(don't) Waste Water! | Water Tech to Solve the World

with 🎙️ Colin Goddard - Director at Source Global  💧 Source aims to market the world's first renewable drinking water system. Clean, safe, made entirely off-grid, and available almost anywhere in the world. What we covered: 😨 How more than 2 million Americans live without basic access to safe drinking water and sanitation.  😱 How over 44 million more US-Citizen are served by water systems that...

Colin Goddard is Director at Source Global. Source aims to market the world's first renewable drinking water system. Clean, safe, made entirely off-grid, and available almost anywhere in the world. 44 million. That's the unbelievable number I dug out and triple-checked after discussing with Colin. In the United States, 44 million people are served by water systems that recently had health-based Sa...

with 🎙️ Piers Clark - Chairman and Founder of Isle Utilities  💧 Isle Utilities aims to bring new technologies to life by connecting expertise, investment, and inspired ideas across the globe.. What we covered: 💪 How the Water Industry could significantly impact most of the challenges our World is facing today  🧑‍🔬 How the best weapon for that impact to happen is not any of the usual suspects (...

Piers Clark is the Chairman and Founder of Isle Utilities. Isle aims to bring new technologies to life by connecting expertise, investment, and inspired ideas across the globe.  I remember my first pilot as a young water professional. We were trying to enhance biogas production in a midsized wastewater treatment plant. To this date, I can't say if we failed. Because we indeed increased production,...

I know, it's the back-to-school period; you've got a lot of things on your plate, I get that, so don't worry.  I won't make that special episode too long, and you'll get a fast-track update on many of the guests and companies that appeared on that microphone. Today, this podcast turns two! Two years, 222 episodes released, of which 97 were feature interviews, for a total of 105 hours on air. That'...

Two Bit da Vinci is wrong when he says: "The smaller unit, the tsunami 500 can produce between 0.5 and 8 gallons per hour or up to 200 gallons per day. With the smaller unit, you'd be able to produce over 60 percent of your daily water needs or about three times your daily needs if you're single." In fact, it is non-sense to imagine covering our daily water needs with new sources of perfect drinki...

Limiting Water to SDG 6 is restrictive. When the united nations defined its Agenda 2030 and split it down into 17 sustainable development goals, they parked "everything water" into number 6. But isn't water crucial to attaining a bunch of further goals? Isn't the lack of water a clear inhibitor to running any kind of business, hence the main obstacle to SDG 1, which is supposed to end poverty? How...

We focus on the wrong water! Would you drink your neighbor's pee? I'll be honest; I may well know that once fully treated, it's an absolutely safe water source; but I would still be reluctant.  Indeed, whenever we discuss alternative water sources like reuse, people have a "yuck factor" as they imagine drinking it. And how would I blame them: our entire homes are fed with water of drinking quality...

People lacking access to Water and Sanitation is an economic non-sense. How much does it cost not to have access to Water? Well, Water from a tanker costs 15x the utility averages and up to 50x more, for instance, in India. And that's still peanuts compared to bottled alternatives! Now, that's only the visible part of the iceberg. Because on the sanitation side of the problem, families without toi...

Subsidies are dangerous to water! We almost never pay utility water at its real cost, and even less so in the poorest countries, where 89% of utilities don't recover their costs.  So how do these utilities reach breakeven? Well, with subsidies. The problem is that these subsidies are very unevenly distributed.  Of the about 450 billion dollars given out annually, 26% go to the wealthiest 20% and o...

There's so much better to do with your pee! Feeding 7.8 billion humans requires a lot of fertilizers, and all types combined, nitrogen fertilizers are the ones that experience the fastest growth. In 2021, their usage reached 110 million tons worldwide! This is actually an environmental problem. Because producing these fertilizers involves a lot of blackish hydrogen, which has a huge carbon impact....

We could solve thirst on earth by breaking all the banking rules! How do banks decide to grant you a loan? Well, they check your background and how much you own and earn.  As a result, banks don't lend money to the poorest people as they never pass their screening process. Most of the poorest people on earth also belong to the 2 billion humans that lack access to safe drinking water. But here's th...

SAUR multiplied its industrial revenue by twenty in three years. Two of the three largest water companies in the World are french: Veolia and Suez. So, for SAUR being the "French 3rd guy" is like being a small fish in a shark tank. In that context, where making a dent is pretty challenging, SAUR had to differentiate.  Hence, since starting up in 1933, SAUR had always bet on municipal water. And th...

Air and Sun: that's all you need to pour your next glass of water!   By 2025, two-thirds of the World's population may be facing water shortages.   And where do you take your water from when there's no water left? One solution may be to truck it from places that are richer in water. Or to bottle it. Two solutions that are expensive and hardly sustainable. So are we doomed? Well, I'd say it's time...

Death by Piloting may finally be history! Why is establishing a new technology in the Water Industry beyond difficult?  Well, if a water utility delivers polluted water to your tap, you may die!  That makes for a risk-averse mentality where everybody wants to be first to be second. Indeed, water professionals are well aware that Modern Problems require Modern Solutions, yet, they want those soluti...

Your poop says a lot about you! Every zombie movie starts the same. One infected person acts as if everything is just fine: "I'm coughing blood? Nah, let me hide it, pretend I'm fine and go hug thousands of people in a football arena!" But is it only fiction? We've seen it with CoVid: there's objectively not much you can do to detect a disease's outbreak unless people voluntarily get tested, assum...

Green Algae will become your best friends! Wastewater treatment's workhorse, the activated sludge process, was invented in 1914, and he looks his age, honestly.  Sure, it's an effective way to clean wastewater, but it involves a lot of energy: the needed blowers alone account for about 4% of our energy use! This makes for the substantial carbon impact of wastewater treatment, well, this and the va...

We should protect our blood from PFAS. In 2015, the US Government commissioned a study to measure the population's exposure to PFAS.  The results were chilling: 97% of Americans had PFAS in their blood, a proportion that was later confirmed by many more studies around the globe. Doesn't it have health consequences to have Polyfluoroalkyl Substances in our blood? Spoiler: it does. A study by the no...

We should all start running for water. Zero Carbon, that's a mantra we all heard, and we all can rely upon. Well, international gatherings and global conversations are no different: everybody's heard of Carbon and climate change. That's great! But meanwhile, water is always forgotten from those same conversations. Though how do people experience climate change?  Well, through floods when there's a...

California could save 580 million dollars with one simple move! In fact, California adopted the sustainable groundwater management act in 2014. But don't worry, it won't be enforced before 2040. This means that meanwhile, you can still pump groundwater for free despite obvious proof that water scarcity hits tremendously harder year on year.  Yet, the district of Coachella proved another way to be...

Water is a powerful weirdo beyond 374 degrees Water is the solvent for life. Beyond the statement, this is a chemical truth: water dissolves a variety of molecules, most of the time for the better. The problem is that it also tends to dissolve a lot of pollutants, which turns wastewater treatment operators crazy when, in turn, they have to separate water from these pollutants. Now there's good new...

There are 320 Nuclear Power Plants in our Sewers Wastewater contains at least seven times the energy needed to clean it. Said differently, what we call "pollution" is, in fact, a type of chemical energy we struggle to tap into. The point where it becomes utterly stupid is that we pour a lot of energy into treatment processes to destroy that said chemical energy.  If you take the blowers alone, you...

The greenest Hydrogen is Turquoise. Hydrogen is not the sustainable gas you probably think it is. Today, 98.7% of the hydrogen used in the World is produced from fossil fuels without carbon capture. This means it would have exactly the same carbon impact as the coal or gas it's made of... Well if production processes were 100% sealed and reliable, which they're not. In fact, today, hydrogen is not...

Too much of our best water disappears underground. Every year, the World loses about one hundred twenty-six billion cubic meters of perfect drinking water in network leakages.  That's one Olympic swimming pool that disappears every ten minutes, all year long! Sure, that's a waste of water. But it's also an energy disaster, as we treat, refine, polish and pump that water only for it to vanish somew...

Your poop can trigger desalination. Reverse Osmosis is an energy-intensive process. Now, to be fair to the workhorse of seawater desalination, it's gone a long way since its first commercial applications in the seventies. The first plants maybe needed twenty kilowatt-hours to desalinate one cubic meter of water, but half a century later, this number was divided by ten. Yet, this decrease will soon...