TEM Ceramic
Six Months Before the Kiln
TEM ceramic begins as clay and a living culture, and only becomes ceramic half a year later. This page explains where the idea came from, what happens during those six months, and what is still in the bead once the firing is over.
Where it started
It began in Okinawa
In the 1980s, Dr Teruo Higa, an agricultural scientist at the University of the Ryukyus in Okinawa, was working on a problem that had frustrated microbiologists for years. Cultures of beneficial microorganisms tended to collapse — the species competed, one took over, and the balance was lost.
His answer was to stop treating them as individuals. Cultured together under the right conditions, a particular set of species turned out to be stable: each one produced something another could use. He called the result EM — effective microorganisms.
EM went into soil, compost and waste water, and it is still used that way across the world today. TEM ceramic takes that idea somewhere else: native Korean microbial cultures are blended with clay from a plant-sediment layer and left to ferment, and only then does the mixture become ceramic.
Around eighty species, living together
The TEM culture draws roughly 80 species from 10 genera across 5 families. They coexist in an acidic medium, and it is that coexistence — not any single strain — that makes the culture stable enough to work through clay for half a year.
- Lactic acid bacteriaProduce the organic acids that hold the culture at low pH
- Photosynthetic bacteriaConsume the compounds behind decay and odour
- YeastsBreak down sugars and feed the other groups
- Actinomycetes & fermenting fungiWork on the tougher organic matter in the clay
The process
Ferment, Form, Fire
Three stages, and the first one takes longer than the other two put together — by a wide margin.
Ferment
High-purity clay is blended with the TEM culture and then left alone. Six months is the minimum, and there is no way to shorten it — the culture needs that long to work through the clay, break down what it can and leave its own minerals behind in the process.
Form
Once fermentation is complete the clay is rolled into small beads and dried. Bead form is a deliberate choice: broken into spheres, the same volume of ceramic offers far more surface to the water than a solid block ever could.
Fire
The dried beads are fired between 800 and 1,400 °C. The clay hardens into a crystalline ceramic and the minerals from those six months are locked into the structure, while the organic matter burns away and leaves its openings behind.
What survives the kiln
Three things the firing leaves behind
The culture is gone by the time the beads come out. What it spent six months building is not.
A micro-porous body
Where organic matter sat in the clay, the kiln leaves an opening. The result is a bead threaded with pores from the nanometre to the micrometre scale — enormously more surface than a solid bead of the same size.
Those pores are where the water actually meets the ceramic. They are also why a small handful of beads can act on a full drum of wash water.
A changed mineral makeup
Six months of fermentation leaves minerals in the clay that were not there at the start — carried in by the culture itself and by what it fed on. Firing fixes them into the ceramic body rather than on its surface.
Calcium, magnesium and potassium then pass slowly into the water, cycle after cycle, instead of washing off in the first few uses.
Surfaces that hold on
Porous ceramic surfaces adsorb. In a wash cycle that means some of what lifts off the fabric is held in the pores rather than left circulating to settle back onto the load.
It is the same property that puts porous ceramics into water-treatment media — here it is doing a much simpler job.
Far-infrared emission, measured
Once fired, the ceramic emits in the 8–14 μm far-infrared band — a property that comes from the mineral content of the clay, iron oxide in particular. This is the one characteristic on this page that has been put in front of an independent Korean testing institute and certified, and the report is reproduced here in full.
Beyond laundry
The same ceramic, other jobs
A porous, mineral-rich ceramic is useful well outside a washing machine, and TEM ceramic turns up across a number of functional applications. In BioWashBall it does one job only: it changes how the water in the drum behaves, so that a load can be washed without detergent.
- Water treatment media
- Soil conditioning
- Functional ceramics
See it doing that one job
BioWashBall seals 152 g of functional ceramic — TEM among them — into a housing built to survive years in a drum. Independent laboratories have measured what it does to wash water and to fabric — the reports are all on the product page.