Our resident expert Jenny Poulter turns her eye to water to as part of our low carbon future series where we share the most exciting innovations from some of the most determined entrepreneurs on the planet.
Sometimes it can be hard to remember that we’re sliding further into a global water crisis when we casually pour ourselves a refreshing glass of H2O from the tap, without giving it a second thought.
But sliding further we are. Just ask the United Nations, which warns that, collectively, ‘our progress on water related goals and targets remains alarmingly off track, jeopardizing the entire sustainable development agenda.’ And the facts are indeed stark: over two billion people live in water-stressed countries, and one quarter of the global population uses unsafe drinking water sources. These are sombre statistics by any measure; frankly it’s beyond past time to get this sorted.
The UN is taking on this parlous state of affairs at its first conference on water since 1977 at its HQ in March. While we watch developments with a keen eye, here at Wilful HQ we’re turning our spotlight on the raft of inspiring people beavering away on solutions across the myriad global water challenges. Yes, for innovations from improving water quality to reducing water use, we’ve got you covered. You’re welcome. And we’re sure you’ve got other innovations to share too, so please do so at hello@thewilful.com.
As we’ve noted in previous pieces, climate change is responsible for a dastardly long list of heinous global problems. And unfortunately, clean water scarcity ranks pretty high up on that list. Wouldn’t it be amazing if safe, high-quality water could be made an endlessly unlimited and renewable resource around the world? It would certainly help our societal climate resilience – but it’s not like we can just magic drinking water out of thin air.
Although, um, it turns out that apparently, we can. Yes, the clever people over at SOURCE have created panels, which create clean drinking water using only sunlight and air.
To achieve such wizardry, SOURCE’s patented Hydropanels use the sun to draw pure, constantly replenished water vapor out of the air and transform it into fresh, perfectly mineralized drinking water. The Hydropanel system works entirely off the grid, requires no outside source of electricity or piped water infrastructure, and produces the high-quality drinking water on site. They can achieve this even in a variety of climates and remote, low-humidity locations; and the beauty of the tech is that the Hydropanels can scale from small arrays to multi-thousand panel water farms, to provide sustainable drinking water for industrial, commercial, residential and community applications.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, an innovation that directly addresses the significant and fast-growing demand for clean, sustainable drinking water in this way has been warmly welcomed by the funding community. To date, SOURCE has already raised over $360 million in funding from investors including The Lightsmith Group, Fifth Wall, Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Microsoft Climate Innovation Fund.
Elsewhere, if we cast our eye over water-intensive industries, food production and energy emerge as the biggest culprits. Agriculture is by far the largest consumer of the world’s freshwater resources; it uses a whopping 72 percent of all water withdrawals. But you can see the conundrum: the growing world population needs to eat. We just need to get a whole lot better at how we produce our food.
The problem stems from our continued use of wildly outdated farming practices, with one key culprit being irrigation methods. It’s been said that today, farmers lose as much as 50 percent of water drawn to manual, outdated and inefficient irrigation. And it’s costly too: irrigating land is not just water-wasteful, but also labour intensive.
Luckily, innovators are stepping up to address this ignominy, triggering a profusion of new precision agriculture and ag tech activity. For its part, IoT agriculture start-up CODA Farm Technologies is focussing in on irrigation efficiency tech, by providing remote monitoring and control for agricultural irrigation pumps and irrigation reels.
While we can safely say that we never thought we’d utter the words ‘IoT-automated irrigation wheels and pumps’ with such enthusiasm, we’re fully onboard with CODA’s innovation. Its FarmHQ platform consists of a small device and sensor kit, which can be retrofitted to any irrigation system in one easy DIY manoeuvre. The other component is the FarmHQ app, which enables farmers to remotely monitor and control their irrigation systems in real-time.
Providing this visibility and data helps farmers to protect their crops, reduce waste and save time, while simplifying and streamlining their operations. That’s what we’d consider a big win – and backers who evidently agree include Lowercarbon Capital and Arnold Venture Group.
Aside from agriculture, the other big water-guzzling culprit is, of course, energy. Yes, the vast majority of energy generation is water intensive, and its use in coal-fired power plants and nuclear reactors is no exception. In fact, the UN has said that power plant cooling is responsible for 43% of total freshwater withdrawals in Europe and nearly 50% in the USA. And while we’d hazard a guess that it’s not something us lay people think about much, it turns out that powerplant plumes are responsible for significant water evaporation through cooling.
So what to do about this? Well, meet Infinite Cooling, a start-up founded by three former MIT students determined to make industrial cooling more efficient. Their patented WaterPanel technology developed at MIT uses electric fields to capture the water droplets in plumes leaving cooling towers, and uses advanced software to optimize the cooling process.
By recovering and recycling the water from the cooling tower exhausts in this way, the energy, water consumption and water treatment costs of industrial processes can be reduced. So aside from simply making industrial cooling more efficient, Infinite Cooling is reducing freshwater usage and helping to reduce global water scarcity. We can totally get behind that – as can $17 million-worth of investor capital, including from Material Impact.
It’s great that innovators are tackling the biggest water guzzling sectors in this way. But the huge issue that needs addressing when we think of water through the lens of health and sanitation is water quality. Contaminated water is a blight for billions of people around the world. For healthy societies to function, it’s imperative that we know what’s lurking in our H2O; so well-developed water monitoring systems are crucial.
Meet KETOS, an impressive one-stop-shop fully integrated platform that helps organisations to monitor and address water quality and efficiency. How? Well, its technology platform combines hardware, software, connectivity, automated reporting, predictive analytics and maintenance to automate water quality monitoring in customers’ water systems. The SaaS platform keeps a beady eye on water flow, pressure, volume, and other efficiency data points across customers’ applications. Its pièce de résistance, though, is the KETOS SHIELD, which monitors for dozens of parameters including heavy metals like lead and copper, and ammonia or nitrates, which is crucial to determining the health and safety of drinking water.
Able to autonomously monitor any water source, and being self-cleaning to boot, KETOS can quite feasibly claim that its solution is transforming how water operators measure, manage and forecast water quality and efficiency. No surprises, then, that it has secured nearly $40 million in investor backing so far from players including Accenture Ventures, Motley Fool Ventures and Better Ventures.
Finally, there’s no denying the increasing need for global access to pure drinking water. A key component of this is the crucial role of water purification – and we were pretty amazed to learn recently that Mother Nature already has her own water purification technology nailed.
‘What do you mean?’ we hear you ask. Well, ever heard of an aquaporin cell? Neither had we, but from what we can surmise it is nothing short of a membrane masterpiece. This genius protein is responsible for transporting and purifying water in all living cells. And, thanks to billions of years of evolution, these aquaporins are super-efficient at their job: one square metre of synthetic manmade membrane can filter around 50 litres of water per hour, but one gram of aquaporins can filter 700 litres per second. Yowsers.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone could apply that kind of natural innovation to our critical global need for pure drinking water? Well whaddya know, the clever folks at Aquaporin are already on it. Yes, their Aquaporin Inside technology incorporates these aquaporin proteins into membranes to replicate nature’s own water filtration process.
The result is a suite of products that enable fast, energy-efficient and natural water filtration across a wide range of applications, whether we’re talking in-home water purification products, concentrating food & beverage products, or the sustainable reuse of water in industrial applications such as effluent treatment or textiles.
We’re big fans of biomimicry at the best of times, so we think mimicking nature’s own water purification process in this way is pretty darn awesome. And with Aquaporin Inside even being used by NASA in space, we’re clearly not the only ones.
