10 Companies Making Waves in Water Innovation

10 Companies: NewWaves ofWater Innovation

Thedata on water scarcitycontinues to be sobering, and shortages increasingly are linked to both natural and human-made causes. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live in regions that face "absolute water scarcity," reports the United Nations. Stemming the losses and re-diverting the flow to stressed regions this will take a big investment: almost $1.8 trillion over the next 20 years, according to the U.N. University Institute for Water, Environment and Health.

The good news is corporate investments ininnovative technologiesand processes for reducing the drain on aquifers, detecting leaky infrastructure, reusing wastewater and addressing thetroublesome water-energy nexusare on the rise.

One microcosm of activity centers on desalination: there has been a 57 percent increase in capacity over the past five years to 19.8 billion gallons per day, according to analyst firm Global Water Intelligence and the International Desalination Association.

"Growth in desalination is not linear, and it is tied to many other factors, including the cost of oil, prices of certain commodities and availability of financing," said Patricia Burke, secretary general for the IDA, in a statement. "However, the underlying factors that have driven the growth of desalination remain in place, including population growth, industrial development, pollution of traditional water resources and climate change."

There's far more to water innovation, however, than better desalination.Global Water Intelligence reportsthat major companies have committed more than $84 billion over the past three years to water efficiency and conservation. Although lists of this nature are always subjective, here are 10 companies that have our attention — ranging from more major manufacturers working hard to reduce their freshwater dependence, technology startups that address the water-energy generation nexus and need for more intelligent infrastructure, and organizations that are advancing what it means to be a responsible water steward.

1. Alliance for Water Stewardship

Technically speaking, theallianceisn't a company, but the organization is behind the development of aglobal standardfor defining water stewardship developed over the past four years. The verification system for evaluating and verifying compliance with these metrics and business practices is due out by the end of 2014.

Close to 30 organizations are driving the framework, including Nestle, General Mills, Ecolab, Sealed Air and Veolia.

"As a global food company, water is critical to General Mills' business," said Jerry Lynch, vice president and chief sustainability officer ofGeneral Mills, in a statement. "We have an interest and a responsibility to protect the quality and supply of water upon which our business depends, and actively look for ways to collaborate with others to benefit our growers, the community and the environment. We wholeheartedly embrace this challenge and are proud to be a founding partner with AWS as they seek to define the global standard on responsible water stewardship."

Spun out of MIT, Cambrian Innovation makes reactors like this one, which can create biogas and 20,000 gallons of clean water per day. (Credit: Cambrian Innovation)

2. American Water

Water utilities have a big vested interest in the water supply, of course, but not a lot of money to spend fixing the efficiency challenge. American Water's strategy is unique. The largest publicly traded utility in the United Statesspent $1.9 million on research and development (R&D) in 2013; about one-quarter of those funds went to outside research grants. That doesn't count the $800 million to $1 billion that the Voorhees, N.J.-based company invests annually to replace aging pipes and pumps and construct new facilities.

American WaterCEO Susan Story, an engineer by training, told me that the 128-year-old company is focusing its R&D on three main things: safety, supplying clean and affordable water, and ensuring a "sustainable" supply. Among other things, it is testing technologies including smart meters and acoustic pipeline monitoring systems, demand response systems that automate water pump schedules for improved efficiency and — with more frequency — water reuse strategies and processes.

This strategy isn't ad hoc or random: American Water has created what it calls the Innovation Development Process. When the utility decides it wants to try something new, a multi-stakeholder team is created to carry out testing and to be accountable for results. Three senior executives, called the Stage Gate Committee, are responsible for finding the money to support pilots. "We are facing a national problem that something must be done about," Story said.

3. Cambrian Innovation

Technologies for reusing wastewater more intelligently are emerging quickly. One example is Boston-basedCambrian Innovation's approach, the EcoVolt, which uses a bioelectric process to simultaneously treat water and generate biogas energy. Each reactor unit is the size of a shipping container, handling about 20,000 gallons daily. Brewery Bear Republic in California is using EcoVolt systems to recycle and supply about 10 percent of its water requirements.

"There is this giant problem of wastewater —billions of gallons from industrial, agricultural and other sources," Matthew Silver, co-founder and CEO of Cambrian,told me earlier this year. "The issue of management is large and growing, and there needs to be a new paradigm to approach these things."

4. Coca-Cola

One of the earliest food and beverage companies to focus serious management attention on water, Coca-Cola and its bottlers have spent up to $2 billion on conservation since 2003, according to internal estimates.

The Slingshot water purifier helps Coca-Cola deliver clean drinking water to remote areas. (Credit: Coca-Cola)Coca-Cola works closely with the World Wildlife Fundto develop and carry out its water-related environmental commitments, including a pledge to improve the water efficient of its manufacturing operations an additional 25 percent by 2020, on top of the 21.4 percent improvement that it achieved between 2004 and 2012. Right now, it supports conservation efforts focused on regions including the river basins of the Amazon, Koshi, Mekong, Rio Grande/Bravo and Zambezi; catchments of the Great Barrier Reef; and watersheds of the Amu-Heilong, Atlantic Forests and Northern Great Plains. In January, it added a project focused on the Yangtze in China, the third longest river in the world.

One of its more radical initiatives, part of the5x20 corporate social responsibility program, involvesdelivering up to 2,000 off-grid water purification systemsto rural communities in 20 countries by late 2015.

"Few projects to date have so ambitiously vowed to help rural communities through such a tightly linked partnership structure that incorporates world-renowned organizations from the public, private and civic sectors," said Dean Kamen, the Segway innovator who developed the Slingshot purification technology at the center of this effort. "We hope additional organizations will join us to expedite the positive impact the project will have on communities globally."

Even with all these efforts in place, water conservation programs take patience, perserverance and honesty: Coca-Cola suffered a public setback in June when officials in Indiaclosed down one of its plantsfor allegedly extracting too much groundwater.

Source: GreenBiz

Read More Related Content On This Topic - Click Here

Media

Taxonomy

• Innovation
• Water Utility