Another company has created a patented process using “little tornadoes” to separate wastes as people produce drinking water from salt water.
And a third company uses bubbles the thickness of human hairs and high concentrations of bacteria to remove contaminants — especially nitrogen and phosphorus — from sewage treatment plants before the water pours back into a stream or river.
Those are three of the six businesses participating in Pipeline H2O’s second-ever class of water-technology businesses that hope to use their innovations to improve the environment, provide better drinking water and also, make some money.
Pipeline H2O is the Hamilton-based effort, with space also in Cincinnati’s Over-the-Rhine neighborhood, that is an effort to create “a Silicon Valley for Water” in this region, which over the past century-plus has been a fountainhead of water innovation, thanks to waterworks, sewage plants, global businesses, universities and a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research center.
The Pipeline H2O “Class of 2018,” which will run from January through May, is mentoring the companies to help them find find utilities interested in experimenting with them and possibly becoming clients. It’s also helping them figure out their optimum pitches to potential buyers, and making other connections to help the small businesses thrive.
The companies spent part of last week working on best ways to describe why their innovations are so good.
Karen Sorber, CEO of Virginia-based Micronic Technologies, which uses the small tornadoes in the de-salination process, said coming up with good ways to communicate about the products is critical. That’s because, “Explaining a system that’s complex, that’s shifting the body of knowledge for engineering, is not engineering,” she said. “It’s a new application of physics. Explaining that to people, especially scientific people, can be very difficult at best.”
Some of these companies, one suspects, may make a big splash.
In 2015, the world “produced 50 billion bottles of water,” said Scott Edwards of Drop Water. “That’s enough bottles to go around the earth’s equator 253 times. And we’re doing that every year. And it’s growing.”
Drop Water, based in Menlo Park, Calif., has taken on the mission of finding “a way, to use different materials, that can be broken down by nature,” he said. The dispenser, about 75 percent the size of a regular vending machine (but not as deep), holds more than 1,000 bendable “bottles” that are earth-friendly. They are filled on site from municipal water.
“The advantages are you don’t need to transport all that water,” Edwards said. “We transport 1/20th the weight, compared to traditional methods, and also we don’t need to take up that much space when we’re transporting it. Because they nest together. So we take up about 1/10th the space, in transporting it.”
The company uses proprietary, compost-able bottles, with the ability to choose the milligrams of caffeine in the drink. It has some temporary kiosks in California’s Bay Area. The company has provided kiosks for a Twitter recruiting event, where one machine sold 1,200 bottles on three days. Drop Water soon will install six machines at the San Jose International Airport.
“Each bottle can be custom-branded, too,” said Edwards, who is very aware Hamilton “has the best tap-water in the world. And that would be perfect with this application. Because we want to switch people to use municipal water, instead of buying water from Fiji, or buying from halfway across the world,” and avoiding unnecessary environmental harm from transporting water in trucks and ships, he said.
Drop Water recently won a $15,000 grant from FedEx to grow its business, by earning a silver award from among 7,800-plus small businesses that competed.
Water Warriors, based in Cincinnati, is the company with bacteria that works to remove nitrogen and phosphorous using bacteria and nearly microscopic bubbles to help sewage plants be compliant with the water they release to the environment. All their products can pay for itself within a year, a surprisingly short span.
Water Warriors CEO John Gradek said the company uses “foam media” that house bacteria, increasing the bacteria concentrations by 700 percent, allowing treatment plants to work with more waste, in less space and less time.
“The foam literally becomes like a condo for bacteria,” he said. The company also uses “micro-bubble aeration,” that uses bubbles 50 microns in size and less, in which the bubbles’ buoyancy and weight cancel each other, so they just “hover in the water, for up to four hours, before they rise.” That gives the bacteria the best conditions for their work.
Water Warriors is planning to install a system this summer for a food-and-beverage company in the Toledo area, with plans for another project in Massachusetts. Their products can be installed for a small percentage of the capital costs of other work that cannot be retrofitted, Gradek said.
The six companies will have their “Demo Day” at 5:30 p.m. Thursday, May 24, in Cincinnati, at Union Hall, which is located at 1311 Vine St., Cincinnati, OH 45202. The event is free.
Sorber said the Micronic process, which works on the back end of de-salination plants, can reduce the amount of waste by about 95 percent, “and disposal of that stuff is really the problem,” because it harms the aquatic environment, can be hazardous waste and can’t be reused.
About the Author