, the amount needed by a family of five for around 18 months. The £250 Community version contains only a larger AquaFilter based on the same well-proven micropore technology. This can produce up to 500,000 litres from local contaminated water sources, enough to provide drinking water for 500 people for well over a year and half.

Rotarians Crittenden and Lloyd said that 500 family Aquaboxes had been despatched to relief organisations in Syria, and other large batches had gone to Rotary and Ghurkha distribution set-ups in Nepal.

The Rotarians took the opportunity of the visit to make a donation. The club’s president-elect, Philip Hurt, said: “It’s a small contribution to help towards the cost of running this amazing operation, which provides so much relief to disaster-suffering people around the world.”