Despite U.S. Research Resistance, Great Lakes Aims to Be Silicon Valley for Water

The confluence of the Milwaukee and Menominee rivers, in the downtown core of Wisconsin’s largest city, is a prime vantage to assess the collection of assets that define the past and future of Great Lakes water use, and the array of technology development encompassing the region’s water.

Together and in complement, universities, research labs, tech incubators, water-focused businesses, and forward-thinking utilities here and in other cities are pushing for something greater than the sum of their parts. Drawing from a deep well of economic and industrial history, leaders envision the Great Lakes region as a world-changing hub for water technology, achieving for pipes, pumps, sensors, waste purification, and resource recovery what Silicon Valley did for semiconductor advances and personal computing. 

But unlike Silicon Valley’s ascent, which was significantly bolstered by steady public research funding – federal investment, for instance, paid 25 percent of the cost of developing the transistor – Great Lakes blue economy development is taking shape in an era of resistance to U.S. government research outlays. 

Nevertheless, the water-related economy is emerging, especially in Milwaukee. The headquarters of The Water Council, an influential water tech incubator, reflects the future. The council’s research center hosts more than a dozen companies, including Badger Meter, a Wisconsin-based maker of water monitoring and measuring equipment. The firm’s $7 billion market cap has grown eight-fold in the last decade.

Downstream, where the Milwaukee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet, is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Science, a center of scholarship on freshwater ecosystems and water equipment technology.

Then there’s the historic water economy. Milwaukee hosts the 155-year-old Pabst Brewery, a prodigious water user before it closed two decades ago and a city icon. Not far away, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s Jones Island Water Reclamation Facility, a century-old treatment plant, turns sewage into commercial fertilizer for lawns and golf courses. 

And around the riverbend, just out of sight, is sparkling Lake Michigan, the fountainhead of the water-based economic cluster and the region’s blue economy. 

This extensive roll call is not just a Milwaukee phenomenon. It is repeated in other Great Lakes cities. Chicago boasts Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, the tech hub Current, and Sloan Valve Company, a toilet and faucet producer. 

On Lake Erie’s shores, Cleveland has Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Water Alliance, and, until it moves to Chicago next year, the faucet company Moen. Hundreds of other Ohio companies comprise a durable regional water sector.

read more about water in the Great Lakes

Thunder Bay is Bringing its Great Lake Shoreline Back

This collection of innovators and water-focused businesses is the defining feature of the region’s blue economy, said Dean Amhaus, founding president and CEO of The Water Council.

“You need to have that innovation happening,” Amhaus said. “And that’s not going to happen everywhere. It just can’t. But there are going to be centers of concentration in a very organic way that come up over periods of time. And that becomes like Boston or Silicon Valley for different industries. It just becomes a feeder.”

A hundred and fifty years ago it was the breweries and tanneries needing to treat water and dispose of waste products that drove water innovation. Today, amid wavering federal support in the United States for transformative scientific research, the need to deliver clean water and purify wastewater, in the Great Lakes and beyond, still commands the spirit of invention.

From the Great Lakes to the World

The water tech incubators in the region engage with businesses at all stages of development. Current is in the second year of a 10-year, $160-million National Science Foundation grant to develop “waste-to-wealth” technologies that recover critical minerals like lithium from wastewater and remove the hard-to-destroy, toxic chemicals known as PFAS. 

“These are not simple, off-the-shelf technologies,” said Alaina Harkness, CEO of Current.

The early years of Great Lakes ReNew, as the NSF project is called, will be focused on the difficult work of laboratory research and engineering the scientific breakthroughs that can then be market tested.

That stage is where Cleveland Water Alliance, a project partner, enters. CWA, through its test-bed program, shepherds early-stage developments from a controlled lab environment through trial runs that are conducted under variable real-world conditions. Founded in 2014, CWA has turned parts of Lake Erie and tributary rivers into living laboratories by liberally seeding them with sensors, buoys, and data-collecting devices. Across 7,740 square miles of the watershed, the sensors relay data on nutrient concentrations, temperature, and water chemistry. CWA has partnerships with 31 utilities plus agricultural, industrial, and residential test beds for assessing unproven water technology in those contexts.

“We’ve got some really great research institutions and we’ve got some really progressive utilities,” said Bryan Stubbs, the organization’s executive director and president. “So we have the ingredients for a natural cluster.”

Other organizations like The Water Council and Aqua Action, based in Canada, take promising small businesses with few sales and help them vault into larger markets.

Attached link

Taxonomy

• Water Reclamation
• Research
• Water Footprint Research
• Lake Management
• Research water quality
• Water, Waste Water Chemical & Treatment
• United States