Despite U.S. Research Resistance, Great Lakes Aims to Be Silicon Valley for WaterMILWAUKEE – The confluence of the Milwaukee and Menominee riv...

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Despite U.S. Research Resistance, Great Lakes Aims to Be Silicon Valley for WaterMILWAUKEE – The confluence of the Milwaukee and Menominee riv...
Despite U.S. Research Resistance, Great Lakes Aims to Be Silicon Valley for Water
MILWAUKEE – 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.


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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.

Attached link

https://www.circleofblue.org/2025/technology/despite-u-s-research-resistance-great-lakes-aims-to-be-silicon-valley-for-water

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