with Lauren Enright – Founder of Axiom Climate LLC

with Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer – Water Sustainability Strategist

Lauren, Michael, and Indrani Pal will lead a Session Day at the upcoming American Geophysical Union Meeting in Chicago: “Adapting to Climate Change: Innovative Solutions for Building Water Resilience to Long-term Meteorological & Hydrological Change.”

What we covered:

How if Climate Change is felt through water, you have to build water resilience in the new realm of climate change adaptation

How climate change adaptation could benefit from innovation and new technologies and why it hasn’t leveraged them so far

How the key is to engage with stakeholders on the emotional level, and how to actually do that

2⃣ Two examples of concrete roll-outs of climate change adaptation approaches and what we can learn from them

How there’s a strong link between tech, finance and stakeholders and how to further strengthen it

How climate change adaptation is a process and what needs to happen in which sequence

How success in climate change adaptation will be measured and what we all have to win in the process

Understanding Business and Finance to better work with it, getting mavericks together, breaking the silo’s walls, flood management, New Orleans, AIDA… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Resources:

Check the American Geophysical Union’s website

Send your warmest regards to Lauren on LinkedIn or check Axiom’s website

Send your warmest regards to Michael on LinkedIn

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser: Climate Change Adaptation

What is the American Geophysical Union?

The American Geophysical Union (AGU) is a scientific organization that seeks to promote the discovery and dissemination of knowledge about Earth and space. It was founded in 1919 and is headquartered in Washington, D.C. The AGU is made up of over 60,000 members from 137 countries, who work in a variety of fields including geology, atmospheric science, oceanography, and space science. The AGU publishes a number of journals and organizes conferences, workshops, and other events to promote the exchange of scientific ideas and information.

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, Lauren. Hi, Michael. Welcome, Lauren. Welcome back, Michael! I’m really happy to have the two of you together with me today. You’re two-on-one, so please be gentle and kind to me. How are you?

Lauren Enright: I am well, thank you, and thanks for having us.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: I’m fine also.

Antoine Walter: You have a bit of an agenda and the reason for the both of you to be together with me today, it’s that you will be featured in a session at a conference pretty time soon. And we’re gonna go a bit deeper into that in the deep dive. So for now, let me just use that as a teaser.

Introducing: Lauren Enright, Founder of Axiom Climate

Let’s start by getting to discover you a bit. So, Lauren, you’re the founder and CEO of Axiom, and my first question is pretty straightforward. What is Axiom?

Lauren Enright: Axiom is a water and water risk consultancy. We’re motivated by. strategizing, innovative and integrated experiences for the general public to really understand water-related climate issues and technologies firsthand.

Antoine Walter: that is the pitch. Now, if I go a bit more in-depth on your website, I’ve seen the picture of a kayak. What has that to do with the strategizing?

Lauren Enright: in essence, I really believe that tangible experiences create memories whether positive or negative in the brain. And these moments and experiences actually translate and create receptivity for actually a unique understanding. And I basically translate that understanding into an unrelatable subject like climate, like water, and technologies.

And in this case, the three of us are really extremely passionate about climate and water. And that’s what essentially I’m trying to do with my startup is linking water and an ice based actually experiences to climate and water technologies.

What’s Axiom’s founder story?

Antoine Walter: And how did you come to that? What’s your founder story?

Lauren Enright: it’s been a long road probably ever since I was like five years old, but I can jump a little bit into what happened in my twenties and I got my master’s in maritime trade and maritime security which led me to studying climate change and fresh water related issues in the Arctic and really from a macro point of view as well as drilling down into more micro issues.

And from there I then converged my love of the outdoor, specifically mountaineering and watershed issues into forming this startup that is where I am today.

Antoine Walter: Indrani, who is your third person in that conference works with you at Axiom. I’m right.

Lauren Enright: Yeah, Indrani’s worked with me part-time for the last. like a year and a half. We met through sort of serendipitous events and then as I’ve gotten contracts in the last say, 18 months, I’ve like, I’ve pulled her in.

Introducing: Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer – the deepest voice among this podcast’s alumni

Antoine Walter: Well, we’re gonna go a bit deeper into what you do with Axiom, probably because that’s linked to your conference. But right before, I have to welcome you back, Michael. you’ve been. The kind of voice where I’m jealous as a host because you have more a radio voice than I have a radio voice. So, welcome back.

You were with us by season two, episode 17, and for the ones which have missed that one, which is a pity because it’s one of these episodes, which I keep referring to regularly because we covered nature-based solutions. We covered how to be close to a river and how that refreshes the mind, which is very close to the topic I guess we’ll be discussing today.

But for the people who would’ve missed you, and honestly, that’s pretty hard, if you’ve ever crossed LinkedIn, what would be your elevator pitch to yourself?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: thank you again for having me back on the show Anton, and let’s just recap season two, episode 17. Briefly, what’s the pitch? Well, I talk water for business and I talk water for business and government in such a way that regular people can understand what it’s worth, its value and importance.

Understanding the Business Mindset to connect it to the Water Challenges the right way

And what does that boil down to in real everyday terms? Well, investing in nature-based solutions, engineering, science, business, sustainability, ESG, et cetera, they have real value. And we know they have real value because of how we measure return on investment. So when you invest in nature-based solutions and invest in resilient water infrastructure, you know ways to work with water effectively in cities, you get about four to one return on investment.

That’s $4 for every $1 spent. We know that from data from the usa, from the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative. So what does that mean for the bigger picture? Well, you know, if it works for the public sector, it probably works for the private sector too. And that’s really what I do. You know, I like to help connect water solution providers to water problems and solve them to add value to people’s lives and to the

Developing the technology companies that deliver the right solutions in the realm of climate change adaptation

Antoine Walter: I’ve seen that you’re working with Desalytics, which got me curious because that sounds like the beginning of a new track for you. I don’t want you to spoil everything because I know that you’ve gave me some behind the scenes and I don’t want to share the behind the scenes. That wouldn’t be very nice from me.

But is there something you can reveal?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Not so much. I mean,

Antoine Walter: I can absolutely live with a no. No problem!

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: I mean, I could say briefly that, you know, Walid Khoury may understand water from a broad scale and kind of operating independently as just an affiliate. I think about ways to solve water, because just like Lauren was talking about, the way to solve climate is inextricably linked to water, and that’s really what brought us all together because we care about this.

This is something that matters and it’s something that also has value, and not just personal value, but economic value. So I call it a triple win. You know, we’ve got value for the world, we’ve got personal value, and we also have business value. So we’re at the verge of a new world of water-based values.

Lauren, Michael, Indrani: Water and Climate Change Mavericks?

Antoine Walter: Well, actually, you’re offering me the perfect transition because I was wonder. I’ve met you physically, Lauren, I’ve met you digitally. Michael, I don’t know what brought the two of you together. Apparently it’s linked to the value of water, but maybe you can explain me a bit more.

Lauren Enright: Michael, do you wanna start?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Lauren I’ll just start briefly and say, I think one day you said, let’s talk, and so we talked , and then we went from there.

Lauren Enright: I had a pressing question that I knew. Needed actually Michael’s expertise. And this was probably about two years ago, maybe even two and a half years ago, where I called you and I’m just like, Michael, and you just spout out the most like, intricate though succinct information for me to jot down, okay, this would be my next step.

And I took it to heart. Even though, you know, you’re like, do you want to go on a next step? And I’m like, no, let’s hang there for a second. But you wowed me by how you articulated information so succinctly and we’ve sort of followed each other ever since. And. I consider almost like Michael, Indrani and I all mavericks in the field, like we’re all coming from very varied ways and point of views.

So we’re not just like, Hey, we’re jumping in it, we have this one specific approach to it, which I very much valued in Michael and Indrani. But Michael, tell me what you think of Indrani and I

How to “tame” the impetuous MSG

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: I think you’re great. I’m very grateful that you put up with me because I’m okay. I can be a difficult person to deal with. As long as I have a clear focus and a very clear objective, which you gave me, you said, I gotta get this thing done. How do we. Then I’m hyper-focused like an animal, like a hound.

I know what I’m doing, but , if I don’t have constant reminders to stay on track and I’m left to my own devices I need handling like just to protect me from the world and the world from me, and to keep me in line with whatever the world needs me to be in, aligned with. So what do I think about our collaboration?

I think that we bring a real lot of unique value to the water sector because we’re not trying to solve problems in the way that people traditionally would solve them. We’re not sitting down and saying, well, this is what we have. Let’s use this to get this thing done. Let’s solve this problem with these known things.

We’re just imagining how we could solve it. And then we’re starting with the end essentially, and then looking to fill in the gaps so we know that we want to get this thing done. Like we wanna make sure that this vineyard has enough water or something. We imagine the kinds of technologies and people that will need to be in place and what the principal or owner or client or whoever needs.

And then we see what exists and then we try to fill it in what doesn’t exist? Well, maybe we can build it or find someone to develop it, or maybe someone’s out there. So that’s what’s unique about how we approach these problems. Like I , I do what they tell me to do and I get it done. And we use our creativity in combination with our analytical ability and the ability to communicate the message, to solve the problem at a reasonable price, and then communicate the value of that solution to the client and to the world.

And that’s kind of how I’ve been thinking of our work for the American Geophysical Union Conference coming up.

5 Key Aspects of Climate Change Adaptation

• Climate change adaptation is not the same thing as climate change mitigation, which refers to actions taken to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and prevent further warming of the planet. Instead, adaptation focuses on preparing for and responding to the impacts of climate change that are already happening or are expected to happen.
• Adaptation can take many forms, including building sea walls to protect against sea level rise, developing drought-resistant crops, and creating early warning systems for extreme weather events.
• While adaptation is necessary to help communities and ecosystems cope with the effects of climate change, it is not a substitute for mitigation. In other words, we still need to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent the worst impacts of climate change from occurring.
• Adaptation can be costly, and not all communities have the resources they need to adapt to the changing climate. As a result, some groups, such as low-income communities and indigenous peoples, are at greater risk of being impacted by climate change.
• Adaptation can also have unintended consequences, such as when measures are taken to protect one area or species inadvertently harm another. For example, building a sea wall to protect a coastal city from flooding could disrupt the natural habitat of nearby marine life. As a result, adaptation efforts must be carefully planned and evaluated to ensure that they are effective and do not cause additional harm.

How to build Water Resilience to Climate Change?

Antoine Walter: So you mentioned the American Geo Physical Union Conference. You mentioned Vine Yards, which by extension makes me think of water resilience, and I guess there’s a connection between those two elements. So what is that session that you’ll be holding at the AGU? You, what is it all about? What can people expect from what you’ll be presenting?

Lauren Enright: AGU, as you mentioned stands for the American Geophysical Union. it’s been in, I believe in corporation since 1920. And primarily it’s a nonprofit studying atmospheric ocean space planetary basically issues. And it’s evolving around science, their research, their outcomes. And essentially just this year they’ve opened it up into innovations, which, lucky for us we’re.

Essentially wanting those larger point of views being brought in apart from just the scientists. Even though we extremely value the scientists and we ourselves have backgrounds in science, we then are wanting to pull in, which we are friends and colleagues from the finance, you know, industry, from the psychology sphere from industries.

Bringing the topic in front of 25’000 qualified people

And this essentially is where we’re really wanting to focus in on these innovations and these actually nature-based solutions, hardware, software, across the board and what these outcomes will be. The fun thing about AGU is the amount of people that actually attend. So it’s I believe there’s 130,000 membership across the board internationally and about 25,000 people will attend in Chicago.

So it’s not necessarily just this, 500 person event. But it’s definitely large and we know that. And so we wanted to say, okay, let’s gather our minds and be able to come up with a session . That was accepted months ago. It was probably four or five months ago that then we tackled and we said, let’s start inviting people and people wanted to join.

Antoine Walter: If we go to the bone of the session what’s gonna be inside?

Lauren Enright: So in essence the session’s going to be primarily parsed off in four different panels. The start is gonna be about climate risk resilience, the opener of the day, looking at how we got here and why we got here. We all sort of know that story, but in essence, it’s nice to start and do a little intro on that.

A Climate Change Adaptation AGU session in 4 Steps

We’re gonna bring in topics such as is data analytics taking us in climate risk resiliency? We’re looking at like where are specific companies leading and why they’re slow or why they’re actually fast to adopt those specific solutions.

So we have some, leading name industries that you guys would know or you know, folks in the industry that I’m sure your listeners would know. As well as jumping into the . Second panel is around finance, looking at how the stock market is relating to water risks as well as climate and.

Reinvesting, divesting your own portfolio specific to fossil fuel emissions, specific to water related issues. And this gets into a little bit of a gray area because there’s not as much obviously, research in this area. So it’s a more fun, I guess, like topic to, to dive into within this specific session.

The third session, as I’m remembering is is gamification. So the three of us really believe in obviously these experiences, not just physical like I’ve described, going out in the mountains and learning about stuff, but within the home. So looking at like, how can a family understand their own water efficiencies and own water management within their own home playing a game.

It’s a digital game on the computer that we’re gonna showcase. And then the fourth panel of the day is around nature-based solutions, and those will be tailored towards looking at specific issues. So in sediment rise, in river flow rise in looking at specific tributaries around the United States as well as around the World.

How to tackle water resilience with a fresh touch?

Antoine Walter: So how much of a terrible shortcut would it be if I was to say that you’re trying to tackle water resilience with a fresh angle? A fresh mind, just because the traditional way is on one hand, boring on the other hand, not efficient.

Lauren Enright: Yeah, I think you were spot on.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Change comes from the outside.

So who else but us three to do the thing that no person in their right mind would do and say, let’s try something new that’s high risk. That has a lot of potential. That would not be something that you might hear in an engineering design discussion. You might not hear this in your standard sort of academic colloquium.

because in those conversations, the same people are always at the table. And what we are doing is we’re bringing together people from different areas who have different perspectives on water. , one of the things we’re also doing is we’re putting together sort of a pre-pa, like a primer that includes a lot of the elements as an introduction to the main session on Friday as a way to help people get into the concepts, to get into the conversation and think about it throughout the week.

One week to get an insight shot in cold but vibrant Chicago

And what this does is it really helps people who are within established disciplines and domains to see how their work fits into this emerging landscape for water like this emerging new world of water where the old solutions just don’t work because change is progressing so rapidly and it gives us a chance to really focus on solutions and not just problems.

and that leads directly into things like the knowledge we gained from data analytics. And that will inform things like deciding where to implement nature-based solutions. Because as we’ve seen recently, you know, river flows are down throughout Europe in parts of the US so that’s playing havoc with our water supply.

How much open-minded is too broad?

Antoine Walter: My devils advocate hats for a second. I love the program. I really love the pitch. I’ve listened to you, I’ve read what you sent me. I’m wondering, isn’t it a bit too broad, what’s the key message if you have right now, to give me like, like three take on messages from the people that will be spending the day with you?

What would

Lauren Enright: I’ll jump in. By nature, we knew it was broad, but we also know that climate and climate, tech and water involving is a huge industry and is a huge issue across the board. We actually got authors from all different sort of industries and we had to turn, sadly, people sort of away and down, unfortunately, just because they weren’t really fitting in with our topic.

So we are trying to really narrow in on a very large topic in essence, but that’s also something that we’re wanting to glean and honestly understand. Where are these gaps? Where are these places where the conventional industries or the corporations or the engineers, are actually missing out and not to their demise or their detriment, but we’re actually wanting to aid and help them.

Focusing innovation and new approaches to the places where traditional approaches failed

Because I think, like you said, Antoine, , Things have been going around the same as before and it’s sort of the same discussion over and over, which is honestly why Indrani, Michael and I are much more about action than we are about. The talking and let’s keep talking about it and we’re sort of like, where’s the physical action on the ground?

 The less talking, the lex writing about, research. Whereas we wanna actually see that action. And I think we all know that action comes from more the general public. Really understanding what these climate issues are in relation to water, in just essence of saying, oh my gosh, there’s, there’s larger amount of rainfall that’s gonna, affect the polar vortex let’s actually spell those things out to the public so then they can actually really attach themselves and physically be able to say, oh my gosh, I will need a specific device or this technology.

And to be able to hold that and own that, rather than say like a utility, take it into their own hands.

The 3-step Approach to close the awareness gap between a broader audience and water specialists

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: It’s the big challenge that we’re facing in presenting a topic like this that’s so important and so big is being able to communicate it effectively with all sorts of people. And we know that in the water sector right now, there’s just this huge communications problem. There’s a huge gap between people’s awareness and understanding of water and that of the professional sector.

People just don’t see water, they don’t know what’s there. So what this session does is it helps all sorts of people gain access to it. So think of it as the big picture of water, not quite water 1 0 1, but more like a big picture water practicum. As Lauren said, we’re gonna do something about this. So one message is, here’s the problem, here’s where the holes are.

Two, this is how we can solve the problem. And three, these are the tools, techniques, and cultural innovations that we need to develop if we’re going to effectively address the problem in real time. Because we can’t wait. You know, we can’t wait for utilities, which are gonna operate on a slower model, and we can’t necessarily wait for government, which could take forever.

We need to give people choices now, like Lauren said, to solve their own problems. And this is a way to do that, to start the process.

Why does it take new technologies to solve the climate change adaptation challenges?

Antoine Walter: If I take you very well, articulated three steps. The problem is something we’ve discussed quite regularly on that microphone in the sense that fighting climate change has a clear message. It’s zero carbon. If you go to zero carbon fight climate change.

If you go into climate change adaptation, climate change, mitigation, saying any ways it’s gonna happen in a certain fashion, we can limit how much it happens. But we have to adapt to the consequences of that. Then we’ve talked about that as well. It has a lot to do with water because there is this quite empty sentence, but which sums it up still, which is if climate change is a shark, water is its teeth.

Once we’ve said that, we don’t have said much. But still it explains a bit the problem. But I think you’re fully right in the sense that awareness of the problem is not yet at the level where we could just say. Let’s skip that because everybody knows it. No, everybody doesn’t know it. So it’s really reassuring that you get the people from there.

That’s the part I fully get. Then you’re presenting the solution and the technologies, and here again, I’m playing the devil’s advocate today. That’s my role. How much do we need to come with new solutions and how much is it just about enforcing? The ones we do know are working today, but nobody dares to do it?.

It’s not so much about technology than it is about deployment and execution

Lauren Enright: And I think that’s part of it. I think we’ve noticed that there is that lack of deployment and whether it’s a marketing issue, whether it’s a barrier to, financing or getting, shall I say, a sales force behind every single climate, related technology out there. We all know why electric vehicles, we all know why solar and wind are taking off.

They’re meteor type of investments. And I think the return on investments specifically to get into the finance side of it is just very tangible. And I think it all sort of circulates around and around going, what is this value of water when, you know, we need it for our survival, we need it for practically everything, we do and come into contact in the day.

So it’s essentially like our lowest common denominator among our human race that we’re not ironically able to value it. And I think that’s sort of the trick and that’s part of where I’m interested in, I think where Michael and Indrani and I are trying to go, where do we fit into trying to understand.

Where these technologies and where our behaviors are lacking in trying to come up with better solutions. Because right now we’re sort of just seeing again like I said prior in the podcast, just it’s over and over. The sort of the same thing. And I don’t mean to say we wanna like shock an audience or shock the public, I think it’s actually really disseminating information through ways , that the public is actually used to.

Applying Copywriter’s AIDA to connect climate change adaptation with a broader audience

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: it’s a way to help the public connect on a action-based level on a very emotional level. what comes to mind is a line from David Mez, Glen Gary, Glen Ross, which is, AIDA. Attention, interest, decision. Action. So we’re calling attention to this. We’re saying pay attention.

This is interest. , you can decide to use these technologies and these systems. And when I think about gamification, you know, you can change your behaviors by having fun. Fun is a positive reinforcement, and that leads to action. You know, it leads to real action that you could take in your life.

And think of it like this. if a child is playing a game, that child’s behavior will lead to influences on the family’s behavior. Because we all know how persistent children are. I’ve got three kids myself, and Christmas is coming up and they want presence. So specifically touching on gamification, it is a very strong way to create behavioral change with respect to water, and also to create awareness.

Because the concept and focus of the game is water awareness. In some cases, saving water, being aware of water in your environment by directing attention. So looping this back around. Yeah, we’re not trying to like shock an awe. We’re just saying it’s here. . And when it comes to solutions, yes there are extant solutions.

It’s just the market requires education. You know, market facilitation education is critical to the business case for emerging water technologies. Ways to share clear, coherent, plain language value propositions that make people feel comfortable with their choices. And that will lead to the kind of change that helps us all.

That triple win once again, for environment, for the individual and for society

Leveraging gamification and psychology

Antoine Walter: There’s this element of gamification in psychology, which comes regularly in, in what you’ve shared so far. And that was also something which caughts my attention in your, I repeat excellent pitch to the conference. , you are calling to climate psychologist and that’s the first time ever I saw that concept or or even occupation or job.

I don’t know exactly. What is a climate psychologist?

Lauren Enright: I’ll jump in. I would say a climate psychologist is a professional who can actually attribute people’s grief of the planet to their own personal life, which might be extremely intuitive on a human’s sort of internal sensories.

But it’s probably twofold at where psychology lies. Within looking at climate and these environmental challenges, I think the general public , is definitely getting more and more stressed as there’s like an uptick in water related issues. We can name out fire hurricane, just like th those kind of Washington post media, like, ah, things are going on crazy and it’s.

but when that happens, things sort of neutralize. So, oh, it’s another hurricane. Oh, it’s another, I don’t want to say the other side of it from what’s been on recently in the news that’s not climate related, but the general public becomes very neutralized toward the situation at hand. It’s sort of by our human nature to feel that sense of just normalcy in our minds.

And I think where people are leaning towards is becoming actually more stressed in their own specific community at what’s going on, or them being pressured to feel like they need to purchase a specific device, specific vehicle, you know, in essence, because they’re being pressured financially or obviously from health related reasons.

So I feel like nature has a lot to teach us at the end of the day. And if we can slow down and learn from it. But I mean, that’s sort of a long-winded answer as to why a climate psychologist is actually really, you know, necessary at this point in our lives.

Connecting with people on an emotional level

Antoine Walter: I think Michael, you mentioned AIDA as a framework, which is a framework which is appealing to our psychology as well.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: It’s like Lauren said people are starting to feel the emotional effects of whatever they perceive climate change to be. And that’s because there’s this constant alert signaling in the media because people respond to alerts and that’s what a lot of headlines about climate are.

You know, rivers are running dry fields are withering. These are scary things and facts are hard. And these are facts. So we have scary things backed up by hard facts and people are getting anxious and that’s not good. And they’re getting anxious. Let’s think about, you know, what just happened for the past few years.

They’re getting anxious on top of covid anxiety. So what does a climate psychologist do, and how does it connect to the AIDA model, the A I D A model of adoption? It gives people a way to make choices and take actions because when people can make choices and take actions, they’re self-actualized and they feel good doing this and this is a way to mitigate stress

it basically gets them to chill out when they can take actions because they now have choices that can lead to change in their lives that help them to deal with these big problems that they felt disempowered towards before, like climate and water is the way to.

Concrete Solutions and Roll-Outs to kickstart Climate Change Adaptation

Antoine Walter: we covered the psychology, we covered the awareness. We covered a bit, your different approach to it, something which. Sounds interesting in your approach to me as well, is that you want to go and lead with real word examples and real case studies. I know you will probably not want to spoil the entire session right now, but if you had to tease me with one of these real life examples, can you share me?

Maybe one each.

Lauren Enright: Sure, I’ll jump in. So one example I can give is a weather monitoring sort of like it’s around weather monitoring and looking at the uptick in water related disasters, specifically over the uk. And this is actually in regards to security, so looking at it from a national security level. And we have a featured speaker, I won’t reveal her name, but

she was the assistant general at the un and she’s extremely delighted to speak about this specific technology. So we’ve had numerous discussions at how it would be deployed and why it would be deployed and what are sort of the necessary steps that it would take. If that’s sort of along the line, of your question, I can give other examples, but let me know if I’ve answered that one correctly.

Antoine Walter: that’s a good example. If you have more, I’m happy to take.

Lauren Enright: Michael, do you want to jump in or I can keep going.

The example of flood management

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: I’ll jump in on the other side. And when I say the other side, what do I mean? I mean, once we know what kind of water-related disasters we are experiencing in with higher and higher frequency, we can deploy solutions effectively in a targeted fashion. We can optimize our decision-making to solve the problems.

And the specific real world example I bring up is we have a real world renowned gentleman who pretty much. Is the originator of nature-based solutions for river design. And when we think about how rivers are affected by changes in water availability related to climate change, we’re not just thinking about how to restore rivers or help them come back to life.

We’re thinking about how to keep them alive. So nature-based solutions to potential, you know, river flooding or drought could allow rivers to maintain certain areas of key habitat and protect critical infrastructure. And even if we restore floodplains, increase river aquifer storage, which increases local water availability, what does that mean in real terms?

If you design. Rivers in line with natural principles using natural materials like logs, trees intact floodplains. You can say, here is where we’ve had problems with river flooding or drought in the past. We’re gonna target our natural design to either increase water availability by improving riparian zone function in areas of drought, or creating more stable banks that reflects a natural accumulations of wood where there’s more flooding.

And it allows us to deploy that solution effectively with knowledge to start because we can’t make the right choices if we don’t know where the problems are and how bad they are first. And this helps us save money because we don’t have tons of money to waste. So using nature-based solutions for river design in flood and drought prone areas based upon our awareness, which Lauren mentioned earlier, this awareness of water related climate disaster.

What is the most pressing challenge to climate change adaptation?

Antoine Walter: You mentioning how we have to understand the problem first. Let me try to get that one right. What is the number one key topic problem? Is it that we have to fight climate change, or is it that we have to fight our slowness to adapt to climate change?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Oh, I could say, Lauren, may I feel this one first.

Lauren Enright: Step in. Please do.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: O okay. I would say that what we’re looking at here is we’ve gotta fight apathy and we’ve gotta fight fear and anxiety. So we can’t fight climate change. What we can do is we can work with it and the way that we work with it is by overcoming our barriers to action. So the big point is take action. You can.

Fight, the fear of the unknown, because to solve this problem, we can’t do it theoretically or analytically. We have to just take risks and see what happens and see what works and what doesn’t.

Antoine Walter: By taking risk in that field. Usually goes with the right incentives. Do we have the right setup of incentives in place so that we would dare to take the.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: I think so, and I’m gonna refer back to, I guess sort of water intelligence systems, you know, water sensing systems like any sort of predictive systems or descriptive systems that allow us to understand when we are, why and how water-related disasters could occur. What that does for us is because, you know, let’s think about a more practical example, a floodplain mapping.

So floodplain mapping maps were made maybe using data that’s, I don’t know how old now, maybe 20, 50 years old, who knows how old it is, but it no longer works with better intelligence. We can say don’t build here, the incentive for the private sector, for the insurance and reinsurance industry is, look here, we can tell you we’re not to ensure houses are in or businesses, and that will shape the investment landscape.

And it has value because it protects companies from risk in the public sector. It helps the government create policies that are effective, that allow for the private sector to invest safely, thus creating a stronger economy. So those are all kind of high level perspectives on where the value comes from and why the risk is worth it, but it’s there.

The example of flood risk insurance

Antoine Walter: Let me tell you on your example, which is a very good example, I guess with the flood plane. What I’m trying to understand is that on that microphone some weeks ago had a discussion with Nick Shufro from the Federal Insurance and Mitigation Administration, and he was sharing how only 9 million insurance policies are taking the US for flood.

So everybody sees the news, everybody sees that extreme climate s are gonna happen with an increased Repetition and increased risk of happening every year. And still it sounds like the incentive is not strong enough for people to move. So how do you move people and how can you succeed in moving people here when apparently federal programs struggled?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Okay.

Let’s start out with the basics. People avoid pain and move towards pleasure or ease. If we know that an area that was previously safe from floods in a city or wherever is now highly prone to floods because of shifting rainfall patterns more extreme river flows, you know, very sharp hydrographs, you know, big peaks and flood flows, insurance companies won’t insure them.

One, which means that their house won’t get rebuilt or fixed after a flood. And two, you know, banks won’t lend for new builds. So those are two sources of, pain negative affect. And so people will move away from. Towards areas that work. You know, his historical case would be looking at the old city of New Orleans in the usa and Louisiana.

New Orleans History: the perfect illustration

The old city was built in areas that were not subjected to flooding. And only after the core of engineers catalyzed and controlled the Mississippi River did we start to see all this development in the low parishes. And that’s what led to the problems that we experienced with Hurricane Katrina. All that flooding, you know, those levees weren’t guaranteed for that kind of storm.

that’s how we see change. You know, we see behavioral change through creating incentives for people to move, build your house here, or create high density residential buildings here and pain. You can’t get insurance and the government will protect you. And so people will make their choices based upon those two, two poles of human affect,

What’s the link to ESG Finance?

Antoine Walter: If I take the headlines of your conference you’re aiming at the ESG investors, so they could be the indirect incentive I was referring to because if they only finance and promote the project which go in the right direction, then indirectly you have your kind of incentive given by the market this time.

So what is the key take on message that you’re preparing and casting for those ESG finance people?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Lauren, do you wish to begin this one? I have a thought that comes right to mind right now.

Lauren Enright: Sure. Yeah. You can jump in. I have, I can follow up as.

Get your Climate Change Adaptation right and avoid to have stranded assets

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: with respect to ESG investors sustainable funds, , what do these changes in human behavior do with respect to water? Well, it makes your investments more reliable because the last thing that you want to deal with as a fund manager is the risk of stranded assets. And that’s one thing that we encounter when people try to get into these crazy high growth funds that you know, there’s, they’re high risk and they’re high risk for a reason and they’re becoming more risky as water becomes more and more uncertain.

So what’s the take home message for sustainable investments? ESG investors, ESG staff at corporations. You want to put your money where water will be in the right amount, at the right time, and won’t be at the wrong times, places where it’s not gonna flood. Places where you do have reliable multiple sources of water, atmospheric ground, and surface water because it means that your portfolios are stabilized and you can provide a more reliable return for your investors.

And business runs on reliability, and that’s better for all of us.

Antoine Walter: Lauren?

The differentiated approach to ESG between Europe and the US

Lauren Enright: Yeah. And ju and just to jump in, I think e s g by nature’s become a nuanced term because by nature a lot of people have thrown it under the bus or said it’s greenwashing. And yeah it could be, myriad or , somewhere in between because of articles, you know, specifically saying the economist written about it a few months ago.

But without in hand, the metrics around E S G the environmental, the social, the governance, like the scoring specifically here in the US as well as in Europe. They are very much attributed to specific water metrics. And I think that’s something actually to where I have worked in the past with a few companies, specifically ESG rating companies.

And to give you an idea, there’s about, say 150 ESG rated companies out there that. Aren’t corporations, but that are actually the ESG where the analysts sit and people from a higher level set of views go and look at specific corporations and look at, you know, all the different metrics from biodiversity to waste management and their sits in the e the water where we’re extremely obviously interested.

And those metrics look at filters such as a water strategy, a water plan where they publish numerical water related analytics and data. They report on water recycling. And I think these specific metrics are extremely valuable in looking at revenue and looking at net sales and looking at where pollutants are.

And so, even in Europe, and we can jump to where ESG looks quantitatively in the US very differently than what it does in Europe. I think in Europe you guys follow the, SF d r where there’s the environmental, the social and the governance and following, like Article eight and Article nine, where you guys are either aligned or not.

But those follow more, I believe, where facilities are. So like where water stressed facilities are and if those sites actually have a specific water score and why they will or won’t be. Built on that specific site from then on. It’s high level, but like Michael’s attributing to, it all runs its course within where we’re trying to lead in this session in our, in actually our specific finance session, looking at how finance and the S M P are all really tied to industry, not necessarily water, but inside of where the E is within industry.

What happens before and after the AGU?

Antoine Walter: I think that makes for a good tour of the content of your session. I like before closing that deep dive , to understand a bit what happens before and after. How is it for the before? Because we are now. Some, as we record, I guess we’re about two weeks before the actual conference. And I’m wondering is it like Nirvana style come as you are or would you expect people to come in prepared with questions having read stuff or how do you want to take them?

Do you take them off guard or prepare it?

Lauren Enright: Within this specific AGU session these attendees are gonna be quite. I would say prepared to attend our session because of the 25,000 people attending, I think they’ve got a tight schedule, so it’s very much of like Tuesday. They’re gonna attend from 10 to 11, this specific session. Ours is Friday, it’s December, I believe, 16th and it’s all day session they gave us, which was nice cuz we had quite a few authors that wanted to speak.

And so we will have a whole day session with sort of a. A preview you know, as, as far as what we’re going to actually entail for the entire day. And then we jump into the actual, , sessions and panels. We have breaks in between. Um, And then obviously at the end of concluding remarks in, you know, what we covered that day.

And then what is to follow regarding, how we’re gonna keep in touch with AGU and what this spring meeting is gonna entail with the three of us. And then specific partnerships , that we’re looking to actually like partner with. So as far as sort of that day goes, general, Michael, I believe is leading this session on Tuesday.

And Michael, remind me of the time, I think it’s 10 to 1130 or.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: The pre-session introduction to the main session is Tuesday, from Tuesday December 13th from 11:00 AM to 12:30 PM and we’re gonna have a number of great guests from around the world to help our expert audience that is very savvy and well prepared to see exactly how their.

Can connect with and benefit from our main session on Friday because the key is that we bring value to the table for anybody who attends. We want you to walk away with something worth it, and we want to continue working with you in the future and keep the conversation going.

What’s the KPI for success in Climate Change Adaptation?

Antoine Walter: what will tell you that you had the intended impact after the session, after the conference, after everybody went home, went through the holiday season and had some time to think of what you’ve shared, what you’ve ignited in them, what you want them to start off fresh in 2023, what? What should drastically change that will tell you you’ve succeed.

Lauren Enright: I think it, it comes with feedback. First of all, I think it comes with action second. But as far as we are wanting our multiple day sessions to go with AGU and who actually attend is to form a larger community around. What we’ve been thinking for the last few years, and it doesn’t have to be, say these drastic changes, but it does have to have a rolling ball effect.

And I think between the three of us Indrani, Michael and I, we’re extremely excited to open the door and be able to gather feedback on where we’ve gone, what we’re, coming up against what other people’s feedback is, and to where we can actually move forward. Because I think that’s sort of one of the main pieces where I see people.

Just in general don’t have as much ability to gather feedback to say let’s have positive change. Let’s have negative change. But I think that’s sort of where in between these sessions is actually where we’re gonna ask for feedback. So it’s very much gonna be a conversational day as opposed to us just speaking to them and having our panelists just speak to them from this sort of hierarchy.

An important metric: people’s engagement

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Yes, exactly, Lauren. That’s exactly how I see it. People are interested and engaged and want to do something. And what could that turn into After the holiday season, and I’m looking forward now, I’m looking towards the future, I could see people, experts in the academic sector and government saying, I see value in solving this problem.

Maybe I will engage in a form of social entrepreneurship with somebody I met at our session. Because as Lauren said, this is not a dictation. This is not from on high, you know, giving a message from the top of the mountain. This is very much on a level playing field saying, how can we work together?

So building the infrastructure for water innovation collaboration as a way to adapt to climate change. I personally wanna see people. executing on their thoughts and developing tools and coming together to solve this problem persistently. So let our session be a beginning, a way to connect and a way to move forward.

See you in Chicago?

Antoine Walter: Well that makes for a perfect round off for that deep dive. So thank both of you for that very interesting perspective. I have to say it’s a pity I won’t be in Chicago, I would’ve. Been happy to to, to see all of that’s rolling out live, if that’s fine for both of your proposals to switch to the rapid f

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Sure.

Lauren Enright: I don’t think you would’ve wanted to come out to Chicago in December. It’s gonna be quite cold.

Antoine Walter: well actually, you know, I’ve been, no let me give you a fully uninteresting behind the scenes. First I’m a big fan of everything, which is cold, and my favorite TV show when I was a kid was emergency room. And I was always very jealous because they always had snow and Chicago seemed to be like the place where there’s always snow.

So to me, Chicago is like the dream city for that

Lauren Enright: I love it. Amazing.

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: For the rapid, fair question that I proposed to, to, to you is that I will be sending some of them to, to you, Lauren, some of them to Michael, and there’s one where I want to have both of your inputs. I’ll start with you, Lauren. What is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Lauren Enright: Okay. I’ve been working on a long-term project . For the last actually few months, it’s gonna progress into the next few years. And it’s involving the lessening snow pack around the United States. It’s involving ice climbing and it’s involving innovative climate and water technologies. So to be soon as to the unveiling of what’s gonna happen,

Antoine Walter: Let me mark your calendar here. The day you want to unveil that one, that microphone is open. I’m looking forward. Michael, can you name one thing that you’ve learned the hard way?.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Which one? Let’s see. One thing I’ve learned the hard way is how to communicate with the business community on the topic of water. Because most times you interact with somebody who’s from the business community proper, you know? And you say, Hey, water matters. Like, why? You know, why does water matter?

Why do I care? You know, it’s everywhere. We’ve got plenty of it. And the trick there is connecting water to what they want, which is typically some sort of profit or gain. So what I’ve learned the hard way is to start with the end. You know, you don’t have three minutes for an elevator pitch. You’ve got 15 seconds.

To get someone interested because nobody wants to waste their time. So I’ve learned not to waste business people’s time when it comes to water.

Antoine Walter: Lauren, is there something you are doing today in your job that you will not be doing in 10 years?

Lauren Enright: Hopefully not wearing as many hats as I do.

Antoine Walter: That’s a good one. Michael, what is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: I would look at the water startup sector. I would keep your eyes wide open and attentive to who’s getting funded in what amounts and what kinds of technologies are generating sales, maybe not profits. I would be, I would look at companies that are starting to. Sell what I call a water optimization technologies.

You know, we’re thinking about things like, I’m thinking about things like hydro loop any kind of water recycling system. I would be looking at that for household use. I’d also be looking longer term at industrial water supply systems, especially atmospheric water generation systems because they fill in gaps in water supply that can’t be met with natural water or desalination.

So the water sector is growing as we speak, but in a strangely quiet way, it’s almost as if people don’t see it happening. It’s so big and all around us. So look at water startups and look at them very hard , and keep focused on them because I see tremendous growth in that.

Antoine Walter: for my last rapid for question, that’s the one which is for both of you. So you both have a chance to go at it. Lauren, you just said you want to have less hats still. I’m giving you one more. So next year there’s this big un water conference in New York, the first in 50 years. And there’ve been lots of comments about the agenda and some are amazed, some are pretty pissed at the agenda, but the agenda isn’t fully framed.

So we still have a chance to put topics on the agenda. And I’m wondering if you had to put one your. One on one with Hank oic, the special Envoy, which is writing that agenda, and you get a chance to put that specific topic on the agenda and it’ll stay there. What is that one topic you pick

Lauren Enright: I think waste water reuse.

I think it can tailor it actually into so many pieces in our life from how we, as Michael sort of reiterated the earlier on how we push away pain and how we push away sort of stuff that is unpleasurable, I gotta say wastewater, which I’ve done contracts now in wastewater it’s the bare bone of our systems.

It’s where we’re not physically seeing any of our waste water. We go away and it’s actually where a lot of the most progress is being done, specifically on the West Coast, but across the United States. And I think when we get that into our mind that we’re actually going to be using and reusing our water is gonna be a whole cyclical type of revelation for the everyday consumer, even though it is maybe one of the most disturbing pieces that, that we can sort of hold in ourselves.

It can go into narratives around our background. It can go into groundwater, it can go into. All different types of technologies, but I see wastewater reuse as sort of this topic that’s lingering in the background, but frankly, so many clients across the board have brought that up to me. And it’s the one issue that actually is lagging in terms of the regulation, in terms of the talk, in terms of where we’re gonna place our future in.

Antoine Walter: that’s definitely a topic which I would love to see on the agenda. So, so thank you for adding it. And Michael, same question to you. What would you put on the.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: This one might sound extremely boring, but. I would love to hear more about groundwater and atmospheric water regulation frameworks. Now, why do I want to hear more about that? Because as more and more people are born and more and more people rely on these emerging areas of water supply, we need to know how to regulate and manage them effectively.

So how we craft policy on a global scale towards groundwater and atmospheric water resources will impact how the future of the water technology landscape evolves because we can’t just keep taking as much as we want whenever we want. It has to be in line with how the water cycle shifts and its dynamic nature and good regulation respects that.

Antoine Walter: Sounds like a key topic I’d like to see on the agenda as well. So I would probably vote for you as special envoy as well. So you, both of you got a new job thanks to me,

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: Another job.

Antoine Walter: Well, it’s been a pleasure to spend that bit more of an hour with you, I have to say. I’m really looking forward your session. Do you know if there’s gonna be any live streaming or is it really what happens in Chicago stays in Chicago?

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: It’s virtual, you know, there’s

Lauren Enright: I believe there’s lives. yeah, exactly.

Antoine Walter: So I will put the links in the show notes so that if some people got teased like me by, by what you shared today, that they would have the pleasure also if they cannot make it to Chicago, to, to join you online. Michael, I think I’ve tried to push you in a corner and the, in the opening of this discussion, but I still mean it if if you have big news to share anytime soon in the future, that microphone is open to you.

I’d be happy to cover that and do like your personal update. Five seasons after your first personal update on that microphone and Lauren I mean it with all my heart today that you want to share about your project, which you teased me when we met physically in which you’re teased again today.

I’m really fully into to get the ins and out about it. So thanks both of you, and I wish you all the best in.

Lauren Enright: We appreciate being on.

Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer: It’s been a pleasure. Once again, thank you.

Other Episodes:

FREDsense: Revolutionizing Water Quality Monitoring with Biosensor Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 7 May 2025

Swirltex: Revolutionizing Wastewater Treatment with Bubbly Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 30 April 2025

Blue Foot Membranes: The Next Evolution in Water Filtration

By Antoine Walter | 16 April 2025

Echo River Capital: Pioneering the Future of Water Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 3 April 2025

1001 Fontaines: Engineering Sustainable Water Access Through Social Entrepreneurship

By Antoine Walter | 22 March 2025

Amazon’s Water Footprint: Tech Giant’s Quest for Water Sustainability

By Antoine Walter | 19 March 2025

Turing: The AI Revolution Quenching the Water Industry’s Thirst for Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 26 February 2025

Altillion: Pioneering Digital Intelligence for Water Asset Management

By Antoine Walter | 6 February 2025

Flocean: Pioneering Ocean-Based Water Solutions

By Antoine Walter | 15 January 2025

Botanical Water Technologies: Harvesting Liquid Gold from Plants

By Antoine Walter | 4 December 2024

The post The Climate Change Adaptation Opportunities You Don’t Want To Miss Out appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Puraffinity is a GreenTech Company that designs smart materials for environmental applications.​ Their cutting-edge material design and creative engineering approach may provide a new horizon to solve the daunting PFAS / Forever chemicals challenge we face.

What we covered:

How it might be time to build the SpaceX of PFAS removal, and how Puraffinity strives to do it

How PFAS reuse fully changes the paradigm (for the better)

What exactly changed in June 2022, and how the US EPA’s announcements impact the PFAS roadmap

How miracle PFAS removal technologies that break the news have to be placed into their context

How, with the new PFAS regulations, we enter the realm of parts per quadrillion

How PFAS removal has greenhouse gas emission consequences and how the 2030 clock is ticking

How Puraffinity strives to monitor what comes next in PFAS science, regulation, and roll-out

How Utilities’ new PFAS liability may represent an unfair burden, considering they don’t reap the benefit of the chemicals’ first use

How PFAS are everywhere around us in our daily lives and how it is an Iceberg we may want to address as a whole

How American regulators may want to emulate the European approach and why

But also thinking you’re safe as long as you’re not proven unsafe, the consequences on private wells, people delegating their water safety, bringing stakeholders together, Ellen McArthur, Erin Brockovich… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Resources:

Check Puraffinity’s Website

Send your warmest regards to Henrik on LinkedIn

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: PFAS Recycling

Teaser: PFAS Recycling

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Henrik, welcome back to the show.

Henrik Hagemann: Hi, Antoine. Good to see you!

Antoine Walter: I’m really looking forward having that discussion with you because you are. The best expert I know about pfas, There’s lots that moved in that PFAS scene and , I think you’ve been involved in some of these moves. So there’s really a lot on our plate for today, and I’d like to start Just refreshing everyone on what pure affinity your company has been doing since the last time you were on that microphone, which was by season four of this podcast, where now by season seven, and if I’m right, you, you get a grant from 1.5 million pounds, , which you probably used to make, some clever stuff and I was wondering what’s that stuff?

Further growing Puraffinity to impact PFAS remediation

Henrik Hagemann: So you are stepping right into it, which I love about you. Antoine, the grant was really focused on something called transforming foundational industries. it, It means it’s jargon, but basically it’s, telling the sort of UK ecosystem that, we need to. The manufacturing industry, the manufacturing sector, get onto the net zero path without adding a massive burden of like additional greenhouse gas emissions from going on to remove some of the things, for example, from their wastewater, improving their processes.

And so we had five investor partners in across the UK selected for this program. One of those five was Heritage Group Ventures. So it’s the only US based investor partner. I think they had something like 300 people up for the application and. Heritage Group Ventures is our existing investor.

So they were basically saying, Hey, we’re sort of doing this for you. We think there could be a really good fit. And from the Innovate UK side, we kept getting these requests about, okay, we know PFAS is essential for making stuff. It’s a super chemistry. You can use it to make mRNA vaccines to make semiconductors for EV cars and for the semiconductors in your phones.

And believe it or not, we still do some manufacturing in the. We have some flexible, cool logistics , for example, semiconductors, which is going on here. And so we basically set out to remove pfas from manufacturing plants that use it within their manufacturing so it doesn’t end up in the final product but doing it without adding a massive greenhouse gas footprint.

How to reduce the carbon impact of PFAS treatment

So for the 18 months program, which we started in January, We basically wanted to one, demonstrate that you can save carbon footprint by using a sustainable production method. So we’ve now got some initial data, preliminary life cycle assessment to say something like 60% reduction in CO2 emissions by using a sustain.

Material like ours rather than activated carbon or iron exchange. And then the other key thing here is we are trying to really rethink the unit economics of pfas in news. Right now we are hearing a lot about, oh, the American wastewater work saying the price of pfas removal is. A hundred fold higher with these new concentrations, what are we gonna do?

And rather than accepting the status quo which is basically like you and I know that it will be prohibitively expensive for the bulk of utility for the bulk of treatment suppliers to introduce it if we just use the same technologies. And so we’re trying to do what SpaceX did for rockets.

Could Puraffinity become the “SpaceX of PFAS treatment”?

They basically reuse rockets. Across several cycles as their main innovation. That’s the feature which drives down the cost. And I see from a bottom up perspective a massive benefit from reusing pfas targeted abs absorbents. The grant 18 month project there is focused on getting industrially relevant regener at so, We’ve developed this for groundwater remediation, for drinking water before, but we all know that the water spec is very different for industrial water.

It is not usually as sort of neat and symbol as a groundwater source. And so the grant is focused on taking that to the next level and really working with the foundational manufacturing industries.

… we’ll know in 9 months!

Antoine Walter: you said 18 months. When will you be done with that part of the program?

Henrik Hagemann: Mm, so we’re nine months in, so we’re actually halfway. I’m just sort of teasing today cuz my business development manager told me these are the things you cannot say. And these are the things you can say. But for the nine months in we have already seen some really promising data on broad spectrum PFAS removal.

So including everything from P FPSs to P F N A and there may or may not be something coming about those results.

Re-introducing: Puraffinity

Antoine Walter: Okay, so let’s focus for now on what you can be sharing and you,, teased a bit in, in, in what you just said. I just noted what you said about the American Wastewater Association, which said that the cost would be multiple. 100. Let’s go into the depth of that in a minute, if you will. You also explain how the space, I mean, usually people refer to Tesla, so you refer to, to the other baby from Ellen Musk, but that’s also something I’d like to get to know, and for people which wouldn’t have listened yet, which is a shame.

On our first discussion, you said sustainable like ours, talking of your material. Can you just recall in just a couple of sentence what you’re doing at Puraffinity?

Henrik Hagemann: It’s very simple. Actually. It’s been the same since 2015. It’s based on two key insights. One is, We benefit a lot from these precision tools. In medicine, we have biomarkers detection. We can do therapeutics we can capture things that are cancer related very elegantly. We were a part of this very big science competition at the time. It was the world’s largest synthetic biology competition. And we basically presented this early thesis to have a targeted material cellulose based, which can have specific small binding motifs. So they can be peptides, they can be peptide mimics, they can be proteins that basically target these specific contaminants with an absorption and iron exchange binding me.

Engineering PFAS into the Circular Economy

So it’s all to say if you can have a precision material, you can get benefits of higher throughput. That was one. And then the second thesis was we went and talked to the customers, so the real wastewater users, and they all just kept asking us, What are you going to do with this? When you’ve captured pfas, when you’ve captured X thing, , that’s the real issue.

How do you do full disposal? And so we developed a safe, engineered end of life approach where we basically engineer the material to be reusable. It’s a regeneration step, which doesn’t require a solvent or an alcohol. So it’s a more yeah, environmentally friendly regeneration step. And then we are trying, Prove that in the Next generation of products as a way to drive down the cost, the unit cost.

So Pure Affinity is basically a material development company. We have a predictive capability to respond to regulations. We’re always monitoring what’s coming next. Is it gonna be 4,000 PFAS species? Wow, that’s a great broad suite. We can use our predictive material development capability to address those.

Antoine Walter: So I think last time we discussed. I call them Pacman, which was my oversimplification of it.

So if you want to, to hear me rant about Pacman, that’s back in season four. I noted some new keywords in which you said the safe engineer at end of life because the no solvent, no alcohol is probably something we want to discuss as well in a minute in the deep dive.

The US EPA turned the PFAS World on its head over the Summer of 2022

But right before I’d like to come to the genesis of that sequel, which was you contacted me end of August and said, Hey, have you. What just happened about pfas, and I have to be honest, at that time, I had not seen all of that. And so I started looking at what has moved into that space. And it’s, it’s true that, and the bogus was pretty dense in news because it started with the ES EPA, Which proposed , to take two pfas, and said those are now hazardous.

So, it means quite a lot of consequences if you look at what the press was saying, if you look at how utility is reacted to that. But I won’t jump into my conclusions. I’d like to hear your opinion on that. So what did that new regulation.

Henrik Hagemann: I mean, that was a watershed moment. I woke up this day and I knew we had some material out for third party validation in the us. And I knew they were supposed to come back with answer soon and, we’ll have something. I can’t say too much, but one of the items which was really a deputy for the last five years in the whole US water sort of regulatory environment is this strange compound called Gen X.

And it sounds a bit like a super villain, you know, , and everybody was guess. What was the level going to be? Was it even going to be included? Obviously Reagan, the EPA administrator come out and said, We have this big plan, pfas action plan. The people have said that before. Nothing has changed. And so this time we were just resting on our laurels or the field was, but one of the things we’re testing this material for and we shipped out was Gen X.

GenX is now officially a hazard (who would have guessed?)

And so on the same morning, , you just imagine me waking up one, I get data in to show we have. Significantly improved Gen X removal with this new at absorbent. And two the same day , I read the news, which are very hard to fathom from the epa. Basically, they’ve included pfas species toward Gen X in the new regulations, but beyond that, they’ve changed the stringency level significantly, blowing everything out of the water no pun intended.

So what they’ve done, Compared to to 2016, the EPA went out June 15th and said, P F O A is 17,000 times more toxic than they thought. And that’s a hundred thousand times more toxic than they thought in 2009. So not only is this a watershed moment for pfas, it’s the biggest change we’ve seen in the last six years for any contaminant in water.

Obviously that’s sort of mind boggling as it is. And, I sort of try to bring this to live with my team, but it just means we have to introduce a whole new word to pfas. Before we knew about trillion, well, you feel like you know about trillion. Now we have to talk about the. What’s the queue?

It’s a quadrillion

New US EPA recommendations change the scale of the PFAS challenge

Antoine Walter: Parts were quite willing concentrations,

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. It’s massive. So it’s four parts per quadrillion. For P four, it’s 20 parts Per quadrillion for pfas. Basically they’re saying this is not safe at any level, but it’s a big deal. The e WG was just saying one part per trillion as a safe level.

This is an order of magnitude beyond that, and so it’s completely unheard of that the regulator. Even though it’s just a health advisory level is more stringent than this sort of action body who has been advocating for pfas for years. But the big news, basically when I was sitting there was what they’ve included Gen X.

They’ve included at 10 parts per trillion. Mind you, this is something that in North Carolina, because of their spill at Cape River, they’ve had 900 parts per trillion in the drinking water for years because Gen X was supposed to be safe. And so , this could be a really significant driver and it’s short chain, which is also a new thing.

Rescaling the challenge…

Antoine Walter: Let me just try to get that one. So you mean that GenX was at 900 part per trillion? Arguably safely in drinking water so far in North Carolina, and now the recommendation from the EPA is 10 parts per trillion. So basically you have to divide it by 90.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Which is… obviously we can talk about this, but there are some of these overlooked communities where certain pfas species have been making their way through existing treatment works, and people would be like, Oh, it’s okay. The carbon doesn’t remove short chain like Gen X because they’re safe.

The only reason we thought they were safe is cuz we hadn’t studied them yet. And so, , going back to our previous conversation, when I sat with my team in 2016 and we saw the lawsuit settlement for Dupont, this big plant, we said, but hey, it’s the carbon fluoride bond, this super chemistry, which is introducing the risk of toxicity.

And so we, we just gambled, we said, , all of them are gonna be regulated and we’re gonna be developing an assort platform for all of them. But there was a big risk, honestly, we didn’t know if they were gonna be regulated. So I think that was a huge deal. And I, I talked to some of the people who provide current solutions and they’re sort of asking what happens to our carbon now?

… creates new challenges!

Like, is it not gonna be able to remove Gen X to 10 parts per trillion? Because it was never engineered to do that. It’s in that strange sweet spot in between Ion exchange, which is super, like it’s irons, like super short chain iron exchange can usually do. And then very long chain, which usually activated carbon can do somewhat.

But in between that we have , the sort of Gen X equivalent. And the EPA moving into that space , is a sort of hot potato

New PFAS liabilities have new consequences on water utilities

Antoine Walter: but what are the consequences for the utilities? Because when we discussed about the Dupont case, , the case at the time was you are a big industrial and you’re releasing pfas. You have a liability. So you have to deal with your liability. And if I got it right now, at those levels, every single small utility could enter into that liability sphere because.

If now they are the ones which are supplying water, which is above those thresholds, they could be held responsible for something which is potentially a hazard. is it that straightforward

Henrik Hagemann: you’re touching exactly on where , the pain point is. How can we, like with the Superfund approach where EPA lawyers are pushing for the. Polluter to pay the polluter PACE principle. How can we put any burden on the wastewater utility or the water utilities to handle pfas? None of those have introduced it.

They haven’t benefited from the profits of, let’s say, doing stretch Dart or Gore-Tex or Teflon products. There’s been significant revenue driven through some of these big industrial conglomerates. And so what it means is , it becomes a bit tricky. It. Sort of political hot potato right now with the American wastewater work stepping into it.

To the kudos of the US ecosystem. The Superfund has moved as well. The Superfund is moving, looking at pfas, and they’re saying, Okay, this could become a designated hazardous substance where you and I both know.

A federal superfund to alleviate the PFAS burden

Antoine Walter: We shouldn’t just maybe explain what the Superfund is. So that is one part of the Biden infrastructure bill, but which is dedicated to PFAS with a 1 billion pockets, which could go up to 5 billion pockets in the future. And which was meant to be supporting the smaller communities, smaller utilities, to treat out their PFAS.

Henrik Hagemann: You have some really good advocate groups in the us. Like let’s say you have the Erin Brockovich writing about this and supporting some of those small groups. But it is still a massive undertaking. I think often, it’s easy to forget what, the US infrastructure actually looks like for water treatment.

Like those 35 million Americans that receive their tax order from privately owned for profit utilities, and we just sort of forget about some of these things. The other part is 10% of the US population have private well. How are they going to install solutions to remove pfas? When there is a lack of guidance, you have the ewg, you go onto the website.

Right now the EWG is mostly advising for the old NSF standard, which is just PFAS and PFOA. And so right now things are shifting. It’s like, oh, the NSF is changing the NSF standard to include this broad spectrum removal. That’s gonna mean a massive impact for the consumer. They’re gonna have to learn about these new things.

And honestly, with the issues we have going on, like many of these people, they don’t want to learn about water treatment. I think it’s, I mean, it’s in your podcast name, Don’t waste water. Like people don’t wanna know about safe water. They just want it to be there. They just want it to be something that’s provided.

Will the new PFAS threshold push Utilities out of the Water business?

Antoine Walter: but to get. , the full consequences of that step change. I’ve read articles about small utilities that said, you know, we were already debating if we have to stay in the business as a utility, don’t we maybe need to transfer into a bigger body to consolidate, to have a broader aspect. And maybe on that consolidated, bigger scale, maybe we can afford to have someone who looks specifically into pfas and then we are safe, or we cover the risk, or at least we mitigate the risk.

And there are even some utilities, which already. Further and said That’s it. We are consolidating. I’ve seen articles in the Boston area, , some others in the Midwest. And the American water scene is quite special. It’s not the UK with its 30 utilities. It’s really, there’s 90,000 utilities on the scale of the country.

So, could be also step change when it comes to this geography or topography of those utilities. does this epa change on pfas really have the potential to just turn the sector on its head?

Henrik Hagemann: It’s such a big area, the utilities alone, and I’m happy to say I’m not the expert. You have , the sort of George Hawkins former DC water go out and talk about how to consolidate things or how to do it better. And they’re trying to do this sort of cooperative approach where they try and bring in different stakeholders, different water utilities to really .

Support one another. Like you’re often going through the same questions and the same optimization pieces. I think that’s something which would be powerful. I’m happy to say I’m not an expert on that. I think they will take a village to address many of these things, and I think it’s going to take a while let’s say as an example, American Water or DC Water, they take a new PFAS treatment technology, They need to go through 12, 18 months of testing before they can then put a business case forward, and that business case can get possibly approved or need some minor corrections that takes a while.

The state of US Utilities, an ever running challenge

So I think honestly, it’s probably going to take two, three years. This is me, Crystal Ball Gaz. So it’s guesswork, right? But two or three years before the utility sector really could have, let’s say, an alternative technology to putting in a sort of firefighting, reverse osms plant or an iron exchange and a GAC where you just concentrate the liability and it goes to, a landfill leachate.

It’s not just a cost, which is growing up, If we’re going to be removing PFAS to this higher level, there’s an infrastructure bottleneck. We do not in the US have any new permits, environmental permits that have been approved for pfas destruction for these plus mark incinerators since the 1980s that came in through the, the sort of environmental initiative from Barack Obama administration, and right now they’re saying, Actually, these incinerators sometimes don’t fully deflate pfas.

And so they’re unlikely to introduce new infrastructure to destroy it. And even with all the cool new destruction technology, there’ll be a massive warehouse which would need to be filled with these materials. Even if the money is there and the intention is there, it becomes a, a logistical bottleneck.

DMSO Soup, the miracle PFAS treatment we were waiting for?

Antoine Walter: you open an interesting door with this trendy new ways to destroy pfas because actually there was a paper by Britain Trend, which was published in Science, which. Since then, republished a bit everywhere because a lot of people saw a lot of hope, in, that research that they did , with her team.

And they found a weak spot. I’m gonna use layman terms in pfas, like you have this long chain of pfas and basically there’s the head and the tail and somehow there’s a weak spot between the head and the tail. And if you cut off the heads, then everything else falls apart and. If I’m right, they use dmso soup and they heat it and they just steer it , and the head falls apart. So drop the mic. Problem solved, right?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah, I think , it’s a beautiful initiative in terms of selective absorption. I, I told you that beforehand and I think. We have a tendency to sensationalize whenever there was a PFAS Progress point, technology or solution. It just reads best in a sensational way. So I think they did some good science communication about the paper.

I love the Twitter thread from one of them one of the authors behind it. But I. Melanie Benesh, was it? Yeah. I’ll add my 2 cents. So let’s go through it. One, you’re right, it is exploring this weakness and so ultimately it’s going to benefit selective adsorbants, which can provide a soup of ps, which could go into the DMSO destruction path.

Managing expectations over a still very revealing new approach

But let’s be real about a few things. One,

there is no LCMS in the final material, so that might still be higher than 20 P B T in the final pfas. We don. Two, It hasn’t done very well for short chain CAR basilic assets. PCAs, there was a lower efficiency on. Three and this, this is the real one. you need to cook the pfas for five days with a solvent.

Tmso is still a solvent. So five days, this is, this is not an industrially relevant process yet. It’s a very good, very, very good mechanism explanation, but it, it’s talking about that gap, that chasm between good scientific breakthrough and industrial scalable solution. We would need to overcome that and then, Sophonic assets, the sort of elephant in the room.

 It still hasn’t done sophonic assets PF FSAs. It only does half of the PF a s treatment. And then the last point sort of commentaries, it still doesn’t do point of use or point of entry treatment. Like there you cannot wait days for the process to provide you safe water. So. Yes, we should encourage these new developments.

We should put it on the front page, but we should go and listen to the scientists and go and see what their science communication like says about this sort of paper

The long road from lab to full-scale for PFAS treatments

Antoine Walter: So for the layman like me, PFAS , doesn’t break the fog every day , and when you see such a hype around the paper, it gets at least people and eyeballs drawn on the topic. So that is incredibly positive. Is there some new understanding about the way to destroy PFAS in that research? Is there something which can be leveraged for the future approach?

Henrik Hagemann: Oh yes. Oh yes. I think so. I think there is a massive drive towards having, and this is really the one problem statement for pfas. We need to. Sustainably capture pfas as cost effectively as possible. And so this type of selective destruction opens up a much more elegant way of destroying and breaking down pfas.

It’s still very much stuck in this paradigm of let’s get rid of it or burn it with fire. I mean, that, that’s what we used to do, . But now it’s like, okay, let’s break it down with very intelligent mechanism understanding, which is. But you are sort of missing a bit of the point. Like the refrigerators we use, they use a PFAS based chemistry, the refrigerator fluid, and there’s an infrastructure in place for reusing that because it’s valuable.

And refrigerators work with a lower carbon footprint. When they use the super chemistry, of course you can use something else, but it won’t be as efficient if you don’t use a PFAS based chemistry. And so they’ve built an infrastructure to reuse it, capture it, circular economy. Now it doesn’t work perfectly all.

That approach, that paradigm will save us a lot of trouble in terms of, we only have a couple of billion tons of CO2 budget left. If we’re gonna be creating like novel pfas chemistries, destroy them, creating novel ones, it’s a lot of that budget, which is just going to waste. So I think , it’s good phase one.

Let’s do destruction, let’s like take care of it. But phase two, let’s focus on making , a circular process.

Creating a new path: PFAS Reuse

Antoine Walter: what’s missing today , to really go into that realm of circular economy when it comes to this pfas, there are 14,000 substances. Meanwhile, maybe you cannot have a circular loop for all of the 14,000, but maybe for the most important ones. It sounds about logical and. Going together with the sustainable times we should be living, We shouldn’t just do kind of that stupid thing of creating, destroying, creating, destroying.

That’s not a useful cycle. So technically speaking, how far are we from being able to recycle pfas?

Henrik Hagemann: It’s one of those like great initiatives where you have Ellen MacArthur Foundation and others try and bring together stakeholders, so large chemical companies, new solution providers, government, et cetera, to look at, okay, what’s missing for us to just have a first use case. Beyond refrigerators. So between you and me, there is a use case for pfas to be reused.

But for a first one, which comes from the waste water cycle , what’s missing? I think there was a few pieces that’s missing. You know, , when we did microplastics, , you remember there was that whole fuss, plastics awful. What are we gonna do? And what they did was, Brought together coalitions that worked together, multi-stakeholder, and they found some lower grade plastic use, like your bin bag you and i’s bin bag doesn’t have to be the best plastic.

Understanding the multiple applications of PFAS components

It didn’t just be a, a tier two or tier three plastic. And so it became a, a lower grade application for plastic where you could put all the recycle. As an example that sort of thinking is what we need to bring into pfas. You have hundreds of products that need pfas. Everything from you go to the shower, you’re chrome plating of the shower head or the sink that’s using pfas.

There’s actually quite a low grade of pfas. You don’t need the most specific sword for. Similarly with some cement manufacturing, they sometimes use PFAS chemistries for the production of that, again, doesn’t have to be the highest grade of pfas. What we need is infrastructure. We need a coalition towards this, and we need to bring together stakeholders.

I try and remind my team about this, like the enemy fo. The clock is ticking. 2030 is coming up. Climate change is taking over in waves all the time and reducing our sort of leverage. And so instead of painting one industry or one, let’s say company, that’s the villain. We need to work together against the real villain, which is the clock.

Full PFAS treatment would be prohibitively expensive

Antoine Walter: you mentioned this importance of coming together , and putting the right resources , and synergizing those efforts. I’m coming back to what you said about the American Wastewater Association who underlines that. Eliminating those pfas is gonna be very expensive. Is that the kind of awakening that you need to see everywhere that we say, Wait, just saying it’s dangerous and destroying pfas isn’t gonna be the sustainable solution because no one wants to pay.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah, I think it, it helps in one way. It helped to say it would be too expensive to use existing pfas treatment technologies. It would cost us 370 billion just for pfas. It makes no sense. I think then it’s a question of this, so what, try not to end up in like doom scrolling where you just read about all the wildfires.

You wanna then say, Okay, what tools do we have? What first principles can we apply that will change this? One trip B This sort of new selective destruction method that could be part of the toolbox. So it could be a circular destruction method. So you have the super critical water oxidation like Aqua Arden 374 water, where basically they break down, they fully deflate the bond and they break it down into fluoride carbon.

Some water. You’ll probably use some of the gas and it can with a heat recovery. Pay off some of it’s high energy consumption. those tools alongside obviously like capture and concentrate steps that probably you want to reuse to save cost , that we can bring together. We’re not trying to stir up more attention on pfas.

We’re trying to use that funnel it in to get some action to get some jealousy cases.

The European approach to PFAS remediation

Antoine Walter: it is still a challenge to get everyone to understand what we’re discussing because when, you bring a pfas in the US it’s DPA communication In Europe, it’s gonna be the reach approach for really the men in the street where I would say I belong on the topic. It’s really. You do know that there are thousands or hundreds, thousands, even with reach of those substances and you’re like, Oh, bad chemical industry. Let’s destroy everything. So I think it’s important to convey that message that PFAS is in our daily lives, it’s in our blood. That’s what we know. But it’s also a positive things in, I mean you, you mentioned the show. We have it in, in a lot of objects, and then you can debate is it the right thing or not to use it, but if already we are accustomed to use it, maybe it’s about bringing , this element of resource recovery to make it more sustainable.

Where I’m heading with that is that I’ve seen also in that list , of regulations , from the EPA that they listed 12 pfas that they want to remove as authorized substances, so would be forbidden. And , when you read that, it’s like, okay, 12 out of 4,000 and so what? Plus , when you read the announcement, they also mention that those 12 substances are not in use anymore anyways. So I, I just don’t get it.

What’s the message when you share these kind of things, like those 12 are out of the game? Okay. And what should I, as a layman understand the,

PFAS are like an Iceberg

Henrik Hagemann: if I could give you , the layman, like I’ll meet you on the street explanation. I would say there’s a big diamond. Imagine this big iceberg and at the very tip of it, we have poking out of the water, maybe two out of 5,000. If you go just below that water, you have 12. They’re just sur.

Out of this large ocean. And those 12 are the ones, these fiber chemicals which enable our modern industry that have just poked out onto the EPA radar. If you look underneath this, there’s 5,000, there’s 12,000 species, and these are not things we can easily get rid of. They have super properties that enable us to make vaccines.

So they’re using mRNA vaccine manufacturing. They make. EV chips. So you can’t have a sustainable car without using pfas and space suits. We can’t go to space without a, a PFAS based chemistry. And so , the impact, the so what is basically. EPA is doing good stuff here, but they’re missing a bit of what the Europeans have actually paid attention to already.

So this is where it gets, gets a bit of attention during the Europeans at the European permission, very bravely went out and said, This needs to be treated like a class. They take this iceberg, they lift it to the surface and they say, Hey, there’s 5,000, there’s 12,000. All of those within the next five years need to be removed, otherwise it will not be classified as safe.

Europe deals with the entire Iceberg… the US only with the emerging part

And what they said, and they recognize is we’re missing tools. So they said We need good analytical techniques for broad. Detection of pfas. We need something called oxidizable precursors with which is jargon. Basically something that’s broad spectrum. Looking at all the pfas, all of these little bonds between carbon and fluoride.

That move was courageous and they enacted it into law. 2021, is the US going to move on that? I mean, there are lots of finger pointing towards. Maybe they should. I think already starting with 12, you’re gonna see a big shift, and for better or worse, it’s only the beginning. So I like to say it’s a brewing storm.

There’s still more to come, even though it feels like, holy cow, this is the the peak of the PFAS hype cycle. Actually, there is more to come.

The European approach to the PFAS challenge is more ambitious!

Antoine Walter: That’s maybe the peak of the PFAS hype cycle in the US, but what about Europe? You mentioned how Europe is forward looking when it comes to PFAS. If you had to synthesize it in a couple of sentences, what makes that European approach so special?

Henrik Hagemann: It’s very simple. We have 20 pfas species in the 2020 Water framework directive, which have been identified as needing regulation. So those 20 pfas species they are basically coming into law over the next three years. Then what they say is by 2025, they want the whole class of pfas species to be detectable.

Probably they’re going to use total oxidizable precursor, assay topa or total organic fluorine for detection. When I talked to , the EPAs and the local sort of, Jurisdictions within the eu. It sounds like Topa is the front runner right now. Or top assay, whatever you want to call it. Now, the real question for me is, When is it going to have teeth?

So you and I, having been in the water space for a while, we know that there’s a lot of bodies of water within Europe, which are actually not classified as safe right now. I mean, you see the sewage, which is being dumped in the uk and that’s like unlawful supposedly. So I think the real question for me is, when is it going to have teeth?

… with regional spots that go even beyond

It already has teeth in certain regions. So you have Northern Italy where they used to have legacy pfas manufacturing. They have 12 pfas species they need to remove. Otherwise they get fined because there are more than a hundred thousand Italians exposed to unsafe levels of pfas from that manufacturing plant.

And so I think it’s going to be fragmented, even though the EU tries to make it like a class and tries to make it unified. It’s going to be individual states within countries that are gonna be the front runners.

How Puraffinity further grows to address the PFAS challenge

Antoine Walter: So that means you’re probably in a good space and in a good spot with your company. And you’ve mentioned how some of the technologies which we have been discussing are not yet to this industrialization level. So I’d like to understand a bit how pure Affinity developed as well. You mentioned how you are in that space since 2015.

I’ve seen that you’ve hired a production director, and that sounds to me like a step forward in your industrialization process. Are you still a research company or are you now a real industrial company?

Henrik Hagemann: it’s why I wanted to talk to you, so there’s still more to come, but beforehand we were bottlenecked by R&D, so we had these four different assets for pfas treatment, but we were bottlenecked by getting this first efficacy data from a third party. It’s a bit like when you develop a vaccine.

can only say so much about your own data in house. You need a third party to say, okay, has this efficacy level to this success criteria. And so where we’ve gotten to now in the last two months for our front runner asset we basically got third party validation, which may or may not be the sort of news that could be coming in the next couple of weeks from our side.

Towards a one billion ton production capacity

But it’s focused on broad spectrum pfas. So it’s not just one site, but actually three different sites we have been testing with in the US coming back and saying, Okay the performance you have for PFAS is what they would classify to the new nsf 53 regulations. So their broad spectrum, short chain and long chain is best in class for the materials they have tested and they’ve tested lots these sites.

And so, Where that takes us. The so want is we are shifting, we are shifting gears from being bottlenecked by efficacy data, third party scientific proof to scale up and manufacturing. And I can bet you as an engineer, that to me is just. It’s really right up my alley. And so we’ve been building out the industrial manufacturing capability.

We currently sitting at about five tons per year production capacity. We’re not churning that out like every day. But we’ve hired this new production director who. Comes in from Johnson, Matthew comes in from Dow Corning, where he was a project and production director with 30 years of experience to help us get on this scale up roadmap.

It’s not just about hitting five tons. You and I know, Yes, it will do a lot for a point of use player. Okay, but for an industrial insulation, that’s just the beginning. You would ask for five tons for a small plant. And so we are executing now on a new roadmap, which is getting us to beyond a hundred tons of production capacity.

And that. That is really going to enable us to start addressing just some of these front runners issue with pfas, where it’s already regulated, they already have solutions, they’re trying to get more sustainable, or they’re trying to respond to the new stringency levels. It’s not just about two pfas pieces.

It might be about 12.

The typical Persona Puraffinity can help resolve its PFAS headaches

Antoine Walter: So when you mention this scale up and different size of what you’re addressing, what is your typical persona? What is a typical challenge which you take on as pure affinity? And what is maybe not sweet spot, which is not the right word, but where do you add the most value within that full spectrum of people which are now concerned by ps?

Henrik Hagemann: The problem statement for pfas is where we. So we spend a lot of effort actually just sitting and listening to, to possible personas, and they will go on about different issues, whether it’s the lead in the pipes or whether it’s the PFAS that’s coming up as an issue. A typical persona, Fas has gone through three stages, so I, I like to talk about this maturation curve.

The 3 steps on the PFAS fight roadmap

Phase one, you hear about PFAS and you start thinking, Oh, is there a litigation that’s awaiting me? And so you start internally. Sampling for pfas. You’re not telling anybody about it. Between you and me, some of the big chemical companies were in that stage for 60 or 50 years, so it can be long.

Phase two, you are sampling and you start reporting. To a sort of local enforcer, usually an EPA or some enforcement of some type. And then after a while they would tell you, Okay it’s great. You create your jobs here. Thank you for that. But now you’re gonna need to install a treatment solution for this.

So stage three, which is our sweet spot. They have been sampling. They have been told to do something, and they have a treatment train for pfas. Usually they would install a sand filter, a GAC and iron exchange, and then they would take care of the old regulations of pfas. So our personas at that stage, they come and say, Oh, actually my ESG is not very good.

Because every month for some of these plants, every month, they’re replacing the gac. They’re getting a new tank because they have stringent broad spectrum requirements. And two they’re concerned about what the cost of that. So it’s, if we are gonna be removing to the new regulations, I’m going to need three times more tanks, maybe five times more tanks.

It’s all about walking the talk

So it’s more of a, a. Capital footprint issue rather than whether there is a budget. So at that point , we listen, we try and like learn in a consultative way , what issues are. We’re not trying to sell a component for a solution. We’re trying to understand , what the sort of solution should look like.

And then in our case, sometimes you can replace one of the texts. Where they might have had iron exchange with something like our absorbent or sometimes both. And then it’s basically providing a total totex solution, , which is more cost effective for responding to the new PFAS regulations.

That’s a typical persona. Pre 2022. June post 2022, June, we have people. Bit like the a hitless chicken saying, Hey all our solutions to date are becoming redundant. We can’t remove pfas to this level. It’s just, it doesn’t work. We can’t even do it for a month. And so in that, it feels more like firefighting.

We saying, Okay let’s talk about where you can fit in our. waiting list for installations, and that’s evaluate, sometimes they have 12, which is the most cost effective way to remove it. Sometimes they would have 12 media just to remove pfas which is nuts. This is in Australia, which is like a front runner.

But imagine that 12 vessels with different absorbate media just to do pfas treat. And sometimes it’s simplification. So then near and me love to reduce complexity, fewer tanks. And then yeah, you have the chemical industry where they would like to reduce their carbon footprint because the overall group is asking them to have a lower carbon footprint.

Show me their, your nets plant. And they sit there as the sort of plant manager and they’re like, I still need to remove pfa. So for them it’s about regeneration. That’s what’s driving the covers.

What’s Puraffinity’s business model?

Antoine Walter: And what’s your business approach for those people? You said you are in for the totex, you’re not in for selling the medium, but you still have to sell something. So do you sell the medium to an epc which integrate it into those tanks, or do you retrofit the existing tanks and then it’s directly discussion with the end user?

Or what’s your business approach?

Henrik Hagemann: Pure Affinity is entering this fun stage of like going to market. We like to partner with organizations, so we would partner with a R&D collaborative partner, where basically they might work like an epc, and we then look at which sites should benefit from having a more. High throughput pfas treatment solution.

And then if it fits, we would do some third party validation, and then following that, we would basically be providing a solution with this EPC or local partner. As you know, it’s very fragmented. For water treatment. So one state in the US will have a local plumber who does all the installations.

One country in Europe will have a local startup who does most of the installations. , it really varies. And so we’re trying to have the most impact by partnering with organizations , as a company, we have this big moonshot to provide 1 billion people with pfas safe order by 2030. And there is no way we can touch all those lives by doing the installations ourselves.

… and Vision towards 2030

Antoine Walter: Do you also have a roadmap towards 2030 to reach those 1 billion? And are you on track?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Yes. We have a roadmap towards reaching 1 billion. What’s beautiful about this thing is if you install at a very high throughput, industrial treatment works, you can touch hundreds of thousands of lives without going to any of the households. You don’t need to see them or look them in the eye to benefit.

And it’s what I find so empowering about the water field. Now, all these people who might be indirectly benefiting from the new solutions and they don’t need to know about us, we can just sit there in the background, walk on the street with a big smile on your face because you’ve touched their health.

Cost, but they won’t know it. And so sitting in that data layer and in that tech infrastructure for PFAS removal is a big part of our roadmap. We obviously lucky to have investors that think about that long term. So it’s Heritage Group is one, but also Kindra Capital and. Partners some of those, they take a much longer view, but they wanna see the impact from the sort of new groundbreaking scientific breakthrough.

A crystal-ball outlook of the decade ahead

Antoine Walter: So you mentioned your crystal ball at the beginning of that discussion, and if you look now in that crystal ball, what’s happening in the next two years for PFAS in general and for pure affinity in particular, what do you see? What are your predictions?

Henrik Hagemann: yeah, it’s so interesting what’s in the next two years alone. So in the next two years, we’re seeing it right now on the ground. There’s this saying, it’s like slowly, slowly, then all at once, and I think that’s what the cracks are starting to show for pfas. First of all but also for the sort of legacy infrastructure, the water infrastructure, which is really like, it is starting to flow through.

So you have Jackson, Mississippi right now, a hundred thousand people. They’re queuing to get water. They’re still under this sort of boiled water. Yeah. Instruction, and those might seem like cracks right now, but as you start adding those up I think , there’s a real risk of possible civil unrest around water security whether that’s in the US or other countries.

That’s something and sort of keeping me up at night and like that’s the real enemy for this field. What’s in the next two years for pure affinity? For us, it’s about scaling up to meet this challenge. So if things go well we will meet in. A year’s time, hopefully before, and hopefully in Singapore where we will say, Okay, we are now turning out a hundred tons of material a year, 200 tons of material a year.

And that’s directly impacting these people in terms of removing and eliminating pfas. So it’s growing from being an R&D company to being a commercially facing entity with real production. That would be a massive shift. The field itself is going to be going very bumpy. I think we have in the next three months a supposed plan from the EPA about pfas.

it’s not going to be a linear path. You’re going to have states that fight back. You’re going to have states that push really fast forward and say, Oh, we’re gonna. Are they gonna try to do it as a class? That would be crazy. And then , I mean we see one another Antoine, and I think we will both be retired before.

There are some of the states in the US that will do anything else than PFOS and P four. They’ll just be doing the long chain. And if you go to their state, those are the conditions. I don’t think it’s an easy journey for the EPA to try and standardize a union that’s already sort of breaking up at some of the seams.

So I think those macro trends are going to be impacting even something as simple as pfas.

Antoine Walter: The good news, which I pick up in what you explain, is that there is still a lot, which is gonna move over the next month and years, which will give us the occasion to do a sequel of the sequel. And if it’s as fascinating as that one, I’m looking for that sequel of the sequel. So Henrik, it’s been a pleasure to explore that field again with you today.

And if that’s fine with you, I’d like to round that off with a new set of rapid failure questions, which is not exactly the same than the one you had last time.

Henrik Hagemann: Nice. Yeah, that sounds great. I love the rapid fire.

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: So the rules are still the same. I try to keep the questions short and you have to keep the answers quite short, and you’ll see that I’m the one side tracking. So my first question is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Henrik Hagemann: it’s introducing regeneration for pfas because it changes the cost entirely. Could reduce the cost by 80% and it makes it sustainable, which would be fascinating.

Antoine Walter: Can you name one thing that you’ve learned the hard way?

Henrik Hagemann: Oh yes, yes, I definitely can. One recent thing, so I’ll put it very recently, is when you get married, then, even if you both work in the same field, my wife works in the water field and you cannot talk about water all the time. You have to take some time, , just talk about something else. are, Even if you’re only thinking about pfas and like how we’re gonna address these inequal.

Antoine Walter: I know the feeling, not with my wife. My wife is not in the water sphere, but both my parents are water engineers, so definitely I get the feeling. What is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Henrik Hagemann: I think it, it’s simple. I mean, it is, it’s simple but hard to do. Decentralization, digitization. And then the third one is the circular economy. If you can hit the, like those three tailwinds with your technology, then you’re in a very rapidly moving river. The one thing I would look out for beyond that, the larger picture is how can we avoid some of , the conditions for civil unrest?

How can we look after some of this sort of parts of the community who are low or middle income and ending up sometimes like Jackson, Mississippi, that is just a breeding ground for riots or for inequality or civil unrest. And that is not what we need as a society or as a field.

Antoine Walter: Hard to switch to the next one after this one, but that’s the rule of the repertoire question, so I have to swipe. Is there something you are doing today in your job that you will not be doing in 10 years?

Uh,

Henrik Hagemann: That’s great. I, I think there was this saying that when you are a small company, so we’re only about 20 people, you work a lot in your business, but I think when you start to grow that and orchestrate the larger organization, you start to work. On your business, you start to work on, okay, what’s coming next for that, that business?

And I think, I love the approach that sort of Bezos takes where he’s saying, Okay, if I work on the here and now I’m getting carried away, he should be looking at two years ahead. And that’s where the time horizon, he should be spending his, the bulk of his time. I’m excited in 10 years time to be moving into that.

And I would love to, to get to that stage with the current.

Antoine Walter: And last question. If you were a words political leader, what would be your very first action to influence the fate of the word water Challenges.

Henrik Hagemann: if I really were in that position, I would invite some of the other leaders for collaboration. And I would pick up the jealousy cases. We’ve got some beautiful jealousy cases in the water field, and I would say, Okay, how can we do it simply how we can replicate these jealousy cases where they’ve already demonstrated an amazing sustainability improvement, an amazing improvement in cost of water treatment provision.

And then, yeah, then I would work.

Antoine Walter: Well, Henrik, it’s been a pleasure to discuss with you over this hour. Is there an elephant in the PFAS room that we have missed today?

Henrik Hagemann: it is a very good question. I think there is an elephant we are missing. So we have community groups like let’s say Erin Brockovich, who are paying a lot of attention to this. She wrote a book about it. How do we. Sort of make these disparate groups meet up without it being confrontational, without it being about, this community is currently getting screwed because there is a discharge of a chemical.

How can we meet up without that needing to be the occasion? Cause if we can, then I think we can tap into a much bigger. Economy in terms of changing these things, but also a much bigger workforce. There’s a lot that could be done if we bring the stakeholders together and that’s a bit of an elephant in the.

Antoine Walter: And what’s the catalyst, which we would need to gather all those people’s initiatives together?

Henrik Hagemann: I, I think we need these very strong figures that help to push. You have Erin as one, but who’s pushing from the industrial side? Who is the Erin equivalent From the industrial side or from the utility side? I mean, I, I mentioned George today. George Hawkins, like he’s doing stuff, but. We need someone as passionate as Erin.

She’s not getting paid to do it, but she’s, If she could meet with the equivalent from these other sectors, then I think we could do more.

Antoine Walter: Well then it sounds like something we have to advocate for, watch for, and probably participate in. So if anyone listening to that feels like the passion and the grit to take over that torch, I’d be happy to redirect those people to you and maybe to start a movement. Where shall I redirect them? The best.

Henrik Hagemann: The best would be. Reach out to me. I’m henrik pure affinity.com. If you’ve listened this far, you’ve done well. It’s like there’s a lot of complexity. The other one is to, to contact us as a company. We are really keen to learn from people as well as to engage. It’s not just about like being a part of a solution, it’s about addressing the problem statement.

So yeah, email contact on website and Twitter as well. I’m also on LinkedIn. Feel free to, at me.

Antoine Walter: Awesome. Like always all those links will be in the show notes. Henrik, it was a renewed pleasure to have you on that microphone. I’m looking forward to the sequel of the sequel, which shall happen at some time in the future. And thanks. Yeah, thanks a lot and talk to you soon.

Henrik Hagemann: Thanks so much, Antoine.

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By Antoine Walter | 30 April 2025

Blue Foot Membranes: The Next Evolution in Water Filtration

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Turing: The AI Revolution Quenching the Water Industry’s Thirst for Innovation

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The post Should We Really Destroy PFAS? No! Your Fridge Knows a Better Way. appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

The Thirst Foundation is dedicated to getting the global water crisis to the top of the agenda and driving innovation to use less water every day.

This episode is part of my series on the UN SDG 6 and the path to reach it. Check it out!

What we covered:

How Mina Guli ran across 7 deserts on 7 continents in 7 weeks to raise awareness on Water Scarcity  

How she completed 40 marathons in 40 days and started a 100 marathons in 100 days series, then broke her leg in #62

How her bringing the “Close the Gap” message across to 4 billion people is proof that we’re all capable of doing anything

How the Water Crisis is the story of People, and how we shall get them heard

How we must find a way to accelerate action to Close the Gap

How we need to put water onto the global agenda

How the UN Conference on Water in 2023 is our opportunity to move the needle and Close that Gap

How there’s Jeff Bezos, the Pope… and Mina on Fortune Magazine’s list of the 50 greatest leaders in the World

How regardless of where you are on earth, Water Scarcity will impact you through the goods you consume

How if we don’t care, there’s always going to be something more important or simpler than water to put on a corporate agenda

How the right scale to ignite action might be the companies, as they are quick to act when something impacts their supply chains or their bottom line

How Water is the main ingredient in everything we grow or manufacture, and how it’s not as simple as water price equals water value

How individually you can have an impact but together we can change the World

People filling in for Marathons 63 to 100, Agriculture as a key battlefield, the role of individuals, regulators, and policymakers… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Close the Gap!

Resources:

Have a look at Thirst Foundation’s website

Check Mina’s website.

Read the report Mina co-wrote with the Pollination group.

Come say hi to Mina on LinkedIn.

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Close the Gap!

Quotes: Close the Gap!

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Mina, welcome to the show, but I’m very happy to have you let’s start with a postcard. Where are you exactly. And what can you tell me about the place you’re at?

Mina Guli: So I’m going to give you a few tips. We just took the world record for the most locked down city in the world, which we took the record from Dublin and London.

That’s the tip. I’m not in London or Dublin. I am far on the other side of the world when we were little. My parents used to joke that if we dug holes deep enough, we would reach you. And what else can I tell you? We’ve just had winter. So we’re moving into summers that tells you I’m in the Southern hemisphere.

Do you want to have a guess?

Antoine Walter: in Austria?

Mina Guli: Oh yeah. Austria. The place where everybody says, oh yeah, I’ve been to your country. You’re right next to Germany. Right. And I have to explain no, that would be Australia, Landon kangaroos, and koalas, not the land of lederhosen

Antoine Walter: and what exactly in Australia.

Mina Guli: Yeah, I’m located.

Okay. All jokes aside. I’m located in Melbourne. So I’m on the Southern bottom of Australia, I guess you could say. And a hop step and a jump away from New Zealand.

Antoine Walter: I have. And that’s my two seconds of talking about myself, which is very impolite, but my very first large treatment plants I visited was in Melbourne.

It was the desalination plant of Melbourne when it was still under construction. So that was almost a decade ago, I would say, but beautiful place.

Mina Guli: A beautiful place, but not without its major water challenges. You know, we’ve built the desalination plant as a mechanism to insulate the city against water scarcity and water related risks.

And you know, now at the time it was highly controversial on the front pages of the newspaper. Everybody said, no, it’s ridiculous. It’s going to be a white elephant. And it’s now operating almost full time. And people are talking about the plans. Build a second DSL plan. So, you know, this is, if you want to know what it’s like to be in a city, which has to confront these water challenges every day, this is a place to be here, Cape town.

And increasingly, sadly, there are more and more of us living in more and more of these cities that have had to confront these kinds of changes. So I

Antoine Walter: think that’s something we will cover a bit more in-depth in our deep dive with this water crisis elements, but just right before, like to take just a step back to talk a bit about you, just because it’s not everyday that I have someone on that microphone, which was in the list of Fortune Magazine of the 50 greatest leaders in the world.

And I love the way you caught that on your website. Just saying that there’s Jeff business, the Pope and you on that list. So they defined you as a corporate lawyer activist. Is that still the right definition? And do you like that? What you’re presenting yourself and if not, what would you do in this.

Mina Guli: Yeah, it’s funny. When we think about the label is that we give people a week of things or organizations, because we like to put people or things in boxes and define them. It makes it easier to relate to them. I have conversations with them. I can’t deny that I was a corporate lawyer because I was for many years, actually in multiple different countries with multiple different hats, doing a variety of things that I never expected when I was a kid I would ever be doing.

And now people refer to me as, again, a bunch of different things and a bunch of different boxes. And one of them is activist. And I’m not sure that I like it, nor that I would call myself an activist. And that’s because to me, an activist sounds like I am lobbying people to do something. Lobbying companies.

Businesses or governments or, or investors to do something. And I’d much rather think of my role as working with others, creating these radically inclusive movements for change these coalitions, these collaborations, because in a place or for a topic like. We’ve failed for years because we’ve fought against one another, or we’ve been lobbying one another to do things.

And the reality is that we’ll only succeed if we start to unite and work in the same direction. So for that reason, I don’t want to be an activist. I want to. Be a catalyst for change. I want to show people, organizations, the government, everyone everywhere, the power of what’s possible. When we join together, we all put our shoulders against the wheel in the same direction.

And just how far we can take it. And I think too often we’ve looked at these big global challenges, climate change, water, all of these things, and we say, It’s too big and I’m just one person, one earth could I possibly do that? We’ll deliver meaningful change at the scale that it needs to, to solve this problem.

And the reality is, as we’ll explore over this podcast, we are all capable of doing anything. You know, people say, oh, I don’t have anything. I’m just nobody. And I say, you don’t have to be anyone to be someone. Every single one of us is capable of doing great things. Maybe it’s not about changing. The weld, but maybe it’s about changing your world.

Antoine Walter: That is a fascinating takeout to see yet. You’re not just everyone. You founded thirst, I guess, roughly at the same time where I was visiting that plant in Melbourne, not to give too much detail on the dates, but you’re still leading thirst today. What is your elevator pitch?

Mina Guli: Yeah. So I built thirst as a not-for-profit focused on solving the world’s water crisis.

And we do that by creating large inspirational out of the. Campaigns and specifically of campaigns that are focused on building ecosystems of stakeholders that we can mobilize to cure what we call water blindness or this whole concept of just being ignorant about the nature and extent of the water crisis, that working together to put water at the top of the global agenda and to drive really bold groundbreaking action on.

And

Antoine Walter: when we say bold action, you have a certain sense of. Some light on the topic. I’m going to make you a stupid joke that I guess 2000 people already made you, but you know, I’m running sometimes on Sundays with my daughter, but one day I hope to be running a marathon, which, um, I tried once, but never didn’t see the finish line and you run 40 marathons over seven weeks over seven countries.

Where did you, did you find this idea and how did you come up with that way of, of shedding the lights on the topic of

Mina Guli: water? Yeah, actually even worse than just running across seven deserts on seven continents in seven weeks, because the reality is a year later I ran 40 marathons in 40 days down six of the world’s great.

And then it just over a year after that, I set out to run a hundred marathons in a hundred days, all over the world. Again, obviously to raise awareness about water. Now, what happens is when people hear that this is what I’ve done, they instantly think I’m some crazy runner that loves running ridiculously long distances in extreme locations, all over the world.

And the reality is far from that. Don’t enjoy running. I don’t like it. I’m not good at it. And I’m definitely not naturally inclined to do it. I got into running because I hurt my back. Very badly. Doctors told me I wouldn’t be able to run again. And then I said, I’m not going to allow others to set limits or boundaries on what I can and can’t do.

Why should I let the goals and aspirations of others limited as they are define my. And I set out to prove them wrong. When I set out to prove my, to myself, that I was capable of doing whatever I set my mind to, and I started swimming then biking, and then eventually running. And, you know, it’s taken me on this incredible journey, not because I want to show the power of being able to run long distances, part of it’s that, but I want to use my feet to go to places.

That have suffered that are at the front lines of the water crisis. I want to meet people and hear their stories, and I want to create a platform that allows them to lift up their voices and share their own stories to the world. Because I think for too long, we’ve had. Business leaders, investors, corporates that exist in cities and in countries where water flows freely from a tab they’re completely divorced from what’s going on in other parts of the world, from what’s going on at the bottom of their supply chains.

And it’s time for us to connect the dots. And it’s time for us to say, do you understand that the decisions you make here today in New York, London, Tokyo, wherever it is the decisions you make at this boardroom table. Impact the lives deliberately or as a corroboree of millions of people all over the world.

And that has to change. We have to reconnect these people. We have to reconnect supply chains and we’ve got to help people to understand that water is not something that can be ignored. Water is the foundation of everything. We have everything we are and everything we trade every single day.

Antoine Walter: That’s a very important and fascinating point because it’s something we’ve addressed quite regularly on that microphone is that maybe the biggest problem with water is that it’s so obvious it’s everywhere and we know we need it.

So it’s just something which is around and that we don’t realize how important it is as long as we have it. It’s only the day you’re missing water that you suddenly realize, oh, that. That’s important. How would you define the water crisis? Is it something which is only happening in a part of the word or are we all within that?

Mina Guli: We are all living in the water crisis. I think it’s easy to look at some of these statistics, you know, I can reel off, like, I’m sure Anton, you can do the same thing, especially given the kinds of people you talk to on this podcast. Thousands of statistics. Oh, by 2030, there’s going to be a 40% gap between the demand for water and the supply of water available.

Oh right now 3 billion people don’t have access to adequate hand-washing facilities in the middle of a pandemic disgraceful. Deforestation gets front page news, but like our wetlands are disappearing. What, four times faster than our rainforest. You know, these are horrifying statistics, but it’s too easy to look at those, like, you know, the polar bear on the iceberg, floating out to sea and just let them be immune.

We’re numb to these problems. We’re numb to the images. We’re numb to a lot of these statistics and they just feel like numbers on a page. We need to bring these numbers to life and we need to help people to understand that these aren’t just numbers on a page. They’re real people’s lives in places all over the world.

And then not someone else’s problem. They’re our problem too. And that is because water goes into everything we use. We buy and we consume every single day. And when you’re wearing a really smart outfit talking on the microphone, you’ve probably got your mobile phone off in your pocket. Probably had at least one of your friends.

So at least one cup of coffee this morning. You know, just the water that went into what you’re wearing today. Like just that one. Smart, cool outfit took more water than all the water you’ve drunk in your whole lifetime. Just one outfit took more water to make than all the water you’ve drunk in your whole lifetime.

That’s staggering, but what’s even more staggering is that you have, I’m sure you’re French. I’m sure we all do have more than one outfit in our. And when you think about that multiplied by the billions of people across the world, and you realize that we all want more, need more energy, food clothing, and you start to realize this is not just a minor problem.

This is a major issue. That’s getting worse every single day. And without water, the whole thing will start to crumble and fall apart.

Antoine Walter: If I was to put one concept around what you just explained, it sounds like water scarcity is going to be the main driver. Like we are missing water, but that’s one of many because water scarcity, for sure.

I’m not minimizing it. It’s probably a very hard concern. But you also mentioned that the wetlands is appearing. You mentioned the overuse of water at some places and. It’s many elements and yet there’s one thing missing. There’s nothing uniting all of these messages. And that’s something that struck me.

When I read the report, you just published around the water crisis and that’s this element of the missing. I mean, if I was to make a weird analogy, it’s this, this one, ruling them all elements of the water message. I’m not going to be a bit all over the places, but it starts with, with the very beginning.

Published a report, which is very eyeopening on that element and on others. But what’s the story of that report. Why did you come up with that report? And what’s the key message to you inside the report?

Mina Guli: The reality of, of why we did the report was, you know, for too long, we’ve all looked at water and said, water is everything, but we treated as if it’s nothing.

We use it. We abuse it. We polluted. We use too much of it. So we set out to say, if water is everything, we treat it as if it’s nothing. Why is that? And what needs to change in order for us to solve this problem? And how can we bring together this highly diverse group of people around the world to actually agree on United way forward.

So. We started having a series of conversations, pulling knowledge and information together and said, what would happen if we looked at some of these other incredible movements for change on other big global issues around the world? We picked climate change because it’s one. I’ve seen over the years, this kind of more rapid acceleration of change.

And we said, what would happen if we actually looked at some of the lessons that we could take from something like climate change and apply it to water? Could we actually accelerate action? Because here’s the thing about water. We don’t have 20 years, 30 years or 40 years to solve this problem. I have been to the front lines.

I’ve spoken to people. We cannot ignore this and say, we can admit. We can not admit failure. How do you explain to farmers like, you know, 24 year old Christian, I met in South Africa who was sitting there inheriting a farm from his father where the dams were so dry. I could run across them or to people living on the banks of the salt lake in Utah, who are literally watching the waters recede before their eyes.

Looking at the dried up, RRC saying we will be the next ROC for 30 years. Scientists told everybody that the ROC was drying up and yet they continue to use the water. And there’s people in Utah saying this is going to be us. No, we cannot. Do anything but succeed. We must find a way forward. And in order for us to do that, we really need to find a way to accelerate action.

You know, the estimates are from the UN and others that we need to accelerate our action. By four times, if we’re going to reach the targets turned out in SDG six, which are targets that we need to meet by 2030. I do not want to be the one that turns around to the next generation, nor do people like Christian, nor to the farmers in Utah, nor to the women and gills spending hours and hours every day, going to fetch water to tell them that, oh, it just got a little bit hard.

We couldn’t figure it out. We couldn’t get our act together. And most importantly, we couldn’t work out how to align all our forces together. So sorry, people, we failed, you might die, but we failed. The only way for us to move this forward at an accelerated pace is to learn from the mistakes and the successes of others, like climate change and in the climate space, as you said, Antoine, it’s become increasingly clear that there were a couple of really key things that helped to move things along.

One was the. Really unifying call to action at 1.5 degrees or net zero w whatever, you know, there are a couple of major rallying cries that people diverse people across the sector have been able to get behind. We are missing that in. We’re missing this mobilized force, you know, in the, in the climate space to put climate on the agenda to start having conversations about climate, not just in the media, but amongst investors and policymakers and corporates at a boardroom level, we don’t have that in water.

And finally, we don’t have this really clear path forward of commit to. When missing all of those things, and unless we can find a way to deliver on them, we’re going to have a problem in, in meeting these targets. And as I said, problems in meeting targets need to be overcome because there is no choice, but to succeed in delivering on the target, stood out in SDG six failure is not an option.

Antoine Walter: How do you deal with the differences, the fundamental differences between climate change and the water sector and the water crisis, because. The temperature on earth heats up by three degrees. Every human on earth is going to feel that. So there was a sense of being all together in that. Whereas if I look at my own situation right now, when I’m sitting just next to the Rhine river on the ground water, which is the largest groundwater reserve in Europe, which means the run we recruit.

I would still have water for 200 years. I won’t feel the same urgency, which is absolutely wrong, but I won’t feel it’s personally, if at the other end of the words, people are really lacking this access to water. So how do we bring everyone on the same boat when it comes to water? And is it really the same then with climate change?

Mina Guli: Yes. Antwon. Let me ask you a few questions today. Um, you probably had a cup of coffee. Where did your beans come from in your coffee, inside the label of your shirt? It probably doesn’t say made with water from the. It may well have come from somewhere, half a world away. So I think it’s a misnomer for us to sit in these big cities where water comes out of a tap and assume that the crisis won’t touch us because the reality is the crisis will touch us.

It’s a crisis that’s far greater than. Scarcity, as you rightly pointed out, and as the crisis, five deep into our ecosystems and the networks that we need to support the water that comes up to us because what it doesn’t come from the tap, what it does come from an ecosystem. So it is the whole, all of the aspects of water that we’ve talked about, that you’ve mentioned the pollution to the recycling, to the re.

To the efficiencies. All of these things are related and necessary to solve. If we actually going to make headway into this.

Antoine Walter: On that microphone. I had the discussion with, uh, David Lloyd Owen, who wrote a book global water funding, where he expresses also that point where he says exactly what you said, that we are going at one fourth of the speed we should to achieve as to just six by 2030.

But his conclusion differs a bit from yours because he’s saying, okay, it’s not happening by 20th. Let’s not accept it, but let’s digest it and let’s make sure that we achieve it by 2050. If I get your right. What you’re saying is that we might not have these additional 20 years. So the time to act is today, which means you still believe that if we act right, we can close the gap by 20th.

Mina Guli: I think failure is not an option. I think that passing the buck for another 20 years, we’re not talking one year, we’re talking 20 years between 20, 30 and 2050 is completely unacceptable. I have seen people’s lives being changed by lack of ability to access water or by water pollution or, but all these aspects of the various aspects of the water crisis that we’ve talked about.

You know, I’m one of my runs in South Africa. I took 10 liter, plastic bottles of water to deliver to kids in a town that had literally run dry. These kids were staying home from school to wait for the water to be delivered. And as we drove off on the trucks that were supplying the water, you could turn around and watch fights breaking out on the street.

When people realized there wasn’t enough water to go. That is reality, and it’s not a life I want to leave for the next generation. I do not want women and girls like I’ve seen in India and places, a variety of plate countries around the world, spending hours every day, walking forward. I do not want Bedouins in places like Jordan.

We’ve been, when I was in Jordan running, we spent days looking for water, worrying, where we were going to get our next water from. It’s a terrible, terrible thing to worry about and to be thirsty, to be truly thirsty. This is not something we can just leave on one side and say, we’re busy. We’re a bit preoccupied.

We’ve got other priorities. No, this is something we need to fix now. Not tomorrow, not the next day, but right now.

Antoine Walter: Is it possible to rank the biggest hurdles we have towards achieving the goal, achieving this, closed the gap. And if we were ranking them, do I understand it right from what you were explaining from what, what you were doing over the past decade?

And from what I read in the reports, that’s probably communication and education is going to be on the top of the list.

Mina Guli: Yeah. So rather than thinking about the problem, let’s talk about the solution. In almost all the conversations about water. It’s always, what’s the problem. What’s the problem. Okay. We know we have a problem and we know that we’re pretty stuffed.

So what are we going to do to fix this? And I think we need to do three things. I think we need to mobilize a call for action worldwide. We need to step up and we need to say the voice of thousands of people across the entire world. Unified saying, we want action on. We need to mobilize a call for action worldwide.

Second, we need to put water onto the global agenda. Enough that water is cast aside in favor of other things, which might be more popular, might be easier to understand or might be easier to take action on. Now, water is the, one of the biggest risks facing our communities, our societies and our economies eat must be on the agenda.

It must be on the agenda in boardrooms, in political environments, in parliaments, in Congress, across the world. We need to put water on the global. And then third, we need to chart a clear path forward for action. That means we need to unify around saying, you know, maybe we can’t come up with the one thing that we want companies and businesses and, and investors to do.

Maybe there isn’t one thing. Maybe there are multiple things, but surely we can agree on 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, even six things that we can get companies to do that we can all agree. If we do these six things, then we will move forward on. So I think we need to mobilize a call for action worldwide. We need to put water on the global agenda and then we need to chart a clear path forward for action that allows all of us everywhere to actually do something together to solve this problem.

Oh, and by the way, I think we’re at a really unique moment in time, which is that we have an opportunity to move from water is a major problem to saying, how can we be part of the solution? And that unique moment is an opportunity in 2023, when the United nations hosts their big conference on water the first in almost 50 years.

And we have an opportunity at that time to say enough talk now. And the only way that that will happen is if we spend the next 18 months moving together in a unified way to deliver on these three solutions. And to say by the time we hit the steps of that United nations, where that conference is going to make with world leaders and corporate leaders from across the world, by the time we get there, there must be no option, but to take meaningful, serious, bold action forward.

But it’s not going to happen if we sit by and do nothing and it’s definitely not going to happen. If we say 2050 is okay, we cannot allow anybody off the hook. We must hold feet to the fire. And we must say, this is action. That needs to happen.

Antoine Walter: So, if we have to build that path to action in the next 18 months in your report, you gave some tracks which we shall follow, which are probably part of the solution.

We should agree on the science to be sure that we have the right data, to be sure that we are all talking about the same thing we need to. Find new ways of financing this, closing the gap. And we probably need to have some innovation somewhere down the road to bring an additional kick in efficiency in treatment and so forth and so on.

How do we build the solution

Mina Guli: in order for us to really drive this whole process forward by 2023, we need to create a sense of urgency and we need to create a sense amongst decision makers everywhere. That the key stakeholders, voters, consumers, people within their supply chains care about this issue because unless we can show we care, there’s always going to be something more important to put on a corporate agenda and probably something that’s way simpler to get your head around.

So we need to build a movement for change. We need to get to a place where we’ve got thousands of people around the world who are talking about water, sharing information about water and saying we demand action is taken. And I think if we can create that, if we can really build that movement, that sense that we all care about water, not we have the Waterworld, but we have the.

No, this is, has to go outside the water bubble and into the main lexicon of people around the world. And we need to get those people to lift up their voices, to share on social media and to actually start to create this groundswell of conversation that says enough, we want action, not tomorrow, but today.

And I think that if we can create that and if we can build that, then we will deliver.

Antoine Walter: And that action. What is the form and shell take? Because water, is it a highly regulated sector, highly regulated market, highly regulated industry. So does this movement from the population, from the people, is it sufficient to achieve this close the gap targets or do you think it goes through regulation?

Mina Guli: Actually, I think that to point the finger at regulators and policymakers is to shirk responsibility and to look at things in a very conservative way. And I think actually fundamentally it’s wrong. I’m sorry to be so blunt on Australian. We’re pretty blunt. So here’s my view about this. My view is that first of all, if you run the numbers,.

There is no way that we as individuals can solve this crisis, no matter how many short showers we take, how many times we turn off the tap. When we brush our teeth, we cannot individually solve this. And that is because the vast footprint comes from companies. And also obviously from governments and from regulators, if we look at the broader ecosystem then of who can actually deliver change, the reality is it can be companies, it can be investors, or it can be policymakers, investors, themselves don’t have a footprint.

So they exist in an environment where they can influence change, but they don’t have the capacity to directly make that change. Policymakers policymakers definitely have the capacity to make change themselves, but they exist with their hand permanently on the snooze button. They respond, they do not initiate.

So until they can see that there’s a groundswell of opinion or movement, they won’t act. So they are the last. Contrast that with companies, companies can be quick to act when they know that something impacts or has the risk against their supply chains or their bottom line companies have direct water, footprints and companies have the capacity to actually deliver change right throughout the tentacles of their wide reaching supply chains.

So the reality for all of us, is it, I don’t think it is an answer that we look to for policymakers and regulators, but I do think that we can work with companies and others in this space to say, how can we work together to make meaningful change? What signals do you need from regulators to demonstrate that you’re moving in the right direction?

And what do you need from investors? To help you to quantify the risk and then figure out how much you can spend on or how many changes or what you can do internally. And would it deliver the shifts that these people, these people, and we as communities and shareholders and voters are all expecting you to know.

Antoine Walter: You pointed at companies in general, but in the report you highlight how there is a 70, 20 10 relationship in the water uses worldwide with 10% for the households, 20% for the industry and 70% for agriculture, which if we want to be efficient and there’ll be straight to the point, it means we would have to first focus on agriculture.

Do the same mechanism. You just describe, apply to agriculture as well, where it’s harder to go into reuse policies and, and reduce your water footprint when water is probably the first ingredient of what you’re growing.

Mina Guli: Yes. But I don’t understand why it’s harder because you said in agriculture is harder because water is the main ingredient, but the water is the main ingredient in everything.

You know, even if you’re a manufacturer. And you are manufacturing clothing where you’re manufacturing, anything, whatever has come into your factory, the war ingredients that enable you to make your things use water, probably quite large amounts of it, because for a lot of these cases, the raw ingredients come from agriculture, unless you’re making, you know, mobile phones or some kind of technical.

Antoine Walter: Absolutely. But if you take a typical industrial plant, you could with finance and with a lot of investments, you could almost close the water adduction by just closing the loop and reusing as much as you could. It’s going to be quite intensive in terms of energy, in terms of treatment, in terms of everything, but on a two radical basis, it could work.

I mean, look at the international space station. You can have a system which works on one glass of water per day. My question is in the agriculture side of the question. It’s much harder because that water gets consumed actively by the plants, by the crops, by the soils. And you cannot just have a bike five meters beneath you or your field that would just take every drip of water that comes back and, and re-inject it into the system.

So I’m not saying things are impossible. I’m just saying it’s probably a bit more critical to close the loop in agriculture, then it may be any hardcore.

Mina Guli: Right. But the amount of water that gets used in agriculture is so massive. Even small amounts of saving can be very significant. And if you think about it, you know, moving from flood based irrigation to drip irrigation, changing the way that pesticides are administered, pesticides are often sprayed on with very large amounts of water.

Often have to get sprayed off with more water. There are ways that we can do things differently and smarter. We can do regenerative agriculture and help to store more water in the soil. We can cover our crops. We can use hydroponics, we can do so many different innovative solutions at large-scale corporate scale.

And also it’s more scale. I’ve met farmers. I met a young guy who was homeless and took a job as a farm hand one day because he knew. To put food on the table. And he took a job as a five. And I said, why did you start farming? And he said, because when I was at school, the only thing I remember is when I was really little, we had to grow a plant from a seed and I’ll never forget the joy I had of watching this seed grow into a plant.

So I thought I’d just work. As a farm hand, the guy was working on a farm that was in a desert in California. Literally had no water. And he worked for this older couple who eventually just said, you’re doing such a great job. Look, just take this and make. And what he was doing was researching and innovating every hack he could find to take every drop of water and reuse it and recycle it.

And he had put coverings up. He was capturing all of the transpiration, capturing all the droplets, running it off and putting it back into the system. So I do think that there is a heap of innovation we can impose. I think that there are ways that we can do things differently for too long. We’ve done things the way our parents and our grandparents did them.

The time for that is over well and truly over, we need innovation. We need solutions and you know what? Antwan the solutions are out there. There are so many terrific, innovative solutions, technology, easy hacks, like the things that these guys were doing, just unbelievably amazing, but not at scale. And if we can find a way to scale these things, even if it only drops the water used by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5% across the crops, across 70% of the world’s water, that’s not an insignificant amount to think about safe.

Antoine Walter: On the critical path to scaling those technologies. Usually if I try to summarize what’s my former guests on that microphone have shared that there’s two big tendency. The first is a certain type of conservatism. Like we will do like our parents and grandparents did what exactly you just explained. And the other thing is there must be an economical sense of doing it.

And here what’s quite often on the critical path is the price of water. Because if. Cheap. It doesn’t reflect its value. And if it doesn’t reflect this value, then there is no financial incentive in working on these two or three person incremental optimization of water users and bringing new technology to the market.

So do you share this concern that maybe today the water price doesn’t really reflect its value? And if yes, what can we do to overcome.

Mina Guli: Yeah, look, I think it’s easy to look at a pricing mechanism and say a price is equal to value and that dictates value. But in water, water has a venue so much greater than the pricing.

This is the year of the, of valuing water. The Dutch government has been leading a massive piece of work, trying to get companies and others to understand that the value of water goes far beyond a pricing making. And fi into the impact that those water molecules have right across supply chains and businesses and organizations and lives.

And I think. We need to find a way to communicate this better. I think we need to find a way to connect with people more and to help people to understand that the easy way out is just to stick a price on water, but that price does not reflect all of the externalities that water delivers to you in so many different ways.

So I think we need to get our heads out of this game of traditionalism and we need to get our minds into thinking laterally around how do we actually solve it?

Antoine Walter: Which brings us back to communication actually, because you’re absolutely right, by the way, I’m trying to push a bit in a corner and to be the devil’s advocate, but I couldn’t agree more with you will often have that problem.

I think it was pointed out by a study of the university of Michigan showing that there’s a one to four relationship between $1. You invest in water wherever you put it in the cycle and the benefits to the society. And then. Depending on the particular part you are looking at, you can have even a much larger lever effect, but that often boils down to it is a diffused benefits for a concrete cost.

And that is something which is sometimes difficult to reconcile. Is it something where we shall educate people? Can it be sufficient or is it even better to go at that higher level? You were alluding to where we simply all gets the message it’s it’s closed the gap and we’re all in that together.

Mina Guli: Okay.

When I first got into water, which was not so long ago, so I am not like a world expert on water. Let’s just be nice to be straight about this, but like Anton, you spend your whole life doing water engineering and you are really truly an expert in, in this space, but here’s what I’ve learned. The first is that everybody in water will tell you how complicated it is.

Oh, Maina, it’s really complicated. Marina asks. What’s the one thing I should ask companies to do. Oh, Mina. It’s so complicated. There’s not one thing may not ask. Well, can you explain the water crisis to me in a really simple way so I can understand it. Oh, Mina, it’s actually very complicated. Okay. Mina says, well, is it all about scarcity?

I keep on seeing all these problems with scarcity. Well, actually it’s really. Enough, we need to make water simple. It is simple. If we don’t have it, we die simple. If communities don’t have it, they start to fight one another and eventually they will die. If companies don’t have it, their supply chains will be.

People will lose their jobs. The company will lose its acids. Its value will drop and the time will be over. I have run through cities where for sale signs, litter, the. Where the value of houses have dropped so much. You can not ask people to take your property. Why? Because the towns are dry because without water, there is no property value.

There are no schools. There are no businesses. There is no economy. There’s no community, there’s no life. There is nothing. You know, we need to simplify this down into really, really simple, basic terms, which says this is the. And we need to solve it by working together. And this is our clear, well, charted well explained, highly simple way forward.

Antoine Walter: I would encourage people to have a read at your, your report, which is available on the website of pollination. My simple question here is what happens next? You read. 80 pages of the report. You get a strong sense of the urgency. You get the full parallel with what we can learn from climate change, and then what comes next?

Climate change has its rallies and its demonstration all around the word. I didn’t see that much of that happening in the water sphere is what we shall aim for. What would be your very, very simple call to action just after the.

Mina Guli: Yeah. So, um, before, before I get to, to that, uh, I do, I do want to tell you something, uh, very short story, because I think that it’s really easy for all of us to listen to these podcasts, read the report.

Hopefully everybody does go and read the report it’s it’s filled with. Actually it sounds like 80 pages. You make it sound like it’s so boring. It’s not boring. It’s actually a really interesting.

Yeah, it’s, it’s actually, I think it’s a super interesting rate and we’ve attracted it in a way that’s very accessible and easy to, easy to get your head around. But I think, I do think it’s easy to, you know, sit passively and listen. Many of you are probably driving or doing something else at the same time as listening to this and think, you know, I’m just one person.

We talked about this at the beginning of the podcast. I’m just one person. What can I do really to make it do. So Antwon, I mentioned to you that, um, I ran across seven visits on seven continents in seven weeks. And then a year later I ran. 40 marathons in 40 days, Dan, six of the world’s great rivers. Um, I’ve run down the Nile and the Amazon I’ve slipped and slid through mud and watch my toenails come off yet.

I’ve run across deserts like the Atacama desert in Chile and Antarctica, a place that’s so cold. My water bottle froze and it’s so quiet. I could hear the sound of my own heart beating. But in 2018, I set out to run a hundred marathons in a hundred days. Totally crazy. And I wanted to show what it meant to be a hundred percent committed to something.

Everything was great in the. 10 20, 30, 40 marathons. It just sounds ridiculous. Just as I’m saying everything was okay. We were telling amazing stories. The whole point had been to go to the frontline of the water crisis and give people an opportunity and microphone to tell their stories to the media that we’ve been gathering.

And we got tons of media, billions of media impressions, loads of enthusiasm across the world for the, for the campaign that we were building, but in the backroom. I knew I had a problem. And by the time I got to marathon number 62, my body was breaking down so badly that on day 63, we did not go to run. We went to the hospital and at the hospital, I was told by the doctors that the damage that I had done to my leg was so bad that I had a 15 centimeter fracture in my.

And that the only option was to stop running because if I kept going, I would literally break my leg in half and there would be no more running, not just like the next day, but for a long time to come me forever. And at that time I thought my world was over. I thought the campaign was over. I thought all the commitments I’d made to.

To the next generation, to how planet to the team, to everybody whose stories I’d wanted to tell in the remaining 38 runs, there was all gone. And I sat there in my wheelchair and I thought, this is the end. This the, my son has dish. And all I’m going to see is darkness, but sometimes in the darkest moments, incredible things rise.

And as I sat there in my wheelchair, My team came in and they said to me, MENA this campaign, this cause this water thing that you were fighting for is so much bigger than you or just one person today will run your miles for you. Day 63, my team ran my miles, day 64. They were joined by people from across Cape town where we were.

Day 65 people from around the world started to join our run to tweet, to blog, to support, to text, to message about their stories and how they were connected to water. And by the time we got to day 100, we did not run 100 marathons. In 100 days, we ran thousands and thousands and thousands of kilometers further than from the north to the south.

160 cities, more than 50 countries and territories right across the world. People everywhere, running for water. That could’ve been the end, but it wasn’t because what has happened since then is that we have built this global mobilization of people now in over 153. Thousands of people raising their voices, talking about water and telling their own stories.

This year, we ran our world war. Uh, world river run zero waste run. We’re in the middle of organizing sweat for soaps. So if any of you out there want to have a run between the 12th and the 17th of October, you can go online. It’s free. Go to sweat for soap.com. You can sign up to run and participate. This is a little bit of a plug for every kilometer you run.

We donate a bar of soap to communities in need around the world. It’s all in support of global hand washing day, which is the 15th of October. The point being that we have tapped into this incredible, amazing community that exists around the world that says, actually we understand that water has an intrinsic value to all of us.

We interact with it every day. We need it. We love it. And we want. This is not a time for taking battles. This is a time for change, and it’s a time for unifying around our common goal and that’s water. So if ever anyone listening to this campaign, listening to this story, listening to this podcast, just thinking about these big issues thinks I’m just one person.

What change could I possibly make on one? You need to listen and think about this story because I am just one person. I’m a kid from the other side of the. I’m a kid from down under who said, this is something we need to do. And if all I do is take one step and another one and another one, just maybe I can be an inspiration to others about the power of what is possible when you want something badly enough.

Someone tweeted at the end of my run individually, you can make an impact, but together. We can change the world, you know what she was absolutely. Right. So why am I telling you that now I’m telling you that now, because I’m Antwan, you asked me from the report. What’s next what’s next is for all of us to step up, to use this report, to galvanize a movement, to have a conversation about solutions and to actually start to implement the recommendations that we’ve.

These are not the recommendations of one or two people. These are the recommendations of a whole bunch of latest and experts around the world. Recommendations that we can draw from climate change and we can apply to water so that we don’t have to wait until 2050 to see action so that we can accelerate this and make it happen right now and today.

And what does that involve? It involves unifying and around a call to action. It involves developing and building this radically inclusive movement for change. And it needs to involve some kind of commitment to action by companies and others. And if we can do that and if we can use this report to achieve those changes, then by the time we get to the steps of 20, 23, we will see that whilst individually, each one of us may have only been a drop in the ocean.

Together we’ve become a movement of change and that that really will have the power to move the needle on mortar and Silva global water crisis.

Antoine Walter: That’s somehow the human bird metaphor towards closing the gap. I love it. It’s inspiring. What you just shared with me, inspiring me. Not, it was a pleasure to dive into those fascinating elements.

Again, I hope I didn’t sound negative when it said 80 pages reports. If you’re into illustration, there are beautiful pictures in the, in the reports and there’s really actionable examples of what to do. So I really recommend everyone listening to this to have a read at the reports. The link is obviously in the show notes and then beyond the report itself, I think what’s what you just showed me is giving us a sound sense of the kind of actions we can all take to get.

To close that gap and to start seeing how we are actually doing that. But the next time we measure in 2023 to all achieve it, it by 2030, if that’s fun for you, I propose you to switch to, uh, the rapid fire questions to wrap up our discussion for today

Mina Guli: for bring it on.

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: So then this last section, I tried to have short questions.

I try not to sidetrack you, but I cannot promise. And, and you can have shorter answers if you, if you wish. So my, my first question, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why

Mina Guli: to be really honest? It’s watching these mobilizations of people around the world grow, it’s seeing and observing and being part of this radically inclusive movement for change.

Seeing the bold optimism that exists amongst these people and the unwavering commitment to making real meaningful change. It’s watching a woman on a Zimmer frame. I think that she can get to one kilometer watching the community around her saying you can do so much more and watching her over a week as she far exceeds anything she thought she was capable of and knows that every kilometer she covered, she helps to change the lives of communities in need.

On the other side of the world, by donating soap, this is the most exciting, amazing thing. The most uplifting thing I can tell you, like, it’s just such a phenomenal thing to watch and to, to be a part of

Antoine Walter: what is your favorite part of your current.

Mina Guli: Hearing the stories of ordinary everyday people doing extraordinary, unbelievable things, seeing them realize the power that’s in their hands, seeing them realize that you don’t have to be anyone to be someone that every single one of them is capable of doing great and amazing things and fulfilling their dreams and their aspirations.

For me, that’s so uplifting and inspiring because when people realize that. And when we all were together and unite that passionate enthusiasm, we couldn’t do anything. Even solving a global water crisis by 2030.

Antoine Walter: Is there something you are doing today that you will not be doing in 10 years running?

Mina Guli: Well, I’m not kidding.

We’ve got to solve this water crisis cause you know what? I’ve got to start running this running things. It’s odd, far out. It’s hard. It’s hard. You get up early in the morning, crazy early in the morning, go out in the rain and the hail. And, and you know, when you’re not a talented runner, like, you know, I did not grow up running, but I was a fat little kid when I was growing up.

I was the last one picked for a sports team. You kidding me? I’m a bad runner. So yeah, in 10 years time, I’ll definitely not be running, please. Everybody step up, make change on water. So I don’t have to run.

Antoine Walter: Can you name one thing that you’ve learned the hard way.

Mina Guli: I’ve learned a lot of things the hard way.

Um, I’ve learned that thing through COVID I’ve learned that we can’t hope for things to be better. We need to accept the way they are today and we need to adapt and adjust accordingly. I think I’ve learned the power of our mind in both setting boundaries and limits and in tearing those boundaries and limits down in the ability to change one letter in a word.

And to shift our entire frame of reference. You know, I’ve got to go to work today. I’ve got to go for a run. I’ve got to go and solve this problem. And instead think about things as I get to go for run. I get to go to work. I get to go solve this problem. And I think that for too long in the water space, We have used traditional words and traditional mindsets to limit the way that we’ve approached these solutions and limit the way that we’ve approached collaborations with others.

And I think it’s time for us to think differently. And I really hope that through this. Horrible pandemic. And through all the tragedy that has ensued as a result of it, we will be able to start seeing the power of what it’s given us, which is to think differently, to do different things. They, up to be differently.

And our hope that we can apply that to water. And we can start to be smart about solutions and say, right, if we apply our collective ingenuity, we can actually get this thing done.

Antoine Walter: Which offers me a perfect transition towards my last rapid fire question, which is what is this one thing we do today with water that will be looked at as totally nuts in 20 years?

Mina Guli: Well, I think to be really honest, 90% of what we do today will be looked at in 10, 20 years. And people will look at us and say, what were they thinking? But, you know, the biggest thing is not to value it, to take it for granted. I said this earlier on water is everything, but we treat it as if it’s nothing.

If there is one thing that we will look back on in 20 years time and say that was absolutely nuts and stupid. And what were we thinking? It’s that we treated water as if it was nothing. We took it for granted. We used it and we abused it and shame on us for doing that shame on all of us for continuing to do that.

And actually what we need to be doing is thinking about doing things, reframing things, but most importantly, valuing this precious, precious thing, cold water.

Antoine Walter: Well, Mina, you’ve been such a inspiring and awesome guests that I can’t help. But to ask, would you have someone to recommend me that it should definitely invite on that same microphone?

Mina Guli: Oh, Antwan. Yes. There’s lots of people. I’ve got lists of people that use. But, you know what, actually, I wouldn’t, I suggest that anybody that’s listening to this podcast, that it has a story to tell, please, in the notes to the show or in however Antwan you collect people’s feedback and stories. Anyone who has a story to tell about water, please share your story.

Please share with Antwan. Preferably share with me my handles on social media, uh, at Mina Gooley, M I N a G U L I or on Facebook where main ugly water. But please share your stories. There is nothing I like more than hearing the stories of how people interact with water and unearthing the non-traditional voices.

Too easy Anton, to find people who already have a platform to talk about their issues and relationships with water, and it’s time for us to find communities and organizations and people on the front lines and others that can talk about what it’s like. You know, I have had such a phenomenal opportunity in all my running to meet really incredible people.

Like. On the banks of the ROC a see that used to 30 years ago, be filled with water and have shipping boats sailing across it, taking like goods and food across. And now it’s so dry. The ships lie like carcasses steel carcasses in the sand. I ran between them. I met women who would tell me. What it was like to actually go out on these boats and fishermen and others, these opportunities to share stories and understand what it’s like, understand what it is to be confronted by the water crisis every single day, not just scarcity, but pollution.

You know, the farmers I met in the, in the beautiful, amazing, um, valleys in Provence in France where they’re growing. Amazing grapes to grow phenomenal wine, just saying, but talk about the whole complexity and issues, not just around scarcity, but pollution in the underground rivers and underground water supplies and these, uh, stories.

They’re all stories and they need to be told. So Anton. I don’t have a specific suggestion for you. Of course, I’ve got lists of loads of amazing people you can invite. But I think the real challenge for all of us is to find new voices, diverse voices, people whose stories need to be told, who can connect to others and who can actually start to galvanize this sense of connection between those of us that live in big cities, where water comes out of attack and the rest of the world who lives in places where they’re confronted with.

Every single day.

Antoine Walter: Well, that makes for the most perfect of all conclusions I’ve ever had on that microphone. So thanks a lot for that. And I’ll underline once more than to illustrate what you just said. There are some very impressive pictures in the report as well, which give a sense of what you were just saying about those people who sew it with their eyes.

These appearing, and I’m not sad Trek you here. And I closed this. Thanks a lot meaner. Thanks for sharing all of that. Thanks for the inspiring message. And for sure if I get any story. Have a direct connection to me through, uh, the social media, which I’ve put as well in the, in the show notes or contact me and send everything over to, to Mina so that you can also gather those stories.

Thanks for having been with us. And I hope you succeeded because if you succeeded, we also have. Hope

Mina Guli: is not a strategy planning and action. Uh, so no need to hope that we succeed. We will succeed because a failure is not an option, but B because I see the power of what we’re doing, and I know the importance of the action that we’re taking.

Other Episodes:

FREDsense: Revolutionizing Water Quality Monitoring with Biosensor Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 7 May 2025

Swirltex: Revolutionizing Wastewater Treatment with Bubbly Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 30 April 2025

Blue Foot Membranes: The Next Evolution in Water Filtration

By Antoine Walter | 16 April 2025

Echo River Capital: Pioneering the Future of Water Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 3 April 2025

1001 Fontaines: Engineering Sustainable Water Access Through Social Entrepreneurship

By Antoine Walter | 22 March 2025

Amazon’s Water Footprint: Tech Giant’s Quest for Water Sustainability

By Antoine Walter | 19 March 2025

Turing: The AI Revolution Quenching the Water Industry’s Thirst for Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 26 February 2025

Altillion: Pioneering Digital Intelligence for Water Asset Management

By Antoine Walter | 6 February 2025

Flocean: Pioneering Ocean-Based Water Solutions

By Antoine Walter | 15 January 2025

Botanical Water Technologies: Harvesting Liquid Gold from Plants

By Antoine Walter | 4 December 2024

The post 18 Months Left to “Close the Gap”: Beware, the Water Clock is Ticking! appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Epic Cleantec offers end-to-end service for the design, engineering, permitting, installation, and ongoing operations of onsite water reuse systems.

What we covered:

How Water and Wastewater management has not changed much over the past two centuries 

Hot the centralized water management approach may suffer from the increased loads if 70% of Humanity is to live in cities by 2050

How the Energy Sector can (again) be used as a guideline towards the Water Sector’s future

How up to 95% of a building’s water use can be covered with recycled water sources and onsite water reuse

How the byproducts of water in wastewater can provide tremendous value

How cities like San Francisco, Los Angeles, or Austin lead the pack, with onsite water reuse regulations

How distributed water management will dramatically enhance the system’s resilience by reducing interdependencies

How there’s a last frontier to break: overcoming the “Yuck” factor – and how to do so

How Epic Cleantec addresses and discusses the problem more than the solution in their marketing – and why

How they actually treat the wastewater in buildings – and what’s inside their “black box.”

How Epic’s system is deployed in a 20 story office in San Jose – and what this onsite water reuse enables

How “one size fits all” simply never applies in the Water Industry – and how Epic Cleantec deals with this

Business Model, GoTo Market routes, the secret to success as a disruptive start-up, Accumulating (well-deserved) Awards… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Onsite Water Reuse

Resources:

Have a look at Epic Cleantec’s website

Come say hi to Aaron on Linkedin

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Onsite Water Reuse

Quotes: Onsite Water Reuse

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

Download my Latest Book - for Free!

Antoine Walter: So, hi, Aaron, welcome to the show.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Thank you very much. I’m honored to be here with you.

Antoine Walter: Let’s start with good old traditions, especially with the fact that you were in quite a fancy place from my European eyes. Can you send me a postcard from the place you are right now? And what would you tell me about San Francisco, right?

That they would ignore.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Ooh, that’s a good question. Yeah. I’m born and raised here, which in the tech era is increasingly rare to have people who are actually born and raised in San Francisco and still live in San Francisco. But you know what I’ll say, that I find so interesting about San Francisco is that it’s a city that is always changing.

You know, there’s so much going on right now with tech, we have autonomous cars, we have robots on the driveways. We have robots on the sidewalks. We have drones flying all around. And I think a lot of people are constant saying it’s changing so quick, but we are a city that has always been changing. We’re always going to be changing.

And I think that’s what makes it a lot of fun ever since, you know, the gold rush days and before. So I would say as much as San Francisco seems like it’s going through a big period of change now, that’s, that’s actually in our DNA.

Antoine Walter: A bit between the born and raised element and the future. So we will be talking about the future in just a second with your venture and the fascinating things you’re doing at Epping Cleantech, but in between, I’d like to go back a bit in time, just right before you started epic Cleantech.

Cause I’d like to understand your path and how you came to. The point where you said, oh, there’s something out there I can solve and actually solving it involves creating my company and the family business if I got it. Right. So, so what’s the story around that foundation stone and founding elements?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yes.

So epic was actually founded out of initial work with the bill and Melinda gates foundations reinvent the toilet challenge. The true story. Is that my co-founder oh, dead was walking down the streets of Tel Aviv one day with his little pug dog named Paulie Paulie. Did his business on the sidewalk as dogs do.

Uh, oh, dad was on the phone, not paying attention. Didn’t clean up after his dog, just then a police officer came driving by sees this and writes him up a fine him being the fiery tempered Israeli entrepreneur that he is. Rather than just paying the fine and moving on with his life decided that he was going to come up with a 21st century solution to clean up after dogs.

So not necessarily the most pressing world challenge of the day, but it challenged him the less in working with his friend, a professor at Hebrew university, they devised a device. So essentially a hype. What we call an English, a pooper scooper device. So basically a device that can pick up the waste and transform it into something usable.

So they formulated a chemical, a chemical reaction that when they dosed the organic waste with this chemical created a quick exothermic reaction. Which means it very quickly moved it from a wet smelly waste into a dry odorless pathogen free substance, which after testing turned out to be good for plants, what we have learned and what I’m sure you’ve seen as well is that one of the occupational hazards of working in wastewater is that we all basically devolve into our inner middle-schooler.

We start making jokes and puns about the nature of this work. So of course this device got the attention of the internet. My co founders were then approached by the bill and Melinda gates foundation, who at the time were running the reinvent, the toilet challenge. And they said, look, take what you’re doing for a dog and scale it up into a toilet application.

And for those who aren’t familiar, the premise of the reinvent, the toilet challenge to look at the roughly three and a half billion people worldwide who don’t have access to reliable sanity. So how do we create solutions that aren’t necessarily reliant on a big centralized infrastructure of pipes and facilities, but instead are above ground are distributed and easy to deploy.

So my partners took what their innovations on a dog product scaled it up to the gates foundation, single toilet application. They were then presenting at a conference in California, where in the audience that they was my third co-founder Igor Igor, who also happens to be my. My father eager was trained in aerospace science and the Soviet union then moved to this country as a political refugee, moved into the building sciences and said, I wonder if we can take what these guys are doing for single toilets and scale it up into a building application that was seven years ago.

A lot has changed from those early days, but the fundamental. Focus of epic clean deck remains. You know, if we take a look at how we design our cities today, when it comes to water and wastewater, we really haven’t changed much in about 200 years, which is to say we, we are almost solely reliant on the centralized model of large facilities and large networks of underground pipes.

And it’s great. And it’s a Marvel of modern engineering. We need to fix it. It needs to be maintained. And frankly, we are not doing those two things as quickly as we need to be doing. So if we look at 70% of the world’s population living in cities by 2050, we can either build back the exact same way. Or we have a moment right now in history where we can kind of rethink.

And re-engineer how we’re designing our cities when it comes to water and wastewater. So that brings

Antoine Walter: us straight into a deep dive because what I get in, what you explain right here is that you’re taking on utilities. You’re really saying that is how it was done in the nineteens, uh, 19th centuries and so far.

And so on. If I’m being a bit, a bit extreme, of course, and the fresh steak is going to be decentralized. Do you really believe you can one-to-one replace it or is it going to be two systems that co-exist what is your vision there?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah, no, it’s a really good point. I’m glad that you brought it up. We do not at all see ourselves as taking on utilities.

We actually think it’s exactly. To what you just said. It is us coexisting. We see ourselves as effectively extensions of a city’s municipal operations. So I think, you know, the, the analogy we like to look at is, you know, look at the energy world. We need a mix of different energy generation. We need the centralized folks doing the large plants, but we also need distributed.

And I think frankly, diversifying how we get our energy makes our systems a lot more resilient, you know, look at what happened to Texas. You know, and when we had our last winter storms where a lot of the grid went down, because it was all sort of focused on centralized infrastructure, or even look at California where a lot of these fires are caused by our central centralized energy infrastructure.

That’s not being maintained fast enough. And it’s leading to things like these ravaging wildfires. And so I think we see that analogy for the water and wastewater world where it’s centralized and decentralized working together to create overall more resilient systems. Because if you’re a. Look, you have to invest a lot of money into your centralized infrastructure, but if you want to make sure that your city is going to have a fully recycled water capability in the next 5, 10, 15 years, it’s going to be very tough to do that at only the centralized level.

But if you leverage distributed or decentralized as well, we’re going to help you get to those targets a lot more quickly. So we very much see it as a symbiotic relationship us with the utility.

Antoine Walter: It’s an interesting, really interesting comparison because it’s a topic which has been regularly touched on, on that microphone.

I remember a very, very deep conversation on that analogy between water and energy with Kim baker, for instance, from elemental. But there’s also a major difference, which is. You still need to pump your water to go from a to B. Whereas on an energy grid can be much more interconnected. Of course, if you travel the full word, you’re going to lose some energy, but still the interconnection is quite stronger on the energy side of the market, which speeds.

Even more for decentralized solutions in the water words that it speaks for it in the energy word. And despite that physical elements, if you look today, we can say that the energy market has 10 years of advance regarding that element of decentralization, but still we are very, very far behind. I mean, we’re still very, very central and centralized when it comes to water.

So do you really believe that. When you’re looking at the energy markets, you’re looking at the future and that is going to happen, or is there a hidden secret source in the water market almost that would make it quite a

Aaron Tartakovsky: different beast? Yeah, no, like it’s a great point. Well, water is a very different, yeah.

And I’m sure this came up in your conversation with Kim baker as well. You know, no analogy is going to be perfect. I often laugh at the number of companies, you know, number of companies I see in San Francisco that are the Uber for X. No analogy is perfect. Everything’s going to have be there. There’s going to be caveats.

There’s going to be differences, but I think the fundamental. Comparisons we’re trying to draw is that we need to move away from just doing things the same way we’ve been doing things. And when it comes to the energy world, you know, I think you’re right. We are about 10 to 15 years behind the energy folks with.

You know, Hey, it means that we have a lot of work to do, but we also have the benefit of seeing what they did. Right. And frankly, in my opinion, what they did wrong. And I think that’s going to help us to be able to cater the approach to how we help accelerate decentralized in this country. And frankly, around the world is by learning from what these other analogous sectors have done.

And it’s true for. Even looking at telecommunications, where we went from poles and wires to cell phones. I think there’s a lot of industries where we are seeing decentralization and I think there’s a reason for it. So yeah, I would say different world for sure. But my vision is this, you know, I live in California, I’m in Northern California.

We pump water from Northern California. Over mountains to Southern California. I want to get to a place where Northern California and Southern California can have their own locally sourced water supplies, not just because it’s a nice, nice sounding idea. It makes us more resilient if there’s a bigger earthquake and that water supply is cutoff, you know, from that sort of connection from Northern Southern California, LA is in big trouble.

And we don’t talk about that a lot, but you know, my vision is to make sure that we can have water created where it’s needed versus needing to move it where we need it. .

Antoine Walter: And the legitimate energy and, and the implications, but to bring it back on track, let’s maybe explain what Epic Cleantech is. You’re working with the onsite water reuse part of the markets, and you’re working with the reuse part.

And I’ll let you explain that the twist in a second, not in the conventional way, if I may say so, which we spoil a bit with the decentralized elements, but what is your definition or your elevator pitch to what you’re doing and where you’re doing?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Sure. So epic, clean tech does onsite wastewater treatment and reuse, which means we’re going into large buildings or groups of buildings taking wastewater that you would normally send to the sewer.

We are capturing that wastewater, treating it and then reusing it in the building for non-potable applications, things like toilet flushing, urinal, flushing, irrigation, cooling towers, laundry. And when you add up all of these different non-potable applications, you can sometimes get up to 95% of the building’s water use can be provided by recycled water sources.

Now you mentioned some of the things that we do differently. We are big believers in the fact that there is no waste in waste. Which means that all of these different things that weren’t, that would normally sort of be disposed of, we actually want to repurpose and reuse. So we turn wastewater into three outputs.

One is recycled water. As I mentioned, two is organic soil amendments. So all of these wastewater organics that we often send to the sewer that are either used beneficially or sent to landfill, where they give off emissions, we actually take those, put it through our own process and create these amazing carbon rich soil blends that we can then use in and around.

And then the third piece is recovered wastewater heat. So we use it in an incredible amount of energy in buildings, for things like heating water for showers, for dishwashers, for laundry, and all of that heat then goes back into the sewer. And by our calculations, there is enough energy being lost through wastewater heat, to power every single electric vehicle on the road in the United States right now.

So we actually think, look, let’s, this is just one more component that we can now turn into a commodity. We can reuse this heat preheat, the building’s domestic hot water supply and bring the overall energy footprint of our systems down. So we are focused on the built environment, which is buildings, it’s resorts, it’s campuses, it’s data centers, it’s wineries, it’s anything where you have a building structure that is meeting water, but that is not going to be where we stop as a company.

But certainly that’s where we’re starting is it’s a space we know. Why

Antoine Walter: did you decide for that critical size? Where did you say the building is going to be our playground? Why not? I don’t know. A couple of houses, a piece of the city. I mean, you, you express your belief of decentralized versus the central utility, but still why

Aaron Tartakovsky: they’re building.

It’s a great question. And there’s a few answers to it. One is just looking at the macro trends. You know, we see the vast majority of people moving into. No. I meant by some estimates, 70% of the world’s population living in cities by 2050 and the rate at which we are adding new building stock to our global supply is like, we’re adding a new Manhattan every single month from now until 2060.

So we’re just building and in many cases we’re going up and we see that a lot of these cities are built on infrastructure that is not designed to handle. That type of urban density, you know, we’ve infrastructure putting anywhere from 30 to a hundred years ago that was designed to accommodate a certain amount of wastewater flow and was designed to provide a certain amount of water.

And we’re seeing a lot of cities, especially in water scarce, Western United States who are right now are not necessarily in a great position to be able to handle that water and wastewater those water and wastewater needs. For decades to come. And so we see an incredible opportunity to focus on cities and to focus on real estate.

Another piece is that we were spun out from an existing building engineering firm. So my co-founder slash father Igor has been designing high performance buildings for the last 40 years. This is a space that we know well. And when we looked at the building space, we said, look, there’s a lot of really great innovations happening on sustainability front.

A lot of them were really focused on energy, which is important because we need to decarbonize buildings. But when it came to water there, wasn’t a lot of. Just really holistic looks at how do we reuse? How do we use less water in the building? Yeah, we have low flush toilets that go from five gallons to 1.2 gallons.

We have, uh, uh, appliances that use less. We have fixtures that use less. That’s great. But in terms of looking at, how do we actually think about water in a much more comprehensive way there not a lot being done there and we saw an opportunity to do that. So when you factor those two first things in together, that’s how sort of we came upon this market.

And then of course, San Francisco became the first city in the country to actually legislate that all new, large buildings have to do onsite water reuse. So for all of those reasons, we saw this path forward in and out, you know, again, that was six years ago, whereas San Francisco, what we were doing used to sort of be a bit pioneering and it’s still is, there are now many more cities and many more states adopting on-site water reuse as part of their long-term plan.

So that means

Antoine Walter: that in San Francisco, you have a regulation trigger. Does that exist in other places? And if it doesn’t exist is the incentive and the yoke factor sufficiently over calm so that you can market your solutions. All the places, which wouldn’t be like, like San Francisco.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah. So San Francisco, we do have an ordinance in place.

So any new construction project currently over 250,000 square feet has to do on-site water reuse. And again, it’s a very common sense rationale as to why we’re doing it. And it came about in the last drought back in 2015, our elected officials said. You know, we are suffering. Our state is suffering when it comes to sort of water supplies.

Why are we using fresh water from national parks to flush our toilets and downtown San Francisco when we can be manufacturing, water onsite for those types of applications. So San Francisco led the charge, but certainly any sustainable business I believe cannot be truly sustainable if it’s only reliant on incentives, grants, and subsidies.

So the real driver for what we’re doing is cost. Which is to say, a lot of these projects are feeling the sting of our infrastructure was, which is to say that utilities have to increase water and sewer rates every single year to pay for all of the needed repairs and maintenance. And then a lot of cities we’re talking about that’s 10, 12, 15% a year increases.

Those are annual increases. So by reusing water on site, a lot of these projects are able to reduce their water and sewer bills significantly. And in the case of our project, We’re helping them to get ROI of three to five years. So that’s San Francisco. LA also has requirements buildings over 25 stories have to recycle water on site to produce 100% recycled water for their cooling towers.

Austin, Texas just announced an onsite water reuse incentive program to incentivize buildings to install. California state has now Senate bill 9 66, Washington state just passed their own Hawaii is about to pass around. So what started in San Francisco is certainly not going to stop in San Francisco and even cities like New York have onsite water reuse grant programs.

So there’s a huge amount of opportunity to do this, but again, no one’s doing it out of the goodness of their heart. Utilities are incentivizing it because it actually helps their cause it helps them to diversify the water supply portfolio and reduce the amount of wastewater going into their systems.

And buildings are opting in because it’s saving them. You know, what I can tell you is that there are a lot of amazing developers out there who have sincere commitments to sustainability. But they’re not going to be able to adopt these types of approaches if it’s not saving the money because they don’t just make decisions based on what feels right.

They have people they have to answer to, they have banks, they have loans at the end of the day. You know, the bottom line is what’s driving these decisions. And for a lot of folks investing in onsite water reuse is a helping them save costs and to hedge against future water challenges.

Antoine Walter: But that is not a very, very objective and rational answer.

And don’t get me wrong. I fully subscribe to that. Um, fully aligned with what you just explained. I’m just wondering, you know, you have a lot of people out there which are a bit NIMBY, not in my backyard. Onsite Water Reuse is wonderful. If you’re taking my water, you flush it away. You bring it to a far far for your Trinity, which is reusing it for agriculture.

I’m very fine with that. But knowing my own building happening in my, in the basement of the place I leave or I work and seeing that water that was in my toilets. I exactly know what was inside before it was treated. There is a bit of subjective factor. Inside that. And you said it very right at the very beginning when you said that, as soon as it’s pee and poo, everybody’s like, whoa, when can get quite, quite viral, quite, quite fast is still, there is a bit of this element insights, which makes it not as the racial, as other parts of our lives.

Do you encounter this kind of reaction where people say, yeah, all of that’s all the numbers add rights, but still not sure if we shall do it.

Aaron Tartakovsky: 100% what you are describing as what we like to call the flush and forget mentality that we fostered in the society. We have very literally created infrastructure that is out of sight out of mind.

So we are trained to not ever have to think about these things. When we flush the toilet, we don’t think about what happens next. And when we turn on a tap, we assume water’s going to come out. That’s how we’ve designed our infrastructure. And there’s no surprise that people never really grappled with these issues.

So there is always going to be. That element of I’m uncomfortable with this, because I have literally been conditioned to be uncomfortable with this. But what we’ve found is that taking a very science and technology forward approach is what helps people to get comfortable with these different ideas.

Obviously, you know, you can have bill gates on a talk show, drinking water from one of the systems deployed by the gates foundation. But we found is in talking with customers. It’s really just about educating them that look, these systems have been deployed all over the. These technologies have been around for a long time.

That’s not really sort of the issue they just need to understand. Is it safe? How do we ensure it’s going to work into perpetuity? What are all the different rules and regulations we’re going to comply with? What I’ve personally found is that so much about successfully deploying these systems has little to do with the technology, because a lot of these folks, it’s just a black box.

What they want to know is everything else. How is it permitted? How do we get install it? And how do we make sure it’s. Successfully into perpetuity. And those are all the different things that we’ve put together and are offering it up at Cleantech, which is handholding. Um, the entire duration of the process, understanding that dealing with toilets has never really been something that they’ve been comfortable doing.

So we come in and, and help them do that. It’s interesting what

Antoine Walter: you just said about the everything, but technically in the sense of the black box and everything, because that is really something that impressed me when I had a look at your website. Everything we discuss now for the past 20 minutes is much more a technical even thought, not absolutely to the bone of the technique side of it, but it’s much more technical than anything I found on your website.

Your website is really captured towards the benefits, the why, and the what’s in it for me, which in terms of marketing is brilliant. But I was wondering if I was now me, what water engineer restarting from scratch your website. I’d probably say something like coolest membrane. There is, there are, they will, they will ever be.

And that is my flow and it consumes that much and you gain that much and you took a fully different routes, which is probably the better route, but why did you decide to be first catcher to the end user?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah. No. And I’m glad you picked that up because it’s all very much intended. No. I think most of the folks that we engage with, the architects, the developers, the contractors, these are all very smart people, but they’re not well versed on biological oxygen demand and TSS and membranes and all of these other terms.

We can get into all of that. And we have amazing water and wastewater engineers on our team. We have two certified wastewater operators on staff and we can get as deep into the technology has anyone ever wants to? But what we found is that that is not actually the key to getting people excited about deploying these technologies into their buildings.

They don’t necessarily want the most cutting edge pioneering technology. They want something tried and. Which is what we’re providing them. You know, I think when it comes to water and wastewater, you know, building owners are, are many cases operating the same way as utilities, which is to say we are naturally risk averse because when you’re dealing with water and wastewater, the single biggest driver for a, or I should say the single biggest commitment for us is protecting public health.

So we can’t necessarily mess around in these buildings and try something that’s never been done before. People’s health and safety are at risk. And so we are focused on the bigger picture because at epic clinic, we like to say, we’re not just trying to introduce a new technology. We’re trying to fundamentally change the conversation.

And that’s what our website, that’s how we talk about these issues. All of that is intended to do that because yes, our business is focusing on a single project at a time, but our longterm goal is to fundamentally shift how cities are using. How buildings are built. And for that, the technology is just one piece of the puzzle.

Antoine Walter: That’s a piece of the puzzle, which I will have to ask you to invade a bit. How does that work? What what’s inside the engine of what you’re doing at it before.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah. So we have, uh, multiple solutions that we can provide. We have some technology elements that are proprietary, that we developed. And in other cases, we partner with existing players.

We partner with existing suppliers and help basically bring their technology into our overall treatment train to borrow a term. We mentioned. Water is an interesting animal wastewater from one project to the next it’s going to look radically different. So there is no one size fits all solution. When it comes to wastewater, some projects will want us to do, greywater only fine.

Some projects want us to do Blackwater. Some projects are going to have us do some sort of mix with rainwater stormwater. We can do all of that and we can tailor solutions specifically for those projects. But let me talk about, uh, Blackwater, uh, just as, as one example, We will go into that building as a first step, we are removing the solids from that wastewater.

Those are solids that would typically be sent to landfill or discharged into the sewer, which by the way, the utilities hate because when you’re discharging solids and reusing water, that just means that you’re putting solids with no flow back into their sewers, which causes all sorts of downstream issues.

So we think it’s not, it doesn’t make sense to solve one problem, recycling water, but to cause a second problem, which is. Uh, solids accumulation downstream. So we actually take those solids. We take them off site to what we call our epic hubs, and we turn them into these amazing soil products. So these epic hubs can service multiple buildings with the solids.

Now removed the downstream water treatment is now much easier. And typically what we’re going to be doing is using a membrane bowel reactor to actually treat that. And get it to exceptionally high quality standards where it can then be reused onsite. So that is a membrane bioreactor, which again, for those who aren’t as familiar is a combination of filtration and biology that together help clean the water to exceptionally high quality standards.

And then we can do a number of things we can use UV aro. To get it to the water quality standards that we need, and then they can be reused onsite for all those non-potable applications. I mentioned earlier. Now, of course, we can also leverage heat recovery to again, bring down the overall energy footprint of the system, but that’s one example of the offerings we have.

But again, depending on the application, we can, we can actually bring different technologies into the mix.

Antoine Walter: Talking of offering, what is it here? That’s your market? Is it the skid itself with the MBR and the pretreatment and the post treatment? Or is it a package service? And we deliver water reuse by the gallon.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Again, this goes back to the fact that our customers are largely not super familiar with this entire space. So our offering is we can do. So we can help with those early concept stages. We can help with the permitting and regulatory strategy. So if we’re going into new market that doesn’t have an on-site water reuse program, how do we get distinct permitted?

And we have an entire policy and government affairs team that is just dedicated on helping to map out those strategies. Then we have engineers. We have building engineers, they have where we have water and wastewater engineers who can make sure that we’re designing and tailoring a system to the project.

We then help with the construction oversight. So we will make sure that they know exactly what’s happening and how we integrate it into the building. And then we have an operations team, so we don’t want to just deliver a system and then say, okay, here it goes. It’s going to work. And you figure out how to make sure it continues working for 5, 10, 15, 20 years.

So we actually have an operations arm that can either treat. Other operators or we can operate these systems ourselves. I’m going to take it back to energy one more time, just because I know you love analogy. So let’s go back the energy world. When we look at the energy markets, it’s not like anyone in recent memory invented PV technology.

What they did was they found interesting business models. They found different ways to sort of rearrange the regulations, to be able to help. Really explode. And I think we are doing that for water wastewater, but again, we’re 10 to 15 years behind the energy guys. The technology is just one piece, but it’s everything else that we as a company have developed where we are actually bringing white glove service to make sure that as you build your project and you will encounter headaches.

I challenge anyone to tell me a real estate development product that doesn’t encounter headaches. We just want to make sure that water and wastewater is not going to be one of them.

Antoine Walter: You have this energy and energy. Absolutely accurate, but there is an even more direct analogy. What you’re basically doing is DBO design build operate, which is what you do on the very, very, very huge utility project.

You’ve just managed to bring that to scale so that it fits into a building. What’s your secret to do that?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah. You know, I think it’s the team, you know, the secret is a team that has experienced across the entire value chain. So we actually have folks from the energy sector who are familiar with project finance.

So if there’s a product that does want project finance, we can come up with interesting ways to make sure that. These types of approaches are actually going to pencil out for these projects. It’s having experience. As I said on the policy and government affairs side on the permitting side, on the regulatory side, on the operations side, it’s being able to let our customers have confidence, knowing that there is not a single element of these systems that is going to be a surprise to us because we’ve seen it all.

So I think the key to our success. Whether it’s design build, operate, design, build, own operate, whether it’s wastewater as a service, you know, there’s a lot of flexibility. We can get really creative there. You know, it all comes back to the team and it’s all coming back to people who have, you know, in our case, we have people with decades of experience in building engineering, we have people who’ve been doing water and real estate for 15 and 20 years.

So it’s just having seen it all before, uh, what it allows us to be able to implement all these interesting.

Antoine Walter: Let’s take a concrete example of what’s, where you’re actually delivering to understand where such a project starts and how you deploy it in over which timeframe what happens is it’s a matter of weeks of month or are really helping out such a customer over years.

What is your approach?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Let me bring up another concrete example, which is park habitat. So park habitat is a 1.2 million square foot development in San Jose is a 20 story office tower that is going to be literally covered on all sides by Greenwall. So what we’re doing there is actually taking all of this water from this project.

Not only reusing it, but actually tweaking the process. To make sure that some of those nutrients are left in the water to be able to both irrigate and fertilize the plant life on this building or to fertigate the entire green wall of this project. So you know how that project starts. Uh, on the feasibility side one, what are the water we used to Manson?

And this is going to be true for any project, but is, you know, looking at the project and say, okay, how much water is this building going to produce? Then we say, okay, what are the non-potable demands for this project? And we match those two together to make sure that we have enough water to satisfy all of those non-potable demands.

Then it’s a matter of talking to the utility. It’s a matter of talking. Two different leaders in a given geography to make sure that what we’re doing is going to work for them. You know, every single city, I mean, cities are almost like snowflakes and that they’re all special and unique in their own way.

Every city is going to have different challenges when it comes to their water and wastewater infrastructure, which goes back to no there’s no one size fits all solution. So, you know, for some cities, you know, their big concern is, well, if you’re going to be reusing water, we don’t want you to put solids back into our sewers for other cities.

It’s look, we’re developing our own recycled water capability. So we don’t want you to be a threat to our ability to provide recyclable. So in that case, we are targeting areas where their recycled water infrastructure will not extend to. So as you can see a huge part of what we do happens before the system has ever delivered to the building and it’s all around feasibility, it’s all around, making sure that our solution is going to work with everyone involved for the customer, for the utility.

And anyone else who has any type of peripheral connection to what it is that we’re doing. So that project is really exciting because especially in a place like California, where we are really feeling the effects of this drought in a very pronounced way. It is huge to have developers behind this park habitat project, sending a message of when the state is going through these challenges.

It is part of our job to set the standard for how all projects, how all developers should be designing these buildings, which is to say reusing their water and making sure that they’re building an overall more resilient.

Antoine Walter: I’m coming back to the communication element because it sounds to me like you cracked it.

So I’d love to take that out as a best practice. People could replicate having listened to you because you can present that in two ways. The first way is to say, look, we’ve brought the international space station on earth and we are able to recycle so much. We improve the resilience. So that would be the positive way to look at it.

The negative way to look at it, the same story we just say, Hey, we are so short on water that we cannot afford to use water anymore. So Hey, we have to recycle more and more and more, but that’s, I mean, if tomorrow, for whatever reason, we have much more water, let’s forget about all that reuse. So it’s a totally different approach.

On one end of the story. It’s fascinating on the other end of the story, it’s, you’re forced into it is the balance to find between both of them or is it really bringing people to dream about that being the future? Yeah.

Aaron Tartakovsky: You know, I don’t actually think it’s a dream, you know, I think we look around other countries, you know, again, I’m speaking on behalf of someone who’s in the United States where we, you know, the amount of water we recycle as a nation is in the single digits.

You know, I used to live in a. A country that recycles 90% of their wastewater. I think Spain is somewhere in thirties right now. I mean, we’re

Antoine Walter: at bone six, so you’re good.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Well, there’s plenty of beautiful things and amazing things about France. Um, you know, I think, look, you can look at the, the, the amount of water recycling we do in the United States.

And you can say, wow, what a shame? That’s the numbers. What I see, I look at other countries around the world and I look at the amazing technology and the potential and the different leaders in the water space. And I say, okay, well, we have a huge opportunity to do better. And I think I’m just kind of an eternal optimist.

It’s just the way I was raised in the family. I grew up with being a child of refugees and immigrants. I think we are sort of conditioned to want to think about things in a positive way. And so I think it very much is the future. And. Another anecdote, just to go back to the yuck factor that you mentioned before.

And I think we’d like to talk about the yuck factor a lot, and we like to assume that everyone is going to be against onsite water reuse and water recycling. And I think people will look at, you know, the toilet to tap a fiasco a few decades ago. But what I’ve actually seen is that people are very excited about it.

You know, I’ve seen, for example, in one of the projects and sent downtown San Francisco, we were in a 35 story high rise, where we were actually mining wastewater solids from this project and turning it into soil that we were planting in a garden, a block away and growing vegetables that are repurposed toilet planters.

Now that story hit the news. It was published by NBC in San Francisco. And so we sat and we wanted to see what is going to be the reaction of the 754 apartments in this project, which by the way, is, you know, over a thousand people living in this building and what we found that was not a yuck factor. In fact, people were extremely excited and we started getting requests from tourists, for people living in the.

And now just accept the, just so everyone really understands what’s happening. These are people living up on the 30th story who are using the toilet and we have the cleaned up we’re on the bottom floor, taking those solids and reusing it to grow vegetables, but people are very excited. I think people are very motivated by the science and technology.

And I think, you know, when it comes to sort of what the future looks like, I, I’m actually much more optimistic that this is going to be widely embraced by.

Antoine Walter: Talking over this external view and recognition, you are accumulating the prizes you’ve been awarded. I think by, by fast companies, as the world changing ID in 2021 and 2020, how do you deal with this praise that you get from everywhere around this industry and outside this.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah, look, you know, it’s all very welcome, you know, it’s great validation for the team. You know, we’re all very committed to what we’re doing and we know that what we’re doing has the potential to really change the world for the better. But, you know, I think part of what it comes from is that, you know, I don’t think there’s been enough attention on water and waste.

No, I think our industry doesn’t do a good enough job telling the story, which is why I think it’s so critical to have you out there really kind of leading the charge with your podcast and bringing on really smart people and thought leaders in this industry to talk about how can we do things better?

So, so thank you first of all, to you for, for the work that you’re doing, but it’s obviously important to get that validation because we don’t only want to be talking to the people who come to water and wastewater conference. You know, which as we all know, there are a lot of them, but we want to be addressing this to sort of the general public, you know, I often ask people, you know, you walk on the street, you stop the average person on the sidewalk.

You asked them what’s the most exciting technology company, apple, Amazon, Google, you know, they’ll have a few to name. What’s the most exciting electric vehicle company, Tesla. What’s the most exciting solar company, solar city Sunrun. What’s the most exciting water technology.

And, you know, I, one guy actually recently said, Disani so we need to do a much better job telling the story. And we have an amazing story teller. I often say that people who work in the water wastewater space, especially our utility workers, you know, there, I hold them in the same steam as first responders.

You know, these are people who work 24, 7 and over holidays to make sure that our systems, whether it comes to water will comes to wastewater, continue to function. People oftentimes don’t realize how critical water and wastewater are until they stop working. And they realize you can’t really do much if you don’t have one of those two.

So I just think we need to be doing a better job telling our story and not just to each other, but to the general public and you know, all of these different awards and recognition. It’s all great. But for us, it’s just, it’s just a means to be able to continue to tell this story in a big way and to get the general public involved.

And, and, you know, again, I didn’t touch too much of my own background, but I come from the world of federal politics. No. I know that members, whether you’re a local elected official, whether you’re in Congress, you’re getting approached by about a thousand different issues a day. Everyone’s pulling you every single, which way.

The only way you’re going to prioritize issues is if you keep on hearing about. Not just from lobbyists, but from the general public. And so it’s our opinion that if people know about these issues and they’re better educated on water wastewater, they’re going to start making these issues known. They’re going to start approaching their elected officials.

And that’s how we’re actually going to be able to get some bigger change on sort of the governmental regulation level. So

Antoine Walter: don’t you think we are missing one single thing to achieve that because you mentioned apple, Amazon. Facebook Tesla. So that is one single thing is to say we have one company that leads the charge.

And if you look at climate change, for instance, the one single thing is carbon footprint. Everybody knows you shall look at carbon when it comes to the water. What is our key message? Is it water for all? Why not? Is it the study duration for all? Again, why not? Is it’s a mark on onsite water reuse? I mean, you have so many different things you could be looking at.

We met. Be missing one single thing where we all want a people unite around bets and then bring the message over and over a certain period of time of everybody hearing about that. It’s going to be imprinted in everyone’s minds. Do I agree with that one? And if you agree with that one, what would be your single message?

Yeah,

Aaron Tartakovsky: no, look, it’s a really great point. You know, I think what you’re calling out is that there needs to be a single rallying. For the industry and, you know, I think it basically, it’s a fallacy to separate climate change from water issues. I think climate change is water change, and I know that’s not an original thought and we’re hearing that more and more, but I think we need to continue to make that a priority because you know, some of the most direct impacts of climate change are felt through.

There felt through more prolonged droughts, there felt through more extreme flooding. So, you know, oftentimes we maybe don’t associate with, you know, the cause, but the effect is oftentimes felt through water. And so I think we need to make sure that we are doing a better job of elevating water issues and challenges as being directly tied to all of this.

Challenges that are being addressed by, you know, the traditional climate tech or climate change folks who are only focused on de-carbonization. But, you know, just look at the water energy nexus. We are part of that conversation. We’re an integral part of that conversation, and we just need to do a better job telling that.

Antoine Walter: I have a last question for you in that, in that deep dive, you mentioned that you want to change the word on the long run, but you mentioned as well that’s today. You have cities in the U S which are very open in terms of regulation, which gives you an opportunity. What is your long bowl game? I think if you look at China, for instance, there is a booming market and secondary drinking water treatment, and it was.

That sounds quite aligned with what you could be offering. And on the other hand, if there’s one thing that you should avoid as a startup is to, to de-focus. So what is your, what is your approach towards this global markets and outside of your Homeland?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah. Yeah. Look, I think what you brought up is exactly right.

That there needs to be. You know, there are million different things we can be going out and doing, but we are trying to remain disciplined to sort of really nailing down our offering and a few key target markets, both in terms of the actual technology, as well as geography. But the ultimate goal of epic Cleantech is to bring clean water and reliable sanitation to growing cities around the world.

Now, you know, you mentioned China, you know, outside of the United States, the most people come into our website or in India and India. You know, we are acutely aware of the challenges in the markets that exist outside of the United States. Frankly, I think Europe, you know, obviously, you know, when it comes to water, it’s a different situation in the United States, but I’m always just continually impressed by how much European countries have really embraced a lot of these, you know, far reaching sustainability measures and how they design their cities and how they build their buildings.

And so I think you’re up just really setting an amazing example for the world, but the world has changed. Our water and wastewater infrastructure. The way we’re doing things is not going to be able to keep up with how many people are going to be on this planet and what this planet is actually going to look like.

And so our goal is to be able to create solutions tailored to each of these different cities around the world, to be able to make sure that we have a water secure and water resilient future. And again, we’re talking about cities right now, but you know, our roots are from the bill and Melinda gates funded.

So we understand that, you know, whereas in San Francisco we’re going to be saving a developer on his ongoing costs, our solution, and other, in other scenarios is going to be helping, sort of raise people out of poverty and it’s going to help save lives. And so, you know, we are going to be focused on developing world markets as well.

So I guess all we can say is we are working on it and you know, epic Cleantech will be coming to a city near you.

Antoine Walter: I have to tell you a light. That wasn’t my last question, because that triggers one more. You mentioned that you, you come out from that bill and Melinda gates foundation, you were appraised by, by many people inside and outside these industry.

And we discussed that element of leading the charge by having why not a unicorn leading the charge. Could that be epic Cleantech

Aaron Tartakovsky: 100%. That is not what drives us as a company. And I think it’s one of the things that I, I I’m most excited about by my team is that we have a bunch of mission-driven impact focused individuals who are very much committed to sort of change in the world.

And you need that because this is not easy work. This is a big, complicated, global challenge. And if you have someone who’s only motivated by what their stock options are going to look like, those are people who are not going to stick around. But when you have people who are focused on what really matters, you know, that’s, what’s going to lead us to be able to become, you know, whether it’s a unicorn or just a big company, that’s going to be able to really change the world and you know, all the other pieces and, you know, making sure that we can return a good returns to our shareholders.

All of that will come, but it’s not going to come without that first mission-driven elements. So the short answer to your. Yes, I think we can become that and we are on the path to becoming that, but, uh, we’re in it for all the right reasons.

Antoine Walter: And what is the timeframe at which we shall discuss again, to see if you achieved it or not?

Aaron Tartakovsky: You know, why don’t we, uh, why don’t we talk again in one year, I’ll let you know where we are.

Antoine Walter: Wow. I love that ambition. Yeah. Great.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Perfect. Yeah. I’m happy. Happy to speak with you anytime we can, we can make this an annual checkup.

Antoine Walter: Okay. Sounds like a cool tradition from the propose you to switch to the rapid fire questions.

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: So in that last section, I try to keep the questions short. I promise you to not sidetrack too much. And if you, if you can, you can try to keep the answers short as well. My first question is what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Well, all of my projects are like children that they’re all special and we don’t have a favorite, but I will say this park habitat project in San Jose that I mentioned with 20 stories of living wall is very exciting.

What’s your favorite

Antoine Walter: part of your current.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Um, the different things that we touch every day from water and wastewater to soil, to climate tech, you know, there’s so many different aspects that we touch upon much like water that it just every day is an exciting day at epic. What is the trends

Antoine Walter: to watch out for in the water industry

Aaron Tartakovsky: decentralization and we’re we’re right in.

Antoine Walter: I was about to say, and you’re not allowed to say decentralization.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Well, I will, I will also add, um, you know, Smartwater, you know, I think helping us move away from being sort of what we like to call the clipboard army of people, reading meters and putting it on pencil and paper. I think we have a lot to do with bringing software to the water space.

Antoine Walter: The thing you care about the most when you’re working on a new project and what is the one you care about?

Aaron Tartakovsky: I mean, the most is always going to be making sure that we provide a great experience to our. No. I think customer service is paramount to everything we do at epic Cleantech. And that’s what we’re most focused on.

Um, the thing I’m least excited about, uh, on projects is, you know, occasionally having to change out a filter, but that happens. That’s part of the job.

Antoine Walter: Do you have sources to recommend, to keep up with the water and wastewater market trends?

Aaron Tartakovsky: You mean beyond your pocket? Of course. Yeah, look, you know, I think there’s a, there’s a lot of different sources that we like, but, you know, we read all the different publications, but I think frankly, what I like to do is set Google alerts for a bunch of different topics, whether it’s water, wastewater, decentralized, sludge, and just be aware of typically it’s not good news.

That you hear in the news when you are searching for those terms. And so I think part of our focus is helping to make sure that the next time in a year, when we get Google alerts, there’s going to be a lot more positive information there.

Antoine Walter: Last question. Would you have someone to recommend me that I should definitely invite on that microphone?

Aaron Tartakovsky: Yeah, I have a few different people. Um, but you know, I would say one of our, our star investors, a man named Peter EULAs from echo river capital. He’s a water entrepreneur. Uh, he built at co-founded and built water, smart software. Um, he’s a great guy to talk to.

Antoine Walter: Oh, sorry. It looks like we will have a chance to discuss again in one year, I’m going to check my calendar.

I think I’m open in one year.

Aaron Tartakovsky: Good. Send me an invite.

Antoine Walter: Well, thanks, everyone. It was a pleasure discussing your incredible path. And, um, if we make that to recurring events.

Other Episodes:

FREDsense: Revolutionizing Water Quality Monitoring with Biosensor Innovation

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Swirltex: Revolutionizing Wastewater Treatment with Bubbly Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 30 April 2025

Blue Foot Membranes: The Next Evolution in Water Filtration

By Antoine Walter | 16 April 2025

Echo River Capital: Pioneering the Future of Water Innovation

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1001 Fontaines: Engineering Sustainable Water Access Through Social Entrepreneurship

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Amazon’s Water Footprint: Tech Giant’s Quest for Water Sustainability

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Turing: The AI Revolution Quenching the Water Industry’s Thirst for Innovation

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Flocean: Pioneering Ocean-Based Water Solutions

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Botanical Water Technologies: Harvesting Liquid Gold from Plants

By Antoine Walter | 4 December 2024

The post Central Water Management Networks won’t Handle 2050. Time for an Epic Move? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

The 4th Phase of Water, or Exclusion Water, is a semi-liquid or crystalline state of water that forms at the interface with hydrophilic surfaces. More on that in a second!

What we covered:

How there’s a fourth phase of Water, beyond solid, liquid and gas 

Where the 4th phase of Water forms, and how

How Light may be creating the Exclusion Zone Water (or EZ Water)

How the Fourth phase of Water bears a negative charge and thus may enable… a Water Battery!

How the 4th Phase of Water can be leveraged in the Water Industry

How the formation of EZ Water bears a surprising resemblance to the first step of Photosynthesis

How Gerald Pollack’s work follows in the steps of Boris Derjaguin’s discovery of “Polywater”

How Water is a surprisingly low investigated field of fundamental science (despite many water questions being still open)

How “Fourth Phase Water” somehow barely isn’t Water anymore, and could have been called “semi-liquid” or “crystalline water”

How like-charged particles may well attract each other without breaking any law of fundamental physics

How “EZ Water” opens the door to discuss esoteric water topics like the theories of Viktor Schauberger and Rudolf Steiner

How many known everyday phenomenons may be better explained through the lens of “EZ Water”

Challenging prestigious names and theories, advocating for a “Venture Science” approach to research, discussing the memory of Water, and so much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Fourth Phase of Water

Resources:

Check Gerald Pollack’s Website

Have a Look at the Water Journal

Visit the Institute for Venture Science

Plan your next visit to the Water Conference

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Fourth Phase of Water

Related Video: EZ Water, the Fourth Phase of Water

Quotes: 4th Phase of Water

In the Depth of the Fourth Phase of Water

We all know it as a fact: there are three phases of water.

Flowing at the tap or in a river, it’s liquid. If it starts freezing, it gets solid. And if it gets over one hundred degrees, it becomes a gas. So when someone comes and tells us: wait, there’s a fourth phase, you’ll have to admit that it’s a bit surprising to use an understatement.

Yet, if the scientific community doesn’t fully agree with everything Gerald Pollack proposes in his “Fourth Phase of Water” book, they nevertheless all recognize something: there’s more than just solid, liquid, and gas. And that fourth phase exists.

So bear with me; we’ll start by reviewing what that fourth phase actually is, then look at all that it may explain in our daily lives, and finally review how it may be applied in water treatment and the water industry in general.

Part 1: A Fourth Phase of Water?

Have you ever looked at a water pitcher and wondered how water was lying inside? Is it like a bunch of water molecules, just discarded in bulk? Or rather a patient and geometric stacking of molecules on molecules?

I first got to know Gilbert Ling. Twenty-five years ago at a conference to which I was invited. His point of view is that water molecules are not bouncing around fiercely at a huge number of times per second or per femtosecond. They’re ordered, they’re standing at attention like soldiers.

Gerald Pollack

At the time, Gerald Pollack was working on muscle contraction, but the more he was discussing Gilbert Ling’s theory with his students and colleagues, the more he was convinced he should investigate it.

If he’s right, this changes all the biology!

Gerald Pollack

Introducing: Gerald Pollack, the author of “the Fourth Phase of Water”

Oh, by the way, Gerald Pollack leads a laboratory at the University of Washington in Seattle. He is the Founding Editor-in-Chief of the WATER research journal, the Executive Director of the Institute for Venture Science and the Author of – among other books – the Fourth Phase of Water.

The thing is that water is a surprisingly low investigated field of fundamental science. Maybe because many think what I thought before jumping into today’s topic: come on, after all these years, we certainly know everything about water, don’t we?

Spoiler, we don’t.

Maybe also because quite recent instances of people trying to revisit what we know of water didn’t end well – think of Derjaguin’s discovery of polywater or Benveniste’s exploration of the memory of water.

Two topics I’d like to cover in the future, drop me a word in the comments if you’d like me to!

Yet, when you think of it, there’s quite a bunch of behaviors of water around us in our daily lives, that we accept as a fact, while hoping that someone understands it.

Do you understand those behaviors of Water?

Why is ice slippery? Why do waves persist over long distances? How do diaper hold 50 times their weight in water? Why does warm water freeze faster than cold water? Why does ice float on water? Why can you build a tiny water bridge between two glasses? Why do droplets of water exist in water?

These are just some of the questions, Gerald Pollack claims he may have answered with the fourth phase of water.

Where does the 4th phase of Water form?

So what is this fourth phase? Well, “what” is maybe not the right question to start with. Indeed, it’s more about where this fourth phase is.

It does form at the surface of water, at the interface, next to hydrophilic surfaces.

Gerald Pollack

Gerald Pollack discovered that when looking at those interfaces, you could notice a particular behavior of water.

It was like, purifying itself from any other compounds than water, excluding all the other molecules.

And that wasn’t all of it.

The water molecules adjacent to that surface undergo a radical transformation. And they transform from the individual water molecules to a sheet like array that has a hexagonal motif to it, consisting of hydrogens and oxygens.

Gerald Pollack

Indeed, we know the water molecule: H2O. In bulk water, it bounces around happily in its typical mickey mouse shape.

But what Gerald’s team found out, is that in those interfaces, it was recombining itself to form H3O2.

How does EZ Water form?

Let me explain you how.

Our water molecules will come together to form a hexagon, with 6 atoms of Oxygen and 6 atoms of Hydrogen. Then, those hexagons will bind themselves with adjacent hexagons, through a shared hydrogen atom, adding 6 half atoms of hydrogen to our structure. Hence the formula: H9O6, which you can simplify in H3O2.

That first molecular layer then serves as a template for the growth of the second layer and so on and so on. And these layers grow one by one. And they can grow to enormous lengths. We’ve seen that grow in certain circumstances up to a meter!

Gerald Pollack

This structure is somewhere in between the vertically stacked-up shape of ice and the loosely connected state of liquid water. Hence the affirmation, that this is indeed the fourth phase of water.

But it still had to get a name to be recognized.

How shall we name the fourth phase of Water?

We called it exclusion zone, a zone that contains this fourth phase of water. And it does exclude almost everything from it because it’s dense, tightly packed kind of entity and almost nothing can get into it.

Gerald Pollack

In retrospect, Gerald Pollack thinks, he may have rather called it “Crystalline Water” or “Semi-liquid Water,” but the name that stuck is “Exclusion Zone Water” – in short, EZ Water.

So by now, we know where to find the EZ Water, and what it is. But the next question in line is: how does it form.

How does EZ Water form?

Gerald’s team actually found it out through serendipity – a fortunate discovery by accident.

We found, or I should say a student who was doing what he was not supposed to be doing.

Gerald Pollack

A post-doctoral student had left the water sample under the microscope in the evening when going home, simply turning down the light.

When he returned the next day, EZ Water had reduced to half the size it was the evening before. But when turning back the microscope’s light, within minutes, it regained its original shape!

He found that the energy comes from light incident lights and particularly infrared light

Gerald Pollack

Infrared light’s incidence on water would trigger a separation of charges, H2O being broken down into H plus and OH minus. Those OH minus then recombine with H2O present in the interface to form H3O2, or as we named it minutes ago, EZ Water.

Does the 4th Phase of Water form like… Photosynthesis?

Now, light inducing a charge separation may make you think of another well-known natural thing: photosynthesis.

I’m not certain, but the process of photosynthesis bears such close resemblance or the first step of photosynthesis. that I can’t help, but wonder whether the two are actually the same!

Gerald Pollack

Even more intriguing: my saying that infrared light triggers separation of charge in water has probably ringed a bell in you. Because, how do you call a body with a separation of charge? Exactly, you got it right: a battery.

The fourth phase of Water has a negative charge

And we’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that starting with this battery, you can actually obtain electrical energy.

Gerald Pollack

Indeed, another feature of EZ Water is that it’s not neutral anymore. It has a negative charge. And the region beyond the EZ layer is positively charged.

We’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that starting with this battery, you can actually obtain electrical energy.

Gerald Pollack

And you’ll see in a minute that this may have direct applications in the water industry.

But first, let’s recap what we’ve learned in this first part:

Summary of this first part:

Principle 1: Water has a Fourth Phase
Principle 2: Water stores energy
Principle 3: Water gets energy from light

The book adds a fourth principle: Like charged entities can attract one another or “Like likes like.” But I won’t be covering that one today, so check my full interview with Gerald Pollack – the link is in the description – if you’d want to know more.

If you need a reason to do so, let me tease you with this: this fourth principle may be the reason why, you’re able to build wet-sand castles with your children to defy waves and tides at the beach.

Are you hooked?

For now, let’s look at how EZ Water may explain many phenomenons we see around us every day.

Part 2: May the Fourth Phase of Water explain many phenomenons around us?

First, if EZ Water is effectively created by the action of infrared light on water, as Gerald’s team demonstrated it, this means that there is EZ almost everywhere.

From the bottom of the oceans, where no visible light passes through, but infrared gets emitted, to the inner part of our bodies, which are made of 99% water molecules.

If you ever type “Fourth Phase of Water” in Google or even Youtube, you’ll swiftly notice that this opens a door to talk about energized water and investigate the theories of Viktor Schauberger or Rudolf Steiner. I won’t do it today, but considering the hype around water ionizers, I’d be keen to dive into it in a future episode – again, tell me in the comments if you’d be interested!

Now, if by now, you’re still wondering if there is one statue Gerald Pollack would still be reluctant to unbolt, consider this.

Let’s question everything!

In his book, he attempts to demonstrate how Brownian Motion – the random motion of particles suspended in a medium – may better be explained through the action of EZ Water than by the traditional theory proposed in 1905.

Who formulated it in 1905, you ask? Albert Einstein!

I was about to meet somebody who was important. It was obviously not Einstein or Archimedes. I’m not that old. I remember that when, uh, uh, w during my first meeting with the late sir, Andrew Huxley and Huxley was one of the grades he passed about, uh, five or six years ago. And he was involved not only with, uh, studies of membranes that won the Nobel prize. I learned from that experience that even famous, uh, really important, important people can be wrong because they’re human. They do sit on toilet seats and eat the same food that we eat, and they have the same foibles that we suffer ourselves and so on.

Gerald Pollack

Hence Gerald’s approach throughout the book, to apply Ockham’s Razor to any phenomenon he attempts to explain.

If you’ve got two competing ideas, like for example, God exists, or God doesn’t exist. Probably the simpler one is going to be the one that is correct. In retrospect, I’d come to realize that in many of those instances, the ideas presented are complicated because they’re wrong.

Gerald Pollack

The 4th Phase of Water as a Hint for further research

Therefore, the book distinguishes the concepts where Gerald’s team is certain – like the existence of EZ Water or the four principles it implies – and the ones which are proposed with reasonable backing, as a hint and support for further research.

And that ranges from discussing what temperature and heat actually are, to studying how vortexes may cool down water, through explaining why various types of water won’t mix, how water-based lubrication works, how water reaches the top of the tallest trees and many, many more.

If you ask me, my favorite one is probably how water bubbles and water droplets may actually be the same:

When you see a structure that is spherical, how do you know what it is? How do you know if it’s a droplet or how do you know if it’s a bubble? how is it possible that you can have a droplet that exists inside of water, it’s water in water!

Gerald Pollack

If you want to better understand what you’re seeing, the next time you boil water in your kitchen, dive into my full interview with Gerald – the link is still in the description!

Yet, if you’re reading this, you’re probably interested in the possible applications of EZ Water in the water industry.

Part 3: The 4th Phase of Water, applied to the Water Industry

In the book, Gerald Pollack tells how his research team experimented around the battery properties of water. He states that “Water acts as a transducer, absorbing one kind of energy and converting it into other kinds.” He also adds that they “were able to extract substantial energy by inserting electrodes into the oppositely charged regions of water – practically as much as the electrical energy used to build those charged zones.”

Hence, it is tempting to see direct uses of water as a battery if it really delivers the high yields Gerald hints to.

That’s why he founded a startup called “fourth phase incorporated” to work on possible applications of his lab’s findings.

But as cool as a water battery may sound, the second hot topic Fourth Phase Incorporated is pursuing is probably even more promising and intriguing for a Water Professional:

If you have an apparatus that can create an EZ, if you put water into this black box and water contains any kind of pollution, including pharmas cast out pharmaceuticals, microplastics, you name it, it’s excluded from the EZ

Gerald Pollack

EZ Water as a Water Treatment

Remember, it’s in the name “Exclusion Zone Water” so it sounds logical that it excludes anything that is not water.

If it can do so, while leveraging renewable energy sources which are widely available on earth, like sunlight in general and infrared in particular, then it may be a cool prospect to treat raw water; be it as a desalination tool, or as a way to produce industrial ultrapure water.

It does work. It works beautifully in the laboratory.

Gerald Pollack

But so far, it only works in the lab.

Funding: The missing Link

It takes an awful lot to cross the so-called valley of death successfully from a laboratory observation, to something that’s usable in a practical sense. And it requires a good deal of investment.

Gerald Pollack

Funding is indeed the last frontier for Gerald and his team. That is why he is advocating for venture science, said differently, to fund research that defies the status quo, taking into account the risk it involves and seizing the potential it may reveal if it was to succeed.

Fourth Phase of Water: Conclusion

But to conclude, let’s take a step back.

First, let me tell you that I am a proud water engineer with a decade of experience in the Water Industry, which gives me some confidence, to review, assess and follow developments in water science, engineering, and applications.

But, I’m by no means a fundamental physicist or chemist. So I’ve been looking around to check what the scientific community thinks of Gerald Pollack’s discoveries, principles, and theories.

It turns out that, for most of what I read, everybody agrees that the fourth phase of water exists. Some argue that, the law of thermodynamics actually say that there are 18 phases of water, but considering that 15 of those phases are solid, I’d see that as splitting hairs.

Reviewing the scientific litterature

Then, when it comes to explain how EZ Water forms, there are theories that compete with Gerald’s light-induced one. To name a few, there is diffusiophoresis, as proposed by Michael Schurr, Casmir-Polder forces as brought forward by Antonella De Ninno, or a brush mechanism proposed by Istvan Huszar.

Who’s wrong, who’s right? I can’t tell. If you know better, come tell me in the comments!

But if you ask me, I find it kind of cool to see people challenging what we think we all know – but we don’t.

I had not played with atoms and molecules since high-school, and I found it refreshing. And think of that: if we had solved all the open challenges and exhausted all the alternatives, would we really still have billions of people without water, 21 years into the 21st century?

I think, that the answer is in the question.

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, Gerald, welcome to the show.

Gerald Pollack: All right. It’s good to be with you, Antwan. I’m delighted.

Antoine Walter: Well, I can’t tell you how glad and proud I am to speak with you right now, because really, uh, I just finished the second path on your book and that was mind blowing to many extents, which we will be covering and guests in that discussion.

But right before I’d like to start with our good old traditions, which is the postcard. So you are clues to Seattle right now. So what could you tell me about whether the place you are Seattle let’s? I would ignore.

Gerald Pollack: Well, I’m in a place called Bellingham, which is 90 miles north of Seattle. And the reason I’m here is not that I hate Seattle.

I love Seattle. And the problem is that someone discovered that my home in Seattle is full of mold. And mold is not good for promoting health. And so I elected to get the mold remediated and in order to do so, the company says you have to move out. It’s too dangerous to be there as we’re removing the boat.

So a friend of mine owns an apartment or rent an apartment up north at a senior center in a city called Bellingham, which is a very pleasant place, not far from the Canadian border. And I’ve been living here now for five months and I’m hopeful that I can return to Seattle in the next few weeks. And returned to my home.

That would be a thrill, but the home looks as though it’s been decimated by a rocket that was launched and was misdirected towards Seattle, Atlanta to my kitchen. And the kitchen looks as though it’s been exploded. So there’s, there’s a good deal to do. And, um, I’m hopeful that this will get done in the immediate future.

And I can return to my beautiful home overlooking lake Washington and the cascade mountains. It’s really nice. Well,

Antoine Walter: in your book, on the fourth phase of water, they are many experiments, which I could figure out what you doing in the kitchen, which is currently destroyed. These have been in a lab, but there’s a full part where you describe how you boil water.

And I guess that’s the kind of experiment that everyone could be doing in a kitchen. So. In your book. There’s a quote, which to me was the perfect way to open this discussion. You’re writing that discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought and have to tell you before reading your book.

I was absolutely convinced that everything there is to know about water was discovered and known by everyone. And to my surprise, that’s absolutely not the case. So when did you see that there is so much to uncover on water and what makes you think that way?

Gerald Pollack: That’s a really good question. And it happened progressively and gradually, and it happened because of.

Uh, you might say a mentor of mine, although we never worked together. His name is Gilbert link and Gilbert, he passed recently at age, just shy of 100. And, uh, Goldman came from China along with two other scientists. He was in the first cohort of scientists, uh, chosen following world war II to come study in the U S and as you can imagine are a lot of people in China and, uh, those three were chosen.

So those three were among the most promising young scientists. And one of them went on to win a Nobel prize in physics, and we should have won a Nobel prize for his many, many contributions. And I first got to know Gilbert Ling. Twenty-five years ago at a conference to which I was invited. And I came to know him and also a dozen or so people who had evidence to support his points of view.

And his point of view is that water in biology is different from liquid water. We know liquid water very well, but he said, no, no, it’s different inside the cell. In particular, you said the water molecules are not bouncing around fiercely at a huge number of times per second, or per femtosecond. They’re ordered, they’re standing at attention like soldiers that attention and he presented evidence, or he had collected evidence during his lifetime as had other.

To support that cetera point of view. And when I met him after I met him, I was really blown away by what he had presented. I had known vaguely of it earlier, but this really clinched it for me because not just because of the logic and in what he presented and the evidence is supported, but also the evidence from other laboratories supporting that general point of view.

Well, it turns out if we’re right, that Gilbert Lang was not exactly correct in his assertion. I think he was correct in his assertion that the water inside the cell differed in a major way from ordinary liquid water. But I think he was not right in detail. And the book that you mentioned describes the experiments that, that show that it’s a bit different from what Gilbert had suggested.

But when I returned from that conference, after meeting Gilbert link, I gave one of his books, just some of my students to look at. And every one of them came back to me with it, with the same comment. This guy is onto something really important. And if he’s right, this changes all the biology. And as you can imagine, it was really important for me to begin doing experiments, to follow through on what Gilbert was suggesting.

And so that’s how we started. That’s how we got into the study of water. And I, I got to admit to you, um, that shame on me. We had some funding to study muscle contraction, which, which was my previous area of interest. And I, uh, surreptitiously devoted a little bit of that money to study water. Well, of course water has got to be essential in muscles.

So I did nothing seriously. Untoured. But that’s how we got started. So I hope that that answers your question. Yeah, it does

Antoine Walter: actually. There’s another thing, which was very impressive to me in, in your work, which is you are confronting some very famous theories and saying, look, it sounds quite complicated, so maybe it’s not right, which is a bit, and I think you’re giving that example in the book as well, of how, the way the earth revolved around the sun, all of a sudden was much more straightforward than the explanation, which was there before, which involved a lot of calculation.

But what’s surprising in the way you confront those theories, like Brownian motion and things like that is that you’re confronting big names. You’re saying basically, maybe Archie Midis didn’t understand everything about his famous Erika moment and maybe Einstein wasn’t fully, right? How is. As a scientist IQ to confront those superstars of the.

Gerald Pollack: Well superstar. So I, it reminds me of a comment when meeting with superstars, uh, this is a brilliant student who, um, who came to me to give me advice. I was about to meet somebody who was important. It was obviously not Einstein or Archimedes. I’m not that old. However, he said, it’s really simple. You go and you meet them and you look at them and you look at them as though they’re sitting on the toilet and anybody sitting on a toilet, can’t be that important.

And I remember that when, uh, uh, w during my first meeting with the late sir, Andrew Huxley and Huxley was one of the grades he passed about, uh, five or six years ago. And he was involved not only with, uh, studies of membranes that won the Nobel prize, but then he went into muscle, which was my field. And, and I remember I was about to meet him and that, and in a sense, confronted him with three pieces of evidence that we had gathered during the past year.

Each of them. Was squarely against, uh, his just didn’t fit with the predictions of his theory at all. I was a bit nervous, not only about presenting the material, but by meeting this great man who, when he walked into a room, is there was a hush. It was, it was though God had just entered the room. However, I knew previously, not only did our evidence conflict with his theory and I, I believe our evidence, but, but prior to that other people and also presented evidence that simply didn’t fit.

And so I, I felt I was on Terra firma when I approached him, nevertheless, a bit nervous. I learned from that experience that even famous, uh, really important, important people can be wrong because they’re human. They do sit on toilet seats and eat the same food that we eat, and they have the same foibles that we suffer ourselves and so on.

So. In doing science, you know, that the objective is not to pay homage to those famous or important people who have succeeded because they’re human and humans can be wrong on any issue it’s to confront truth, to try to identify truth. And that means it often means starting from fundamentals. And I think, um, uh, sir, William of Ockham had it right now known as his principal Ockham’s razor.

And it was originally a theological argument taken up by Newton and translated into science. And he said, if you’ve got two competing ideas, like for example, God exists, or God doesn’t exist. Probably the simpler one is going to be the one that is correct. And then you can apply that to science. If you’ve got two competing ideas, what is simple?

What is complicated? The simpler one is probably going to be correct. And that, that principle in fact held for, for quite a few centuries and to about a hundred years ago, with the advent of physics and quantum mechanics, which put science into the realm of abstract mathematics and a, you know, a question you might, one might raise is, does mother nature, uh, do her, her work based on abstract mathematics or is it simpler than that?

And I guess I would vote for the simpler of the two options. And so, so this has actually guided my scientific career. I’m looking for elegance and simplicity, and somehow when you’ve identified it, there’s a kind of resonance that comes you, you kind of feel and know that you’re on the right track or you might be on the right track.

And then of course it depends on the evidence and whether the evidence fits your simple idea. I do that. I do that all the time. And I do that with many mechanisms. I used to think when I studied, for example, I studied physiology with medical students at the university of Pennsylvania. Just one of the courses I took very thick book and presented by the experts, some of the experts in the field.

I couldn’t understand so many of those mechanisms. At the time I thought this is a shortcoming on my part. Maybe my brain cells are not quite as functional as those of others. And I talk, well, I, you know, I tried, but I simply can’t understand. In retrospect, I’d come to realize that in many of those instances, the ideas presented are complicated because they’re wrong.

They simply don’t make any sense. And if you try to make sense out of something, that intrinsically doesn’t make sense, you go nuts. And so I hope, I hope that answers your question about challenging authority that has no place in science.

Antoine Walter: Well, I think that’s a very valid point. I hadn’t heard of that. Uh, imaginating people on the toilets in that context, that was usually something you advise to people when they go to a job interview, for instance, but I guess that’s valued for attention as well.

Now I have to think of that. Talking of toilets. That’s not a weird connection and making, but to right before our interview, I was changing the Japer of my daughter. And I was thinking of you and of the book. And it was like, you know, that Japer contains a lot of, let’s say water, rich content. And I have no clue how, and I have no clue why to me, it’s just a fact, it contains a lot of humidity.

And I thought of how you demonstrate in the book that there are many things like that, like surface tension, like, um, uh, why boats leave Stillwater behind them when they pass and in the ocean, for instance, and all these things that you see in your everyday life and that you don’t realize how little we knew about it, and I’m going to be straight to the point.

I mean, the book is called the fourth phase of water. So you explain in the book how that fourth phase of water first. I mean, we know sorted, we know Likud and we know vapor and you say, let’s go beyond. And you discovered what’s you call to us the end of the book, liquid Crystalyn or semi liquid phase of water, which you call in the rest of the book and which has stayed with that name, easy water.

So can you explain what EZ water is,

Gerald Pollack: and easy may, may make no sense in Europe because it stands for exclusion zone and in the U S the Zed is a Z. We say Z. And so, uh, easy is easy to remember. And so it works out very nicely in Europe. It doesn’t work quite as well because, and other places, because it’s easy and.

W, you know, whether, whether you pay attention to that or not it’s exclusion zone. And we, we called it that early on, and perhaps it was an error because exclusion zone actually describes a zone that contains this fourth phase of water. And it does exclude almost everything from it because it’s dense, tightly packed kind of entity and almost nothing can get into it.

And so we started our experiments using microspheres, and we found in these experiments that there was a zone, a region next to a certain surfaces where the microspheres got excluded. And so after a while, instead of going through this, this long description of a phenomenon, we had to give it a name.

Someone suggested to us that we call it exclusion zone because it excludes, it contains a special kind of water that doesn’t admit soluble, et cetera. Ordinary water does add that. Uh, it was an Australian colleague who kindly suggested that and he also suggested it would be easy to remember. And so we adopted it, but it doesn’t describe in a convincing way what, what this water is, is all about because it has the other, besides excluding Sabias and particles extensively, it has other really interesting properties.

And those interesting properties are the ones that together teach us something about, about the water in biology and also outside of biology as well. So that’s where exclusion zone comes from.

Antoine Walter: So that means you take a bulk of. I have here, I’ve played a little bit with them, some water molecules. I mean, the representation, the usual representation of, of water molecules.

So you have these water molecules, you, you just put them in a, in a glass or in units up and whatever you want. And after a certain time, that easy is going to build up. So that means these fourth phase of water is always present as a periphery of liquid water. Is that right?

Gerald Pollack: Yes and no. Um, it does form at the surface of water at the, at the interface, it does tend to form.

So yes, that is one, one feature of the water, the feature that we tend to study, because it happens every time and in an easily easy to measure fashion is next to hydrophilic surfaces. So hydrophilic, water loving, as opposed to hydrophobic water. Like Teflon, for example. But most surfaces are somewhere in between hydrophilic and hydrophobic.

They have a certain, a certain degree of hydrophilicity and those surfaces, not everyone, but so many of them, if you were to immerse a material with that kind of surface into water, what happens is that the water molecules adjacent to that surface undergo a radical transformation. And they transform from the individual water molecules to a sheep like array that has a hexagonal motif to it, consisting of hydrogens and oxygen.

It’s not water anymore. It’s undergone a transformation. And that, that first molecular layer then serves as a template for the growth of the second layer and so on and so on. And these layers grow one by one and they can grow. To enormous lengths. We’ve seen that grow. And in certain circumstances up to a meter, I mean, this is extraordinary by any dimension of any consideration, especially one that is focused on the molecular level.

And that imagine molecules organizing themselves layer by layer out to as much as a meter granted under extraordinary conditions. But typically it will be something like 500 micrometres, half a millimeter or something like that. Or a third of a millimeter, even up to a millimeter. Some ordinary cases so that it undergoes the water undergoes a transformation and a feature of that transformation is that this structure is not neutral anymore.

It has negative charge. And the region beyond this fourth phase, the fourth phase is growing layer by layer. And if you look just beyond it, positive charges are cast out into that region as the, uh, easy or fourth phases forming. So the easiest negatively charged the region beyond this positively charged together.

They’re neutral, but you have a separation of charge which creates a battery. And we’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that starting with this battery, you can actually obtain electrical energy. So that’s one other feature. The third feature I wanted to mention is that this is an order structure of water with battery, like features.

You can’t get that without putting in energy. If you want to create order, you need to put energy. And it’s a fundamental theme of physical chemistry and thermodynamics, and I believe it’s true. It’s not complicated. And also if you want to charge a battery, you need energy to do that too. And so the question has been well, where does this energy come from?

And, uh, we found, or I should say the students found a student who was doing what he was not supposed to be doing. He found that the energy comes from light incident lights and particularly into red light, infrared being far more powerful than any of the other wavelengths. We’ve seen instances where, where there’s a fourth phase or easy.

Water could grow by 10 times, even in the presence of weak infrared light. So infrared is really important and infrared is all over the place. It’s not just coming from your toaster, uh, or your sauna, everything emits infrared. And that’s why if you have a camera with an infrared sensor, even if it’s pitch dark out there, uh, you’ll get a beautiful image because everything is generating infrared.

And that means that the energy for creating this easy is always there. And in terms of biology, you yourself are generating heat and in your, the metabolic processes that are taking place inside your body, and this heat is essentially the same as infrared. And then, so in your body, you have an internal source of infrared, as well as external sources of infrared.

And therefore your body is filled with easy water with fourth phase. So those are some of the properties.

Antoine Walter: There’s a lot to unpack in what you just explained. Let me just go back to what you said that it’s no longer water. It’s just fourth phase and you, you explain this exit going form that it’s taking next to, to the surface.

And then it’s building layer by layer, but in a molecular fashion, molecular description, I mean, water to everyone is age to all, but under your definition, that’s probably the way you say it’s no longer water. What would be the best description is it’s edge three or two? I think that the book is H H 1.5.

Oh,

Gerald Pollack: well, yeah. Or the same is H3O2. Uh, you know, you could multiply by an we’re in to be any number because it’s a vast array, but, but yeah, we, we say H3O2, so. It isn’t really water. And in some sense, calling it fourth phase of water is perhaps erroneous, uh, because you might say it’s not water anymore.

Uh, on the other hand, you know, we think of, for example, of, um, hydronium ions H3O+ plus it’s water together with an extra proton. We still call it the kind of water proteinated water. So we use the term water in a kind of loose sense and, and even evaporating water. Uh, we think of water evaporating, one molecule at a time.

I think that idea is erroneous. And we’ve demonstrated it’s in the book that you mentioned, the fourth phase of water. We’ve demonstrated evidence that what evaporates is not exactly what you think. It’s not one molecule at a time. It evaporates in clusters and these clusters have negative charge. And in addition to that, you have protons that are leaving the water as well.

Um, and these protons are repelling each other. They want to get away from each other and escape into the atmosphere. So, so you don’t really have water. So to speak, that’s evaporating, you have something with negative charge and something with positive charge, both evaporating and both centrally important in weather and understanding.

Antoine Walter: There’s something else that you just mentioned in what I still unpack from your explanation. You said that you have the separation of charges and explain the book, how that resembles the first phase of photosynthesis. It’s somehow that similar mechanism, but if we have a watch of battery that can be charged by lights, that sounds really, really, really promising on one end and too good to be true.

What is it’s as a battery that we’re talking here? Is it a potato battery which can power a clock or is it something which has much more potential in it?

Gerald Pollack: I think the latter, I think it has much more potential in it. So just imagine, uh, you know, mother nature and mother nature was very successful in using light has the energy photons as the energy source in green plants.

And even before that, and in some units out of their organisms, And one day she’s sitting in her easy chair and yawning and thinking I’m getting bored. I want to do something new. And I think that advance animals. And so, you know, animals can move around. They can eat plants, get their energy that way. But, but if you were in mother nature, thinking about inventing animals, would you throw away a mechanism that has been seemingly so successful in so-called lower species, plants and units out of the organism?

Or would you keep it in reserve or keep it in some manner over and above the energy that you could get from food? Uh, you know, the answer to me, it seems pretty obvious that that mother nature, why, why would she throw it away? Why not keep it? And if so, it means that you and I may be getting some of our energy from light and you know, a student of mine right now is undergoing a seven day fast is not eating anything.

He says he’s full of energy. It ends tonight. So if he survives, it will be one week while he’s drinking. And there are other people as documented by, uh, for example, uh, a very nice documentary film. Peter Straub singer produced a few years ago in which he interviews people who don’t eat. And so, you know, if you don’t eat and by the way, this includes a guy from India who, who claims to have eaten nothing for 65 years.

And a group of physicians went on to test him and reported that, you know, his physiology is perfectly normal, except he doesn’t eat at all. And there are many people who do this. And I I’ve been in contact myself with several, including my student is one week, but others for long periods of time. So w where do they get their energy?

And I think it’s possible that they get their energy from the surroundings. And it may be that some of these people are particularly adept at accruing that kind of energy and using that energy. So that’s a, you might say a philosophical point of view about mother nature, but. There’s more. So every cell in your body is filled with easy.

And basically it gets that way because of infrared energy. That’s responsible for building that water out of ordinary liquid water and converting it into, into easy water. And that, that water has negative, as I mentioned before, negative electrical charge. And so your sales, every one of your sales is filled with negatively charged, easy water.

And I would say paranthetically, I think that’s the reason why, if you stick an electrode into a cell, you measure 50 to a hundred millivolts negative, and there were other reasons that are set forth and, and believe. Most everyone. I think that idea is not correct for reasons that are too extensive to go into right here.

But I think the negative electrical potential comes from the negative charge of the easy water. It’s very simple, not complicated. And so this negative charge, you’ve got a sale that’s filled with negative charges. And all I want to do is get away from each other because they repel each other. And that tendency toward getting away from each other, it amounts to potential energy and is energy that the cell can use.

And I think that the cell does use that energy. And this is detailed in my earlier book on water, it was called sales gels and the engines of life. How the water inside the sale plays a central role in practically everything the cell does. That potential energy that’s there is used to propel these processes.

Now, whether it’s the main source of energy or a secondary source, it’s really hard to say at the moment. I should say that though, that some of your listeners who are into biology and such will know about ATP as being the accepted energy source inside the cell. But what people don’t know is is that, uh, one year after that idea came out of a prominent physical chemistry group said, the idea is wrong.

That ATP has this special high energy bond that’s used in all of biology. He said there was, uh, an arithmetic error and that arithmetic error is pointed out by Gilbert link and his writings in his books. And also his website, which I think is still working Gilbert Ling. He talks about it and he mentioned, and I think it’s still true today that nobody has followed up on this challenge.

The challenge is that ATP has no high energy bond. So I’m not sure which argument is correct because, uh, I think I’m not sufficiently adept to evaluate all of those, uh, arithmetic concepts that go into the calculations. I’m leaving it to others, but I just want to point out that the idea that ATP is, is the ultimate source of energy has been challenged.

And whether the challenge is accurate or not accurate, I’m not certain, but the process of photosynthesis bears such close resemblance or the first step of photosynthesis. There was such close resemblance to what we’ve been studying that I can’t help, but wonder whether the two are actually the same, you know, first step is the sale.

The photosynthetic apparatus absorbs light from the environment and then converts water molecules into oh, H minus and H plus, in other words, it breaks up the water molecule into these two fractions. That’s step one of, I think, 20 or so steps. Most of which are not understood. It’s a very long and complex process, but the first step is very simple and it resembles what I’ve been talking about.

So it’s possible that you, your listeners, and maybe even I taking advantage of the energy that come from light in our environment, uh, infrared light specialty, and the infrared light coming from our metabolism.

Antoine Walter: So that is. Application and explanation of what you could be doing with that battery feature of easy water.

I was wondering because there was discussing with BOLO Callahan, which is, um, founder and CEO of BlueTech research, who is looking at some companies in the water sector, which are looking at this easy water and trying to find some technical applications of it. Be it’s as batteries, or as you mentioned, there’s this catalyst aspect also that it may have.

I was wondering how involved are you in that part of the, of the development of your findings?

Gerald Pollack: We formed a startup, a company called fourth phase incorporated, and we were, have been pursuing so far applications and the two applications that we we’ve had in mind, mostly our number one. Uh, I should put this as number two, but.

First is getting electrical energy from light and we’ve demonstrated in the laboratory that we can do it. We can actually light an led by sticking one electrode in the negative, easy, and another electrode in the positive region. Beyond, as I said, it acts like a battery and we use that battery to power, to light a light bulb.

Uh, it works. The problem that yeah, as we have encountered in our startup is that it takes an awful lot to cross the so-called valley of death successfully from a laboratory observation, to something that’s usable in a practical sense. And it requires a good deal of investment. And we’ve been able to obtain a, you know, a rather limited amount thus far.

And the second, which we actually did spend quite a bit of time doing. And ran into some technical difficulties that again require a substantial amount of, uh, development and that isn’t filtration. So I mentioned to you that the easy excludes, practically everything, that’s why it’s called exclusion zone.

And so if you have an apparatus that can create an easy, if you put water into this black box and water contains any kind of pollution, including pharmas cast out pharmaceuticals, microplastics, you name it, it’s excluded from the easy, and in that black box, if you have a way of creating easy and then collecting that easy as distinct from the ordinary water, you should have water that is contaminant free and it does work.

It works beautifully in the laboratory. We developed a system to do that and. And then we’ve been working on a practical way to make it work. It works and we’ve run into technical obstacles because we want it to work every time. And, uh, these technical obstacles have gotten in the way and they still remain to be solved and solving them requires a substantial investment in personnel and, and such in order in order to get it done.

So it’s a real, real challenge. And the real prize, I think comes from that second, that filtration, it’s not just getting rid of pollutants. Uh, there are perhaps other ways to do that, but having our way is need us because there’s no physical filter involved. You don’t have to clean it on a daily basis or replace it or whatever, which is really cumbersome.

So it has distinct advantages in that. It’s so simple in principle, but what we think it can do in the future is as a filter is to filter out the salt. As a sort of contaminant, you might have say from ocean water. And if we can do that, then we obtained drinking water, salt, salt-free drinking water, and it uses only it there’s no physical filter or anything, no energy requiring process, except the energy from the sun, which is used to create the easy water, which should be salt-free.

So we started developing that just a little bit. We haven’t really gotten too far, but I think this is the real prize, you know, because the regions that need, we all need water, it’s becoming so scarce and the regions that need it most, I guess you might say the middle east or north Africa and such, they’ve got lots of sunlight there and lots of water, lots of ocean water.

And right now the countries that are wealthy enough use reverse osmosis, but that’s really costly in terms of. And in this case, you need only the energy from the sun. So these are all really exciting developments, but a big challenge to cross that valley of death from laboratory observation to practical application.

Antoine Walter: Well, that is also a topic where you recall me a discussion with polar Kalon, because he has written a full thesis around the dynamics of water innovation, where he shows how all the discoveries in that field take 30 to 40 years to cross that, that valley of death and to be in the middle of the market.

So I get you, it’s quite a challenge.

Gerald Pollack: It is a challenge. Yeah. What you’re

Antoine Walter: describing here with the potential application, for instance, in this study nation are I could see also, you know, water is on the critical path in applications like microelectronics, where they’re looking for ultra pure water, and basically what you’re doing here.

If it’s water, extruding, everything else, that’s the purest of the ultra pure water. There is. But if I recall, right, you have a pH graduates in what you’re building. Wouldn’t you have a water that might be very pure, but also very aggressive in terms of pH.

Gerald Pollack: I’m not sure what you mean by aggressive in terms of PAG, you mean deviating from what we would call a neutral or normal pH and pH seven.

Yeah. Why would you say, um, a,

Antoine Walter: it might not be the good term, but if I recall, right, the pH is dropping outside of the easy. So I guess the pH is going higher instead of the easy, and you have some gradients which were shown with color grades in the book. So it was wondering if, if that is a permanent feature of easier, if it’s just a transition phase.

Gerald Pollack: Well, yeah, I mean, what you said is accurate as the easy builds, it becomes negative and the region beyond becomes increasingly positive and yeah. Increasingly positive a region. Of course it has low pH because it’s got lots of protons on the other hand, it’s really not so easy to define the pH of be easy because it certainly has negative charge, but pH is defined for liquids.

And this is, it’s not exactly a liquid. It’s more like a gel. And so you can certainly talk about charge that’s contained inside this jail, like water, but more difficult to define it in terms of its pH. So on the other hand, you know, the body maintains this negative charge inside the sound by getting rid of all the complimentary positive charges.

And it does this. So every time you breathe, every time you exhale, you’re breathing water vape. And carbon dioxide. And when you’ve put together water and carbon dioxide, you get carbonic acid and, uh, which has the low pH. So basically you’re, you’re getting rid of positive charges that way. So the body keeps, uh, attempting to expel those positive charges and retain the negative charges.

And that’s why essentially every cell in your body is negatively charged. So you’re a negatively charged as well. We had some preliminary or measurements from students, which indicate that, although. Did reach the stage of being secure enough to be published, but there are pointing certainly in that direction.

And so when you say aggressive, um, with, uh, all kinds of pH gradients and such, I’m not sure whether, whether that’s necessarily the case and I, I guess the main, main reason is is that the negative charge aspect or so what you would call high pH that energy is actually used as we discussed a moment ago.

It’s actually used to power a processes that go on your body and the positive charges, which would give you a low pH are expelled from your body. They’re expelled. It’s not just by respiration, but also for example, if you sweat, the sweat contains positive charges at low pH. When your urinate, the urine usually is pH neutral, too low.

So you could expel positive charges that way, et cetera, et cetera. So the body really tries to get rid of those extreme pH extreme low pH is for perhaps the reason you’re talking to.

Antoine Walter: We’ve been discussing about the prospect of applications of easy. And, and we described, I mean, you described easy water if I may say so quite accurately.

I mean, I think it’s, I hope by now it’s clear to everyone in the book, you have a big part of the book, which is dedicated to showing how applications we all know in the real world might be explained by easy. And sometimes you say it is sometimes it’s you say it’s might, and sometimes you say it could.

So yeah, you have this, uh, very funny graph without on the limb. When you say, Hey, sometimes take it with a pinch of salt and sometimes you have proofs to support the experiments. And I was wondering if you had to pick just three out of those phenomenons that you, you explain through easy, which one would you.

Gerald Pollack: Oh, my goodness. You certainly ask challenging questions. Um, which I appreciate. Oh, uh,

Antoine Walter: uh, I can give you my favorite one if you wish. Oh,

Gerald Pollack: okay. Let’s start with that.

Antoine Walter: My favorite one is your explanation of how a bubble is very similar to a drop and how we shall call them vesicles. And that may be one is creating the other.

And I was like, you know, that was what I was mentioning with the boiling water in the, in the kitchen. At the very beginning, I really did it. I was in front of some water that had pushed to boil and it was like, okay, it’s that thing, which I see every day, every time I’m cooking some pasta. And now that I look at it with a bit more of attention, everything you describe, it makes a lot of sense.

Well,

Gerald Pollack: thank you. You’re very kind to say so, but, but I think that’s a good one to choose. Absolutely. And that may expound just a little, you know, when you see a structure that is spherical, how do you know what it is? How do you know if it’s a droplet or how do you know if it’s a bubble? And we tried early on and sometimes we were quite sure that it was a bubble, turned out to be a droplet and turned out to be an underwater droplet.

And you wonder, well, how is it possible that you can have a droplet that exists inside of water, it’s water in water. And the reason for that is that in order to create something spherical, we showed evidence in the book that it’s got a membrane around it, both of them that bubble. And the droplet and the membrane consistence like onion layers, and each, each layer is a sheet of easy.

And you might have many of these mayors. So the reason you get a sphere to begin with, whether it’s a droplet or a bubble, the reason you get a sphere is that you’ve got water of some sort inside. And that water has got a lot of protons in it. And we demonstrate that has the evidence in the book and those protons are repelling each other.

They, they want to get out and what’s restraining them is a membrane built easy. It’s sort of like a balloon. You know, you, you pump air into it and the balloon expands and what’s keeping it spherical or almost very cool is the resistance of the balloon material. And it’s pretty much the same with the droplets and with the bubbles, the restraint comes from the membrane, which consists of easy.

So now. Why is this important? Why is it significant? And does it extend into other realms? Well, absolutely. And one of those realms is clouds. So we look up at clouds and what are they made of is, uh, well, there are many, many questions on the clouds. The first one is why do they float in the sky? They’re made of water?

You know, if you take a picture of water at the same elevation, if you open the door of your plane and pour the water out, the water comes down in a mass, but the cloud stays up. And so, I mean, that is one reason. And I, I want to answer that unless you ask me in a moment, but I want to get to what is the cloud made of, and you know, it’s not liquid water because we’re liquid water.

You know, it would be just like pouring that liquid water out of the plane. It would come right down and like a waterfall or a bathtub full of water. And it doesn’t do that. So, yeah. And then why on earth? Is it when it rains? How come it rains in droplets? Uh, why isn’t it, why doesn’t the whole cloud descend and inundate you with water?

And the reason has to do with the makeup of the cloud and the cloud is actually made up. It’s not a liquid, it’s not a gas it’s actually it’s, I don’t know if you’d call it a undefined kind of structure, but it’s a suspension of little droplets. And each of those droplets is the same as the droplets that we were talking about, whether they’re bubbles or droplets, they all have these easy membranes and these easy, as I mentioned before, negatively charged.

And it turns out for reasons I discussed in the book that each droplet has a net negative charge. No. If you think about, so we’re back again to why this is important, the droplets versus the bubbles and in conjunction with that, the existence of an easy membrane. So you’ve got these negatively charged droplets and you think at first, well, they’re all negatively charged.

If you buy my argument evidence of which is presented in the book. If you buy the argument, they should repel each other and the cloud should quickly dissipate, but it doesn’t do that. Why not? Well, the answer and in a sense, this comes from the great physicist Richard Fineman. The reason is that you’ve got two droplets and if you have the negatively charged, they should repel each other.

But if you have a positive charge in between, then you’ve got two forces, you’ve got the repulsive force of these droplets that are repelling each other, want to get away from each other and you have an attractive force of this positive charge in between. That’s actually polling on those flanking droplets and wants to pull it all together.

So when you have a balance of these two forces, the repulsive force and the attractive force, it remains stable. And so clouds are, you know, moderately stable. You’d look up to the cloud and it’s of course, undergoes dynamic changes, but they’re rather so changes. And all of this has to do, if you get down to the basics with the structure of individual droplets and bubbles, which are in fact what’s the same.

So that’s, um, I think a good example of a phenomenon that has wide application.

Antoine Walter: It is what you call your fourth principle. If I recall, right? The like likes like

Gerald Pollack: exactly like likes, like so, so fine men in his own. Inevitable way. He said like likes, like because of an intermediate of unlike. So, you know, it’s just a beautiful way of describing the phenomenon that I had just told you about.

You have an intermediate of unlike charges that is the positive one in the center. And two of these droplets that contain like charges. So like likes, like, it means that the two droplets want to come together because of an intermediate of unlike the, the positive charges that lie in between those two negatives and it becomes stable.

So I think that was actually part of Fireman’s Nobel lecture. If I, if I remember correctly and you know, it, it appears as a whole chapter pretty much in, in five minutes, classic book lecture, three books and lectures and physics highly recommend. I’d like

Antoine Walter: to step. I think we decide from easy water to cover, to swiftly cover.

I don’t want to sidetrack you too much, but it really intrigued me and appealed to my curiosity. You were mentioning two debacles that you call like that in the book, the poly water topic and the memory of water topic. And I wasn’t sure about the conclusion because you, you present the cases you show, how if I got it right.

How dare you again, with the poly water wasn’t that far from, from showing the same that you showed with easy, because the reputation was a bit, I mean, what you demonstrate is that poly water was discarded because the water wasn’t pure, fully pure. And what you’re showing is that if it had been pure, the effect would have been even stronger.

Correct. So if I got your rights, you validate the poly water. Thankfully somehow dirty again, couldn’t prove his point. And that way you are the one writing the fourth phase of water. And not him. You’re not saying that I’m saying that I’m not one to put words in your mouth, but on the memory of water, I couldn’t get your, your

Gerald Pollack: conclusion.

Well, yeah, the memory, let me, let me talk about that when poly water. Yeah, I, I can’t prove, but I do think that what Dario was onto is similar to what we observed, maybe the same phenomenon observed using in different ways. And, and I also know that, uh, although Darien was quote, proved wrong, you know, very famous, their most famous physical chemist in all of Russia.

And in theory, it was claimed that he was wrong and he’s the one. Who, uh, apparently sealed his coffin with nails by expressing his view that all the critics were correct. And as it turned out, I I’ve had private conversations with two people independently, two people who knew him very well. And who said that?

He actually, until the day he died, he knew that he was correct. He believed he was correct. And what you might surmise from that is that he was under pressure from the Soviets to declare that he screwed up. It was not the Soviet system of science, which would be embarrassing for the regime. But he specifically, he was the guy who screwed up because his water was contaminated.

And yes, we found that if we use pure water, we see an easy phenomenon beautifully. And if we add contaminants, we still see it, but maybe not as strongly or as clearly, but definitely there. So the argument is erroneous. I think now Benveniste is, is more interesting. I don’t want to go into every detail of what he did, but he had.

Uh, scientists or rather, you know, conventional scientists who became very famous. Uh, and some of the stuff that he produced is in every microbiology book. So, and they went back to France. He started somewhat in the us, and he had a laboratory of something like 50 people, a very major scientist. And someone came to his lab and said, Hey, you know, when these experiments that you’re doing, you put some substance on to cells and the sales secrete another substance.

You said the antibodies that you, you exposed to the cells, you said I can dilute them and dilute them and dilute them so many times and still get the same highly specific result. And, you know, Jacques who I, I knew reasonably well, he passed about six or seven years ago. You said, uh, I impossible that that can’t be, but he invited being an intellectual scientist, curious.

He invited this guy, he sat in the corner of my laboratory and it’s free. Why don’t you demonstrate what you can do? And he did it. It was kind of like, like a homeopathic procedure, dilute and shake, dilute and shake and shake. And you can dilute to the point where statistically speaking, there should be nothing left, but water.

And then it turns out that if you take this quote water unquote and pour it on the cells, they did exactly the same thing as what happened with the undiluted is a, an and of course, this seems preposterous to the world and especially to the editor of the journal nature, who, um, um, it’s another story. I kind of interesting story, but let me just come to the bottom line.

So Ben Venus was shamed by this, this editor who sent a delegation to the laboratory to. At what they were doing and the delegation of peers, so to speak, uh, consisted of the editor himself, who was a physicist, not a biologist. This is biological experiments, the amazing Randy, uh, magician famous, famous for determining the tricks of magicians, other magicians, and a guy named Walter Stewart from the national institutes of health, who was a fraud Buster, so that they surmise that this must be some kind of fraud.

And they sent this delegation. There were not exactly peers to the laboratory. And even though in two, out of three attempts, they demonstrated that the phenomenon really worked as they had reported. And one time it didn’t work. So to speak was when one of the committee members did the dilutions himself.

And so they drew the conclusion they huddled and I drew the conclusion. Since the French seem to get it to work all the time, but the visitor couldn’t get it to work. It must be a track. And the world’s greatest magician maintains it was a Trek, but couldn’t figure out the nature of the trick, which is kind of interesting.

So, um, Ben for this, essentially, it was the end of his career being shamed by these people who, who wrote essentially an editorial in nature saying the whole thing is a trick and it was because of sloppiness or poor note taking or something like this. And then within the year, several people claimed to have demonstrated that they couldn’t reproduce it, reproduce the phenomenon.

And that was published also in, in nature. And the objection to that is they actually didn’t follow his protocol, pay Pablo their own protocols. And therefore, if they got a negative result, it didn’t prove that Vanessa was wrong. It just proved that whatever protocol they used, I didn’t work in the same way.

But since then, Ben Venus has been confirmed in many laboratories and in our water conference, which we organize each year, I do the scientific organization. We invite speakers at that conference. It, Ben Venus is a hero. And the reason it a hero is because the people at the conference know that his work has been reproduced many times, including presentations at that conference.

And one, one paper is by a group they published together. The first author is Ballone B E L O N. I think he’s Spanish. He or she, I, I, I can’t recall in which a consortium of laboratories throughout Europe, some of them skeptical, repeated the experiments exactly as Ben Venus did. And they reported together that, uh, I believe it was five out of six of them, uh, could reproduce what he and his group claimed.

And by the way, when they claimed it, they said, even for them, it doesn’t work every time, but it works so much of the time that easily it’s statistically significant. Although they couldn’t identify the reasons why occasionally it wouldn’t work. So I mean that in a quick summary, essentially, that’s the story of jock Ben Venus.

So those two are, you might say debacle that took place because of serious consequences. In the first case, it might have meant, uh, you know, If there are, y’all getting hadn’t cooperated. It might’ve meant that he’d wind up in Siberia somewhere in a work camp. And in the case of Ben, Vanessa, it’s just that it sounded a whole idea of sounded preposterous.

So preposterous that the editor of nature couldn’t imagine that it could conceivably be true. And the reason let me just conclude by, because you’ve got other questions by, by saying that the reason is that they thought of water as being independent molecules bouncing around randomly. At a fierce number of times each second or each, you know, as I said, femtosecond, and there’s no way that a substance like that could retain memory or information, which is really what Ben Venice was talking about.

Memory of what the water had seen before it was diluted. However, they didn’t know about it, easy water and easy waters, like a crystal and crystals are like Silicon crystals are used in computer memories and they indeed can store information. And so if, um, if the water that we’re talking about is easy water, and there’s a reason to believe that, uh, that that’s the case, they absolutely do have the capacity.

I mean, the easy water being a liquid crystal, pretty much like a Silicon crystal in many ways does have the capacity to store information. And now at that same water conference, water information and water is a given. I can say everybody who attends the conference is in agreement, but pretty much so, as far as I can see.

So those are really interesting stories. They have humanistic aspects to them, which I think we don’t have time to go into, but I do detail them to some extent in the book.

Antoine Walter: Well, that leads me to my opening question to close, which is kind of ironic, which is you will have, aside from your activity is on the easy water itself.

You have created the Institute for venture science and what you described right now with those two outliers. I mean, clearly what you described with, with Ben venues is to me a note, Larry, he himself couldn’t believe it to be true before he tested it and found out it was. And that’s what. Understanding of what you intend to achieve with your Institute for venture science.

It’s like, even if it’s against the OD, if it has the chance to be transformational, let’s, let’s test it out. And let’s try to do research on those topics, which might not be within the usual spheres of classical research to understand why you’re right with that approach, what you intends to do with this

Gerald Pollack: venture science.

Yes. Uh, yeah. Okay. This is a good question. I’m glad you asked, because we’re really excited about, about this Institute. And so yeah, the purpose of the Institute is to provide funding from private sources and, uh, to fund scientists, uh, who, who are addressing issues that, that may run against the mainstream.

Why do we need this? Well, uh, we needed. Unlike technologies that that are disruptive and challenge the mainstream and could be supported by investors. If you’re, if you’ve got a scientific topic, a fundamental science with no obvious practical application, but really important. Ultimately every new finding produces applications that you could never have conceived earlier.

So unconventional science is absolutely critical, but scientists don’t have much of a chance to pursue them. And the reason, the reason is that they need money to do it. Any scientist working in a laboratory, you need to equip the laboratory. You need to pay for the people who are actually doing the experiments in their laboratory, and it’s not cheap.

And especially at universities, generally the universities contribute zero. They expect you to bring in money from the outside. So the difficulty with bringing money in from the outside can be exemplified by, by me. Let me give you an example. You Antwan you have an idea you’re maybe not, I’m not sure your background, but perhaps you’re not a professional scientist working at a universal.

I’m a humble engineer. Uh, well, I started in engineering too, and I don’t know humble. Maybe. I don’t know. Some people say so, but I can’t judge that. So we’re perhaps in the same boat, but you Antwan have an idea and it runs against mainstream thinking. And then your idea, uh, the, the one I always like to present, because it’s so convenient, your idea is that the earth is round, but everybody around you knows that the earth is flat because all you need to do is look out the window and it kind of looks flat out there.

You know, you don’t see much in the way of curvature and everybody believes that it’s common knowledge that the earth is flat. And you’re, you’re thinking, wait a second, something’s wrong here because, um, you know, I’ve seen satellite pictures. And each time I look, I see the earth is curved. It looks, looks round, looks like a sphere.

And so, you know, the prevailing idea to me sounds, sounds wrong. And you even pursue your idea a little bit, um, looking, you know, you’re thinking, okay, so the earth, if the earth is flat, if I take off from Paris and I go from there and I, I traveled westward and I go to London from London to New York city, to Seattle, to Tokyo, and eventually come back and wait a second versus flat, how am I able to come back?

And you even were more conscientious than that. You look out the window, you said, next flight. You said, if the earth is flat, you know, in order for me to get back, the only way that this could happen is the earth is a cube. And you’re looking for the edges of that. And you keep looking outside, you don’t even sleep or eat.

They just look and look and you can never find the edges of that cube. And so you go to one of the funding agencies, like the national science foundation, and you put it on an application for money because you want to study this. Obviously, if the earth is round, everybody should know about it because it’s really pretty important if it’s not flat, if it’s round and you come with so-called preliminary data, so-called in the, in the scientific ground, the pictures that you’ve seen around earth and your story about looking out the window of the airplane, and I guess the, the funding agency and the gatekeeper at the agency received the application.

Oh, this is from Antwan and read through quickly. And oh, this looks pretty radical. This is very interesting. Um, you know, if this guy is right. It’s a fundamental change of scientists. So I better do my job and recruit the most competent reviewers to check out this application, review it and see if it makes sense.

Or if this Antwan guy is a crackpot, which is true. So who does he or she recruits the most famous people, the most accomplished and adept people in the field of the shape of the earth, right? Who are these people? Whether they’re the flat earth people. So it means: if you’re right, they are wrong., And they don’t like to be wrong, you know, nobody likes to be pretty wrong.

It’s human nature. So it goes to this review group and they read carefully. And what are they going to say? They’re going to say, they’re not going to be enthusiastic about giving you a score that allows you to get the money. Uh, on the other hand, you know, they have to be a little careful about their reviews.

So they’ll come up with something like, oh, you know, this is a very interesting application, but the guy has not proposed the proper degree of statistics or the proper statistical approach. He should come back again another time and be really careful. And maybe he should team up with some people in the field to make sure that.

That the right expertise is there. You’ll just miss the funding threshold, you know, and everybody around the table will be happy about that because they’re all flat earth people and they don’t want to be challenged. So your first-line reviewer will be a hero because he turns down your application. Now you multiply this by every scientific field and it’s all the same because of human nature.

Some of us may, as reviewers, we may think of ourselves as open-minded, but we’re also biological creatures. And there was an issue of survival. If you were right, they’re wrong. And if they’re wrong, they’re going to lose their funding. And if they lose their funding, it could be that they even lose their salary because a lot of people are funded from these research grants and that will be the end of their scientific career.

So the system is set up in a way inadvertently in a way that guarantees that the most far reaching of fresh ideas don’t get. And the end result is if you ask yourself, can you name a scientific revolution, major scientific revolution that’s occurred in the, in your lifetime, or let’s say in the past 30 or 40 years, I’ve asked that question to many and mostly they’re sort of dumbfounded, uh, without they can’t identify an answer.

And I’m not talking about a technological revolution. Like what’s allowing us to communicate as we’re communicating right now, not talking about that. That’s technology and technology gets plenty of funding, uh, from those who are basically exploiting this opportunity. But fundamental science is different.

There’s, there’s no obvious place where radical ideas, you know, like an iPhone, uh, could get the proper investment for development or research. And that’s why. Ideas like, um, I mean, fundamental, scientific breakthroughs, like the, uh, genetic code, which was in the mid 1950s. That’s how many years is that? 65, 70 years.

And the splitting of the atom, which is 10 years prior. I, those are fundamental scientific revolutions, of course, with many applications as has all scientific rev revolutions. But there’s no obvious mechanism to fund to support these radical ideas in, in science, not talking about technology. And that’s the reason why it’s probably hard for you to identify a genuine scientific revolution.

I mean, one that’s really impacted your life. Not like for example, um, uh, Higgs boson that got a Nobel prize a few years ago, you know, has that impacted your life in any way? Can you even understand it or explain it? There’s a cool

Antoine Walter: episode about it in the big bang theory. That’s what I can tell you, but, uh, that’s a sitcom.

That’s not nothing which is really impactful.

Gerald Pollack: Okay. And sit-com yeah, well, yeah, we don’t, that’s a separate category. So, so anyway is the reason. Y the idea of, uh, an Institute that funds specifically those ideas, that challenge mainstream ideas that have outlived their usefulness. And we’ve gone so far as to identify five, um, uh, projects out of more than 200 applications.

Pre-proposal applications. We’ve invited 15 full proposals and out of those with very thorough review, more than I think any other organization that I can, I can imagine Larry thorough review as selected five of those, that show extreme promise. And if we could get the money to fund them, I think some of those will produce scientific revolutions.

They show that much promise and we’ve also removed one obstacle. And I’ll tell you the obstacle because it’s sort of, it’s part of the territory. If you Antwan got some money from an organization to, uh, to pursue your radical round earth idea, you’d think that would be sufficient. Oh, I can do experiments.

And I could really show that the earth is round and you might actually do so successfully, but someone’s going to pop up from the flat earth society. Raise a flag and say, oh, Antwan, he’s a crackpot pay. No attention to. To Antwan. And what do you do? It is nothing you can do. You, you can’t stand up and wave your flag and say, no, I’m not a crackpot.

I’m really serious about it. Just doesn’t work. And the opposition has the numbers it’s across any sort of rebellion. And so it stops right there. Even if you get funded handsomely, you’re dead. So we know what to do about this. We know that if we fund you for your round earth idea, we’re going to look for up to 10 or a dozen laboratories, independent laboratories who follow your general line of thinking who think, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Antwan might be right. And I’m going to use my own methodology. I’m proposing to do that, to study the roundness of the earth. And next year, a dozen of you would go to the shape of the earth society. And you’ll pop up. And a dozen of you are presenting evidence using each one, using a different technique independently that yeah, the earth is round.

It’s impossible for them to call you a crack daughter. Even if they do, nobody will take it seriously because are all 12 of them crackpots independently. And we think that this approach will lead to scientific revolutions. So, you know, anyone who’s listening to this who, who has done well in life, or know someone who has done well in life wanting to give back to society.

I hope that you’ll consider contacting us or me. And the URL is very simple. It’s Ivy science.org. Hy-Vee like an intravenous, the Institute for venture Ivy science.org. And we’ll be happy to chat with you. This is I think, a critically important endeavor for the future of the.

Antoine Walter: Well, I’ll put off course, all these things in the episode notes.

So in case you want to click on it directly, it’s fascinating. It’s a fascinating approach. And it’s also very interesting, the way that you anticipate the potential repulsion, that’s a revolutionary idea might generate generation to have directly the antidote within the research. That’s quite a clever approach.

Gerald Pollack: Thank you.

Antoine Walter: Last element. First, let me give an advice to everyone listening to this. I think I can’t remember the last class I attended, where was one of the best in physics or chemistry. So just to say. I am an engineer, but I always prefer the math and the application to the terrorist. So I was a bit reluctant when I opened your book.

The first time I was really wondering if I would understand a single thing. And it turned out that it’s really written for everyone to understand. So even a crackpot like me was able to understand the really it’s very pleasant to read. It’s really the kind of book which you go through and you don’t have a lot of stuff while not having just pose the book and to take some notes and to write something, to understand what you just read.

I mean, it’s real and concrete, and it’s pretty easy to understand if you give it some brain time. So that is really so thanks for

Gerald Pollack: that first. Well, thank you so much for your kind words.

Antoine Walter: My point here as well is that the book was written in 2013 and I’ve seen on your website that. The book you’ve been working on on many scientific paper, I’ve seen that over your full career, you’re involved in 300 scientific papers.

And I saw that there’s quite a lot of them which have been published since the book. And if you have to take just a one or two that stand out within those, what would it be? And can you re recommend us some additional reading to follow on the fourth phase of oh, okay.

Gerald Pollack: Yeah. Um, uh, there are two of them and you’ll have to remind me of the second one.

When I started talking about the first one I will get, and the first one has to do with the, uh, uh, vascular system and in your body and what, what drives it. And the second one has to do with the understanding of what is pH really means. Okay. And the first one, it would take me a few minutes, but I’ll tell you the bottom line first, the bottom line is that everybody knows that your heart drives the circuit Dettori system, but we’ve found that there’s another driver that works together with the heart, and that is the, the blood vessels themselves to drive the blood.

And let me back up a moment, because this is a difficult one for, for people to, uh, to accept and believe. But I, I think we have the evidence for it. It means, uh, and it’s related to the easy water is how we came upon it. And there is a paper that we’ve submitted for publication, but it’s also uploaded on the bio archives for anybody to freely access it.

Right now pre-publication. And so we found in the laboratory that if you, if you take a, a tube made of hydrophylic material, like a straw and put it in water, that the water will flow through the straw from one end to the other without stopping. And we found without going to great detail, this goes on indefinitely.

We found that the energy comes from light, largely infrared light, and the end for the red light builds an easy annulus just inside the tube, which releases protons to the very core of the tube. And those protons are repelling his job there. They want to get out and they will get out either at one end or the other end.

And once they get out dragging water with them, Water comes from the opposite end and replaces, uh, what what’s missing. So you get this continuous flow. So we discovered that. And then one day I took a trip to Russia and I met with my dear friend Vladimir via cough, who is a professor and vice chair in the biochemistry department at Moscow university.

And he came and introduced me to his colleague and he was very eager for me to hear what his colleague had to say. And the colleague said to me, there’s a big problem in the cardiovascular system. And I said, Uh, one big problem with w w w what are you talking about? Big problem. Uh, because I had studied the dynamics of the cardiovascular system as a graduate student.

It was in fact, my PhD thesis about pressures and flows and the different vessels in the cardiovascular system, and actually thought we had it all worked out. It was very simple. So I came to this guy with my nose in the air, a little bit, some element of arrogance thinking, what is this guy going to tell me?

Within five minutes, he had me convinced that there was something really wrong with the conventional view, including the view that I had took only five minutes. So what did he tell me? He said, he said, do you know that the big problem is that the blood vessels are big and smaller and smaller, and the smallest ones are only three or four micro meters in diameter.

And through those three or four micro meter vessels have to pass. Particulate matter. That’s twice the diameter, the red blood cells are six or seven micro meters in diameter. So, you know, mother, mother nature didn’t make a mistake. Usually she doesn’t make mistakes. And so something is going on and he says that in order for these galumphing blobs to make their way through those capillaries, you have to squeeze them right.

Otherwise, and you can look at videos and you can see that, uh, videos of capillaries with red blood cells. They’re not the classic, um, uh, disc, like, so they all get squeezed as they’re flowing through the capillaries, it’s common knowledge, but what’s not common. Now this is the amount of energy it requires to squeeze them down and that he computed it.

He said, if the heart is responsible for driving those red blood cells through, it would need to develop something like a million times, the pressure that it actually develops. That’s high blood pressure parenthesis. So obviously the heart can’t do it all. There must be something else. And he started telling me his theories about what those something else is might be.

And he had a bunch of different ideas. And I must admit I was less focused on those myriad ideas than what we had just found in our laboratory. That when you have a hydrophilic surface too, if you have the energy coming in to infrared energy, that, uh, it will power the flow through the tube. And it’s based on the easy phenomenon.

So I’m thinking, oh, this is pretty interesting. You know, it might be that what’s going on is, yeah, it’s not just the heart is the vessels themselves who are acting, which are acting pretty much the same way as these tubes act in the laboratory. So I went back home and I tried to interest my student, Jane Lee in doing some experiments to check out.

And he admits to me that when he first heard the idea, he said, it sounded to him preposterous. On the other hand, you know, being a quote, obedient, unquote, that’s not what I tried to instill in my students actually quite the opposite, but he undertook the experiments and the results were positive and, and the way he did it, uh, was he took a hard from a chick, had chick embryo, and the embryo at age three, three days.

The vascular system is pretty well-developed, but the regulatory systems hormonal and, uh, neuronal and not yet well-developed. So it’s a fairly pure system of vessels alone. And the first thing he did was to stop the heart. It’s really easy to do. You just take a potassium chloride and you inject it in the heart and heart stops.

So what happens after the heart stops? Well, Uh, we’re solely responsible for driving the flow flow should stop right away, but it didn’t stop right away when I’m at a much lower velocity, but continued meaning something is driving it. And Lee found that he was not the first one to find that over the last century or so there have been half a dozen different reports from different scientists using each one, using different systems.

And they found the same thing that when the heart stops the blood capes. So it can’t, there must be something else you could argue in some of those studies that the conditions were not exactly right. There could be gravitation is driving the sort of flow, but he was able to rule out those potential artifacts in his experiments and the flow continues.

So he tested the most fundamental feature of the, of the flow phenomenon that we have found, namely, that infrared light infrared imagery is driving it. So he imparted infrared energy and he found that the flow reversibly increased by a factor of three times. So the results satisfies or satisfied the prediction that we made.

And I think that the answer. It doesn’t prove it, but it’s certainly consistent with the idea that in your body, it’s not just your heart, that’s driving the flow, which essentially everybody thinks. And I thought so myself, up until recently, but that there’s a secondary driver and that is the vessels themselves.

And how much did the vessels contribute versus how much does the heart contribute? That part is yet to be figured out. It’s not clear. So I think that is one of our, uh, significant, uh, you might say breakthroughs stemming from easy water is stemming from a laboratory observation, I think with a rather meaningful consequence.

Um, and as I said, it’s available, it’s uploaded on bio archive. Anybody, uh, could, could look for it, uh, there, and hopefully it will get published soon.

Antoine Walter: So that is number one. And you said, number two, you have to remind you is on PA.

Gerald Pollack: Yeah, what is PA? So when I was a graduate student, I started learning about pH and buffers.

How buffers work, you know, to keep, to maintain pH. And I could never understand how buffers work I tried and tried. And since then I’ve found that others ran into the same problem. They really don’t understand how buffers work and in our body, there are many buffers to maintain the pH. I gradually came to realize that it may be that my limited ability to understand, uh, uh, arose because of my own, my own limitations.

But since other people have had the same problem, understanding, you know, the, the, the equations are pretty clear, but understand that the principle and the fundamental level has evaded a number of us. I came to to wonder how all that might work. And so we began to study pH. It was motive. We got a simple result.

I’ll tell you in a moment, it was motivated not only by, by lack of understanding, but motivated by a question. I asked many people and nobody could give me a straight answer. And I asked, I asked the question, I could ask right here, if you have a solution with, let’s say low pH like acids or so, is it neutral or does it have a net positive charge?

And on the one hand you could argue, well, it’s got, it has a lot of protons in it, so it must have a net positive charge. And the other hand you could argue that no, it can have a net positive charge because if you have, for example, HCL, you’ve got H plus one cl minus one, they balance. And despite, yeah, you’ve got protons, but you have a balancing act and therefore it’s gotta be neutral.

And it turns out that, you know, roughly half the people I ask will say, oh, it’s Nutro. And the other half said, no, it’s gotta be positively charged. And the only way I can interpret that is, is that nobody learns, uh, when people study pH, what does it really mean? Um, you know, you’re not taught that because there’s a question that people don’t ask.

And I thought it was a relevant question to ask because people don’t know the answer, uh, as evidenced by the fact that 50% choose one option and 50% choose the other. And I was motivated to do that. Uh, someone had written the paper challenging, some point of view that I had. And this was a guy. I don’t recall his name, but a distinguished professor from, I think, member of the national academy of science, who said it’s impossible for anything to have net charge.

If you have, if you have a beaker full of some liquid, it can’t have any net. And he said, every physical canvas will tell you that. And I, I was thinking, you know, he might well be wrong, even though he asserted that with some, some kind of certainty. So, so we did experiments and experiments to check, to see whether solutions of different pH are they neutral or are they charged?

And the answer turned out unequivocally that they’re charged. And if you have low pH it’s positive charge, and the more concentrated you have, I’d say, if you put an acid in, the more positive charge would have, and the opposite, uh, with basic solutions, you know, the more basic it is, the more negative charge.

So what that means is. In your cells or anywhere if you have a solution, if we’re right. And I believe we’re right, because I think the experiments are really clear. The results are really clear that if you have a solution of a certain pH, what it really means is that you’re measuring the amount of charge and the solution.

And for me, that’s really a lot easier to understand than pH, which is fundamentally a mathematical construct, but more primitive and more simple as, you know, You’ve got a container of a liquid. And how much charge does that contain? This is similar to what’s inside yourselves. And you asked me earlier about, uh, easy water and what’s the pH value.

And I kind of equivocated say, well, it’s not really a liquid, but, uh, it’s got a net negative charge. And if you were to assign a pH through it, you’d assign a high pH as you were taking about, about doing. But really what it means is it’s got negative charge. I think everything is simpler that way. If you, if you run through to understand that it’s as simple as net charge, you don’t have to run through the mathematics and logarithms and whatever that sounds like.

I think it is, you know, I just have to say one more thing based on that, um, about the haka was razor, uh, stuff. Um, that’s the bit for another time, I think, uh, yeah, we’ve, we’ve abandoned. So when it’s Auckland’s razor, my, my colleagues was stand up in front of a seminar room and report something that is extremely complicated and they, they subtext is look how complicated this is, and I’m smart enough to be able to understand it and pursue it.

So look at me, I’m, you know, especially that it’s so deviant from the principle of outcomes, razor, which in my book is really fundamental to the whole foundation of science. When

Antoine Walter: foods spend three more hours trying to explore all the. Elements and all the bits and pieces that you left left and right within this conversation, because there will be much more to unpack.

But for today I tried to be a bit cautious of your time. So I propose you to switch, to do the rapid for a question to round that off

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: In this last section, I try to have short question, which you can answer with short answers. And my first question is going to be what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Gerald Pollack: Well, when you say, have been working on, I guess there are a couple of exciting where we’re not moving into starting with water and easy water and such, we’re moving into, you might say applications.

I’m not sure if that’s exactly the right word because they’re not technological applications, but it’s gaining an understanding of the. And I have two books that both of which are almost complete and largely waiting for my son, who was a talented artist, who did the other stations on my fourth Facebook.

And so many people that have commented on, on the beauty of the illustrations and the whimsical nature of some of it, but he’s busy remodeling his house. And so I have to respect the fact that, uh, his family is now living in very tight quarters and waiting for him acting as general contractor to finish all that work so they can live in some reasonable comfort.

And so the two books that are kind of waiting on, uh, on the sideline and one of them said, what’s exciting. And so of course what’s exciting is what is the next step? And in the, in the book idea with the role of electrical charge in nature, and many of the phenomenon I argue that we see everyday, but we don’t really understand.

It’d be explained by a understanding that electrical charge plays a central role. As some of the phenomenon are amount to, for example, what turns the earth every 24 hours, what’s the origin of wind. How do clouds really form? Why does it rain sometimes and not other times, what’s the nature of gravitation.

How do fish swim? How do birds fly? Even somebody said, how do airplanes fly? Which you may be surprised in a scientific American article one year ago. I forget the title. The subtitle is even now, we still don’t understand what keeps planes in the air and surprising and scientific American, even the experts don’t understand.

So those are some of the topics covered and you can understand why a. It might interest me a lot. I find this exciting and, um, and the second book has to do with the structure of the atom, I think is wrong. The one we’ve learned, the basic construct, uh, and, and the, the surprise to many is, is that when the physicists came through with the so-called solar system model, and now greatly modified, uh, by quantum mechanics, the chemists said, uh, th and this came through through the physicists who were dominant at the time, the chemist said, this is nonsense.

It, it doesn’t explain the first reaction in chemistry. And they came up with a few other ideas. And, um, so I argue in the book, uh, reasons similar to the chemists. I didn’t know about it at the time. Why the bottle I think is fundamentally flawed, uh, very simple. Arguments. And I put forward a mechanism, which to my surprise is actually rather similar to what the chemists, the most prominent chemists had been advocating a hundred years ago.

And I developed that to Hologic stance so that that’s, uh, an applique is almost done as well. And that’s for me, the excitement and all of this started from, from water. And it started not only from water itself, but from some of the scientific principles that came out of a search for understanding of water.

And now they’re being applied scientifically, I don’t mean technologically, but scientifically to understand the world around us, obviously, I don’t know if I’m right. I may be totally wrong, but, um, those were fed back to me said, you know, your ideas make total incomplete. So I’m sure that they will be rejected by the colleagues who are in their respective fields.

How can this outsider come through with that kind of nonsense? He’s a crackpot, for sure. So anyway, I’m responding to that. I’m really excited about what we’re doing.

Antoine Walter: Going back to the field of water. What is the trends to watch out for in the water industry?

Gerald Pollack: I don’t follow the water industry with any degree of precision or detail.

It’s a huge, huge industry. What to look for? Well, you know, that’s when I, I guess it, it, it depends. Um, if the people in the water industry, uh, take the idea of easy water or a structured water, as it was once called them or other seriously, they may begin a rethinking of how to solve the problems that need to be solved.

And in that case, they’re going to follow along with some of the ideas that I’ve been hinting at, or, or suggesting, uh, ideas for filtration, for example, for energy harvesting. So far, my experience is those people are sort of practical, practically oriented engineers who don’t really follow the fundamental science.

And so I think they’re going to be, uh, as long as that whole. They’re going to be continuing along with, basically with what they’ve been doing, which is trying to improve what they’re doing. And you know, this great example, I forgot who was showed. It is a light bulb with a, a candle inside of it. And with a comment that, you know, the way to move things along is not to perfect, uh, candle lighting, um, to keep improving it, but to start something that is brand a brand new idea.

And so if, if they take account of what we’ve discovered, I certainly hope they do. They may be switching gears and solving the problems that they need to solve. And we’re all aware of those problems. Uh, you know, getting rid of the pollution and the water, getting energy, renewable energy, and such. Um, the problems have been, I think pretty much outlined, but the solution.

Could they want it one of two paths and the current view of the current approach to solving them will probably yield incremental improvements, which they have been feeling. But I think we need to switch gears and those who have, you know, the interest in looking at the fundamental science, um, which, uh, you know, a good place to look is actually at our conference.

Um, the presentations are, have been video access, um, and it’s free. And so to follow the fundamental science, which is gathered together at that annual conference, a lot of eyes begin to open when they see that. And my hope is is that the trend will undergo a lateral or a reverse, uh, shift into something.

Completely new. And I think that’s going to take some time to happen. You were mentioning 30 or 40 years. I hope it occurs more quickly because the problem is so urgent right now. It’s a problem that we need to solve. Also, you know, the problem of climate and weather, I give the analogy of like a car it’s difficult to fix a car.

If you don’t understand the principles of how the steering wheel and the accelerator and the brake work, your car is towed to the shop. And, you know, he has no idea he or she won’t be able to fix it very well. And so I would certainly encourage to those who have the time and interest of a pursuit of learning, what basic science is now beginning to show that will change their course and accelerate the results enormously.

Antoine Walter: That leads me to my closing question. First a way to thank you for that very insightful discussion on my end. So it was very, very interesting to listen to your explanations and that’s opens the appetite if I may say so we’ll have another guest like you to recommend me. I should invite absolutely. On that same microphone.

Gerald Pollack: Oh, um, uh, my goodness, uh, yeah, toward the practical and, and, um, and especially in terms of health and a person that I would recommend is Gina. Gene that runs the so-called hydration foundation. She’s not a scientist. Uh, uh, she understands the critical importance of water and hydration of, uh, of the body.

She wrote a book that I, I think is a best seller. It’s called she and her colleague it’s called quench. And it deals with the role of water. And she understands, uh, although not as scientist, the role of structured water, easy water in, in sales. And, and she’s a really dynamic, uh, kind of person. And so, um, I can certainly connect you with her, but you can easily find her, uh, hydration foundation, Gina B R I a sorry, family name.

Uh, I think she would be a really interesting guest for you, although she’s not French.

Antoine Walter: I don’t invite that much French on that microphone just because they have the same shitty accent than I do. So it’s not,

Gerald Pollack: uh, your accent is beautiful and by the way, I, I’m not sure. I’m not sure if we’re on the air off the air, but I must say that I really appreciated your, I really a penetrating questions that has show huge insight into call of these.

Um, uh, so thank you for your unusual insightfulness. Uh, very much appreciated.

Antoine Walter: Well, that makes the perfect conclusion to this episode. Thanks a lot. Thanks for all of that. And I’ll make sure to have your books as soon as they are. ’cause w teased us two additional ones and maybe that’s, uh, a right point in time that you have a followup discussion and be very, very

Gerald Pollack: happy to do so.

Maybe that would be my great pleasure. Thank you so much.

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Blue Foot Membranes: The Next Evolution in Water Filtration

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Echo River Capital: Pioneering the Future of Water Innovation

By Antoine Walter | 3 April 2025

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Amazon’s Water Footprint: Tech Giant’s Quest for Water Sustainability

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Turing: The AI Revolution Quenching the Water Industry’s Thirst for Innovation

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Botanical Water Technologies: Harvesting Liquid Gold from Plants

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The post Solid, Liquid, Gas, And… A Fourth Phase of Water?! appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Puraffinity is a GreenTech Company that designs smart materials for environmental applications.​ Their cutting-edge material design and creative engineering approach may provide a new horizon to solve the daunting PFAS / Forever chemicals challenge we face.

What we covered:

What Polyfluoroalkyl Substances – or PFAS – actually are 

How these PFAS enter the Water Cycle somewhen along the way but never exit it. In other words, they bioaccumulate in all of us!

How finding PFAS in >97% of people has consequences on health, wellbeing, and overall societal costs

How PFAS liabilities may also be a risk for the corporate world and Fortune 100 companies

How Puraffinity may light a bulb of hope in PFAS treatments, thanks to a sort of “Chemical Pacman”

How “Forever Chemicals” are only eternal because we don’t take them seriously (yet)!

How PFAS could be reused and regenerated from the recycled solvent medium

How you can control PFAS flows, removals, and by-products (and how you need to go beyond LC-MS for that)

How the bottleneck to PFAS treatments might be at an unexpected place: a shortage of operators

Where PFAS treatments shall ideally be located, and what shape they should take

How we shall move on from the human-centric approach to water treatment to also consider the price tag attached to biodiversity losses

How to best nudge the adoption of PFAS treatments, from regulations to market incentives through investor activism

How spinning off from academia to entrepreneurship involves a mindset shift and a readiness for war

Cycling across the World, studying with monks, time to adoption of new water technologies, being a Forbes 30 under 30 and MIT tech review 35 under 35… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: PFAS Treatment

Resources:

Check Puraffinity’s Website

Send your warmest regards to Henrik on LinkedIn

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: PFAS Treatment

Quotes: PFAS Treatment

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, Henrik. Welcome to the show.

Henrik Hagemann: Thank you. Yeah, I’m excited to be here.

Antoine Walter: I’m really excited to have you and we’ll see quite soon why, but I have to open with our good old traditions and that involves that you have to send me a postcard from wherever you are and if I get it right, you’re in love. So, what can you tell me about London that I would ignore by now?

Henrik Hagemann: Well, I guess the one, one thing that often overlook this, we actually have quite a diverse scene of like different cultures. So where I stay is like really close to the Notting hill carnival. We just had like a few weeks ago and that one is like, yeah, it’s pretty cool. It’s not a lot been allowed lately, but whenever it is possible, it’s great Ron to come.

Yeah. Well,

Antoine Walter: let me jump directly into it and let’s tell everyone why I’m so excited to discuss with you because actually you were listed by Forbes as one of the 30, under 30, and by the MIT tech review as one of the 35, under 35. So I don’t know if you’re a soon hitting the 40 bar, which will make you one of the 40 and the 30, but I was wondering how do you get these recognition and what was your path to impress such impressive?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Well, I guess it’s, it’s often seen as like maybe a symptom of the journey rather than like the goal itself. So yeah, I started out with this crazy synthetic biology science competition with a team of other like engineers and scientists, which was told like at the time nobody knew about. Genetically engineered machine.

What is that? But these days, like everyone is like, oh, that’s how our vaccine to me. And it’s like, yeah, that’s right. But that was, yeah, that was back in 2015. Then we joined in through this sort of Imperial college ecosystem. Creating a venture and yeah, I think there were some really hard decisions that had to be made along that journey.

Some of them were between, is this going to be a tech push or a problem solve? So like a mission-driven company and I think, yeah, we’ve definitely. Whittle it down. We started out with 10 people at that item journey. And then now we’re like two left on the team, the others, they went to do the PhD, like we’re all supposed to do myself included and I’m sure some of them will become like similarly, like recognized by whatever external body.

Uh, but I guess it’s a symptom of them having choices. Some of the more mission-driven approach and then really sticking with this thing. Like, it is not just a quick fix to develop some of these things already in 2019, it had been four years now. It’s been a few more years since then. And maybe that that’s, it it’s like sticking with stuff when it’s really like, you’re just piling around in difficulty.

Antoine Walter: We come back to the mission part and to what you’re actually doing. But you know, when I was reviewing your path, Many things which are, I mean, you’re clearly not one of the conventional people we meet in the water industry, but I saw two that really were standing out of the crowd. First, you were cycling 9,350 kilometers from China to Denmark to give you a scale.

I was cycling 10 kilometers this morning to take the train and I was exhausted so impressive there. And you also learned Wushu, which I learned to be a variation of Kung Fu with some Shaolin monks. So how do you fit that in your journey and why?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Yeah, I think it’s a, it’s an interesting one. I guess it’s like, it’s a bit unusual, but basically I spend a really long time planning this trip.

I ended up spending maybe a year and a half planning this trip and the, the original thesis for it. I was really interested in this sort of send Buddhism, which lies underneath the Shaolin Kung Fu staff. And as a kid, I want it to be a monk. And then the other interest was I was fed up. I was really fed up with studying day and night during my high school.

So I went to this boarding school to leave the more Mon-El monolingual countryside in Denmark. And I just walk up this day, laying in bed like. DOF. Wouldn’t it be nice if all I had to do today was cycle. All I had to do yesterday was cycle and all I’ll do some Moro or cycling. And so that, that kind of, that was the early sprout for the idea.

And then one and a half years later, I had convinced my parents to let me go. I had worked so that I could earn some money to pay for the trip. And basically I found myself, yes, you said living with, but the Charlotte. In Hunan province, China, just like central China. It’s between Sierra and Shanghai. It’s the middle of nowhere.

Really? It’s an industrial province. And the whole village was like concrete up in the mountains is not particularly pleasant, but I really enjoyed it. I still keep my hair. But short from those days, we really were bused completely short here. And yeah. Then we were asked to train from five 30 in the morning until 7:00 PM in the evening.

Six days a week. So you lose transept of weekend. They like, where am I? I didn’t do it for that long, only four months. And I would definitely do it for longer if I could get away with it again. And then yeah, the, the trip kind of, that was good preparation. And then I decided I took, I would take the sustainable way back.

And so that’s how I came to the cycling trip. So I, I flew out and then after the training with the monks, I basically, uh, cycled through that silk route. So that, that took me through some really. Well, I guess discern it parts like the Gobi desert Kazakhstan, parts of Russia that are now like inaccessible because of the tension with Ukraine.

But yeah, throughout, I think I met so much kindness from people and I was like, oh, I cannot pay these people back. That kind of current bro and pay them back for like all the kindness. They offered me whether it was like a mechanic offering me to sleep in his house with the small kids also, or like someone doing the food and in China and the middle of nowhere.

But I thought, okay, maybe I can help these people by trying to solve some of the issues. So I cycled through the ROC and you can see it’s like dry it out there, like bolts in the middle of the desert, where there used to be an ocean. And so. Yeah. Later when the chance to do something with water came up, it was like a chance to develop a technology where these people wouldn’t know that I would try to help them because the technology would be at the industrial plant and their sites would benefit without them having to pay for it directly.

That’s a longer story, but basically what I learned from that there’s maybe like, keep your feet in the pedals and your eyes on the horizon. That’s kind of, it translates well to entrepreneurship.

Antoine Walter: It sounds like a perfect metaphor as well. So you mentioned that you had this competition at MIT where, where you first touched that idea of the technological aspect of what you’re doing today.

And you also mentioned that, that element of the, of the mission, which I now understand as that link with watcher, but what came first? Is it the technology first, the water mission.

Henrik Hagemann: So they picked us out of 120 students at Imperial into a very curated group of 10 people to represent Imperial at this science competition in 2014.

And they had deliberate practice around what makeup they wanted us. So we were 50, 50 male, female. We were engineers and scientists and were basically thrown into a room with our white wall, like behind me, asked to brainstorm, come up with something. Guys. You’ve got four months to present that in Boston, at MIT.

Uh, it better be good. So we went through for two weeks, just like brainstorming, pounding, like through different ideas. And as we, we evolved different like problem sets. There was this convergence around one being these targeted materials that you can develop in biotech. So at the time we saw. Wow. You can use these like green tea bacteria called a Cecil banter to make cellulose.

Okay. That’s cool. Like nature knows so much. And then the other side was, oh, there’s this sort of impact problem of clean water where I was like, huh, like keen water for all or something. Lots of people have done. When you dig into it, there was this sort of like 80 20 rule that came apparent to us. It’s basically like this small group of contaminants, less than 20% of the stuff in water, which basically mess up more than 80% of the fresh water we have available.

And so the idea came like when those two rings overlap and that vendor. We’re like, okay, what if we combined this thing with this thing, and we basically try just as a proof of concept and see if we can make nature, trick the materials and focus on the highest impact within that group with our limited understanding of water treatment in 2014.

Antoine Walter: Does that mean that because today you focus quite a lot on the PFAS treatment, because you just said you have a limited knowledge of what a treatment at that point in time. And PFAS is usually not the first thing that you learn about water. So was that within the concept from day one or did you build it up with.

Henrik Hagemann: I think you’re spot on. It was definitely not a simple one-off thing. In the beginning, we were considering the stuff with the very long tail. So like radioactive things, some with very high acute toxicity. So like a bacteria in the water cryptosporidium, whatever it might be and more, and it, it only came through like us talking to customers to really learn about, oh, do you need a new solution, obviously?

And I they’re there. Joyce, but, and then there would be like, ah, actually we can use electrocoagulation we can use ion exchange. And then Bob’s your uncle job’s done. No. So like running through this wall and being like, oh, okay, well we could spend a lot of effort developing that’s technology, but there isn’t really a market near for.

Or the market need a small probably be like, huh, okay. Back to the, back to the other micro contaminants, micro pollutants, what were the contestants? And I think, yeah, that was something we build up over time. And we’re definitely grateful for like these ecosystems where you you’re asked to go out and talk to a hundred customers in 10 weeks.

And if you don’t, you don’t get to present. So it was like, it’s really a pressure cooker. Yeah. That then led us down this route of having a criteria for what to pick. So it was. What’s the toxicity. Okay. Is it persistent? Does it stick around and then does it build up over time? Does it bioaccumulate those three were also like what?

It’s like the usual European regulations for water framework. But one that I think is often overlooked is volatility. Something that’s special about some species speciesist they go into the clouds and migrate and bras is the most remote parts of the world. And that’s something which is special about, for example, a Teflon chemical, like PFAS.

Yeah. Once we came on to that, it was like a blood like, oh, I like a shark smelling blood. It’s like, oh, this is like, there’s something juicy here.

Antoine Walter: You had PFAS ticking all the boxes because you could solve it. It was one. Type of compounds that you had an idea of how to treat and that’s something we’ve covered on that microphone in the past.

It’s clearly a dead angle of the water industry today, because as you mentioned, some more conventional ones made already have a treatment, but not PFAS are not really. I mean, we’re still in this phase, which looks a bit like, you know, beyond DVD. Blu-ray and 20 different technologies around. We knew that all of them could somehow match the demands, but none of them was really developed.

So we are still in this, in this Prairie phase, which gives you a strong opportunity. Again.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Yeah, that’s true. And I think the other, like outside observation, I mean, obviously you can see my background. Like I was playing around with the monks and like, I wasn’t doing water treatment in that time. Like one of the outside observations was just that we spend these orders of magnitude more energy.

When we filter with science, exclusion principle and 80%. Pollutants we remove, they’re not that harmful. So it’s like, it didn’t seem like a prudent use of energy. And that was kind of like part of the observation also in those early days in that, that sort of white board, Imperial hygiene D.

Antoine Walter: It’s interesting because your approach, now, what I understand from what you say with this 80 20 Pareto rule is really unconventional in water treatment.

I mean, you’ll get sold. Okay. Remove those. Okay. You remove those, you don’t think of. Okay. Maybe that was another, that harmful. We should dedicate on those, which are really harmful. That sounds, I mean, you already gave two very interesting insights here. The first is go out and talk to customers the earlier the better.

And the second is really focused on, on what mattress, but steel PFAS is really something emerging. And do you think that’s the overall, uh, a as of the level at which it matters is already there, or is there still a disconnect between the level of, of harm? It can CO’s and the understanding that people have with.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. I mean, we’re very far from having had a microplastics general awakening for the whole population. We haven’t had that for PFAS, that kind of happened for microplastics. And it was like watching an earthquake, like what the hell is going on? Like the whole, the whole candidate is talking to us about whether we can remove microplastics and we were just.

Uh, yeah, we mean, I mean, it’s persistent, but it’s not that toxic. Like this is, this is like a self core thing compared to these other bad boys. And so I think industry wise, there’s definitely a massive awakening. Like when you see fortune 100 companies losing billions of dollars of market cap, because of PFAS liabilities, like we saw in 2019, it’s like, holy cow, like it’s really moving to the top of the corporate.

And then for us, it’s just doing the maths. If you take a back of the envelope, like calculation, you take the lawsuit in 2016 settlement for six, $670 million for one site for one fluoropolymer manufacturer. Then I did that. I said, okay, there are several fluoropolymer manufacturers with more than 20 sites and there are least the same lawsuit liability.

And so you can clearly see how this maps onto the balance sheet. And I think often in water treatment, we will talk about clean waterfall and isn’t that just driven in and off itself, but it’s really hard to adopt when you cannot map it onto. The corporate agenda. And so I, yes, I saw, I guess, a chance for that with PFAS.

And I think right now we are kind of being a bit cautious or like just not trying to spur things on too much, because I think with microplastics, some of the general awareness was like, good, but then it’s it deflates a bit after that? It’s like, okay, what’s the next cool thing. What’s the next hot topic?

That’s

Antoine Walter: absolutely true. I mean, when I started within water treatment, the hot topic, because some regulations were coming around were micro pollutants and it was microplastics and we had one for Diane. Then we had, I mean, there were some fame waves and yeah, there’s a racial behind that’s for sure. But not all of them.

If you wait them have the same consequences. So it’s very interesting to hear that from you regarding, I mean, if we’ve exposed the problem of PFAS, what is your solution there? How do you intend to solve that PFAS?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. So I think first off it’s recognizing the size of the challenge. So people are trying to stick the most non-state contaminant.

It’s not just all these things. It’s not just 50 times more toxic than arsenic is really a non-stick. And that is like, it’s such an interesting technical challenge in itself. And so I really view it as an experimental search for. So it’s you got to go through this iterative design build test learn cycle to basically find the most suited molecular receptor or molecular binding group for group of PFAS in a given matrix.

But people often forget this piece, that there was a constraint. There’s a constraint in the water sector of cost of manufacturing, the stability of the substrate. And the functional groups and the safety of those molecular receptors, you cannot just do crazy chemistry. Like we can for biomarker detection where nobody gives, gives a yeah.

A trap about whether there is, there is a top on fluoride bond and the binding, my hand is in for detecting cancer. People don’t care. But for us in water treatment, dance really important. And so the first time we did this, we basically went through an MRI and a library to screen with 10 to the 13 different variants.

That’s a lot of zeroes. And then we would discover a group of peptides that can efficiently capture PFAS in our chosen water matrix. And then we would test those groups of peptide mimics in a high throughput screen and our experimental labs. So you have labs working alongside the bits with the modeling and then basically.

That insight led to us having a dual mechanism for binding. So you have ion exchange and its option, which gives you a more flexible approach. And it introduces this really exciting for me, flexibility to have non solvent-based regeneration of the absorbent media. So that was obviously back in 2017. When we first did that, we’ve since like learned a lot about.

How there’s a need for regeneration. So that’s been something we’ve been building out the capability for not necessarily the product, more the capability, this is one learning. And then we’ve been introducing these sort of advanced analytics. So you understand how to make the product, what the product is made of and material informatics.

So you’re trying to close the loop and what is our performance data and how does that link to the material, properties and performance. And then. We have been mission-driven so it’s not just about biotech. It’s like opening up the clock to stuff like super molecular chemistry so that we can have peptide mimics instead of necessarily peptides because.

Some applications, let be very real. Like they require tighter price, performance pros, and reduced complexity of manufacturing. And so you’ve seen pool startups in the past. Like maybe it was by Aqua developing cool and science to capture stuff, and it’s like, nobody can, can afford that price point. And so it’s about reigning in the complexity, uh, which has been one of the other walls we’ve had to grow into and kind of find a way around.

Antoine Walter: There’s a lot to deconstruct in what you just said. So let me just try to break it down first, really for the Mughals, like me to regress roots you at Sorg, the PFAS, and you also that mechanism of ion exchange at the same time, that means PFAS is in the water. You have your substrate and at the end, PFAS is on your substrate.

You mentioned that you can originally rate it. How would you do that? And what, what do they become when you originally rate your.

Henrik Hagemann: So for us, it’s about the mass balance of PFAS. And it’s often overlooked when you do these new treatment solutions. So we, we basically have that solvent media, which has these small pack men, the Pacman’s stick to the PFAS in the water preferentially.

When you filled up this at solvent media, and it really looks like these small grants. Uh, if you mentioned buying a new shirt, like those small pouches that are inside, that is what the granules look like. And then once you’ve used it up, we take it offline. So you have a lead in a lag vessel, take it offline, and you basically apply an aqueous.

Which unclicked the chemical. So it introduced a pH change and assault that allows you to generate a smaller volume of PFAS waste, which is in a liquid form. And then you dispose of that liquid form as the hazardous waste, much like pharmaceutical waste or existing, uh, PFAS waste that’s destroyed. And then you can reuse.

We’ve covered that in our second and third patent, but we haven’t done this at scale yet because we need to test like the safety, the stability, the performance, the cost effectiveness, before we can go and finalize like the saturation of the media. So it’s yeah, I think it’s about what can this technology do for you?

You can flip the unit economics of treatment if you can regenerate the media. And that’s where the scientific, like, uh, enthusiasm originates from not just from like academic interests. So,

Antoine Walter: what is your, your vision there? Because you, you mentioned that you can reuse the substrates and if I get it right, it’s patented, but not yet industrialized, this reuse part, but what is your vision?

Is it like something you can read? Ad lib forever or at some points like a membrane would be clogging, let it’s like 10 paths or five paths or three paths. Jeff

Henrik Hagemann: feeding they’re already. Yeah, I think, I think it will really be like a three paths or five paths. What I envisioned is like, imagine how cool would be if we could have non Virgin.

It’s like, we do need it for space exploration. We use it right now for vaccine manufacturing. We use PFAS to put out fires that otherwise cannot be put out. And so I think there will be a use for it. We’ve got to restrict the number of youths. We cannot use it. Promiscuously in everything. And for that closed loop system, we need these like precision capture and ideally regenerate as a second phase solution.

Antoine Walter: So you mentioned the analytics as well. So you have this Pac-Man on the substrate, which are eating up the PFAS and at some points, I guess they’re fed. How do you determine mind at which points they cannot eat more just because their abilities.

Henrik Hagemann: It’s been so much analytical development efforts. And we’re really grateful to our partner who has been helping us with that, that this sort of innovate UK funded body in London.

So basically we do LCMS in tandem to see the performance, but we realized that wasn’t enough, even though it’s the gold standard for PFAS detection and grid and everything. It’s not enough to give you insights about where you capture what other species are really. So we’ve been working on these sort of stability and safety testing to see if we might release any sort of, uh, total nitrogen, like quality control to ensure that none of the functional groups had degraded, because it’s not enough just to say that PFAS is not coming up.

One of your materials, not stable, and that’s a real concern, then the water treatment space. And then it’s also about having these sort of other measures. So total organic carbon, uh, having. And understanding of functionalizing the material. So does it have the same profile in terms of NMR spectrum, as we would expect this material to have, and then linking that profile in, in the material composition, which is what NMR tells you back to the performance.

And that’s where we build our feedback loops to inform the next variant of PFAS media.

Antoine Walter: When you, I mentioned LCMS, that means you have a lab analyzes, or do you have also online measurements, which give you. An idea of where you stand.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. So we worked with a third party body that provides us this LCMS analysis.

And I think it’s important to have a third party to provide it because otherwise the data is kind of a bit biased. You can say, oh, this company has great data, but they’ve generated all of it themselves. And nobody has actually like analyze this water that they provide. I think the other point you touched on it’s the whole, one of the holy grails of.

Uh, we want to see an online, real time in situ PFAS sensor. And obviously there’s a lot of cool excitement going on for that, but the reality is right now, there isn’t a real time sensor for that yet there are cool new analytical techniques being developed, like total organic total oxidizable precursors assay, the torpor or the total organic flooring measurements.

But none of them are, are real time. And that’s really what we need.

Antoine Walter: Very clear. So now zooming a bit out. We have the substrate, which is in contact with water, I guess it must be in a kind of contact tank or something. Where’d you place that in your treatment train? What’s the shape. How does it look like?

Can you just describe.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Yeah. So if you imagined like a large stainless steel tank, that operates a bit like a Brita filter, where you basically have water flowing in from the top coming down at the bottom, that’s the large application installation and there we’re trying to change the material. Not how the operator works.

And so by changing the, this sort of within the constraint of a granular media, you can reduce the complexity of operation. And I think, again, one of the learnings is you can do a lot of cool stuff in the lab. Maybe you can have a stirred bed reactor, and you’re going to have fractionation of whatever you’re doing, but it’s difficult to implement those with the operators we have.

And there is right now a shortage of operators. So introducing complexity there. It might mean that you cannot actually scale up. And so we’ve stuck with that pack bed vessel of operating, uh, because of that to retrofit. The cool thing we see is for these sort of, you mentioned this it’s for these sort of point of view.

So point of entry applications. Whether you just need a small volume of this media, because it has higher productivity per volume of material, but this like specialized grabbing mechanism there, you can have mechanisms of possibly under St. Cartridges where basically you capture much quicker with a smaller footprint.

So that users who couldn’t fit it in, in their house or at the entry of the house before now, And that’s one of the things that’s driving us in terms of prioritization of the, the materials that is now a

Antoine Walter: very intriguing point for me, it’s a discussion I somehow had with Sreenath Bolisetty from BluAct when he was on that same microphone, because he had a similar approach to you.

I mean, it’s not the same steps, right? It’s not the same way to coat it, but on the business model part, he was also looking at under the sink cartridges. Maybe in the industrial place, maybe been drinking water. And you mentioned that’s designed tests learn. And I guess that’s when you’re just starting out in that fields, you can just come out with one idea that that rules them all.

So you have to, to focus somewhere. And when I was reading your, your marketing materials and the different points where you were playing, I was seeing that point of views and that recalled me, you know, the study done on Americans, on PFAS in their blood that every single American. PFAS in his blood. So I was thinking if you combine those two and you say, Hey, you know, you have that in your body already today.

And your drinking water production plant is not able to cover you from that risk. So what if you could just screw something under your sink and you’re good. So it sounds like probably science fiction at that point of time, but why not on the long run? So if you were to have a crystal ball and you look at five or 10 years in the future, where do you think.

Is the best point to apply your technology is it’s under the sink is it’s in the drinking water treatment plants in an industrial treatment plant where

Henrik Hagemann: yeah, I have a love opinion about that, but I want to add one step to you before we do so one is. They found the Nordic council of ministers. So this is the government.

They basically put a price tag on the cost of PFAS chemicals and the blood in Europeans. It’s 84 billion euros in annual costs every year. And that’s across 740 million citizens roughly in EU. So you have actually more than a hundred dollars spent in, in health cost every year. Just for PFAS, you can see, like you can model that out and play with a different scenario.

But I think that is something which is driving us, but where I

Antoine Walter: want to understand that one. Very good, because it sounds very, very intriguing. Can you unpack that number? So it’s the cost on health because we are infected if I may say so with.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. So it’s, it’s because 97% of the population have detectable PFAS in the blood and the C8 science council, which was funded by the floor of Paloma industry, concluded that there’s a high certainty linked to six diseases.

Those six diseases are listed on the CA panel, the science panel there. And one of them is like a thyroid disease, et cetera, two cancers. And basically just because of those with high certainty, They tied it in to that 84 billion year old cost. They also included some environmental cost within that. But the majority of it is health cost really to the population.

And then they said, this might be an underestimate, but at least here is something and where the government, so we’re publishing this number.

Antoine Walter: Okay. I think we have now an even higher understanding of the problem, which, which leaves me back to my question, which was. Where do you intend to treat that problem first?

What is the best

Henrik Hagemann: place? Yep. So in my opinion, the highest impact area we can install, these solutions are as close to the source as possible. We can apply the polluter pays principle. We can help so many headaches and we can put a plug in the system. We cannot be like sister first who keeps rolling the Boulder up to the peak of the mountain.

And then it just falls down again because we are treating the symptom at the point of view. So the point of entry. I think we need to get, we need to work in partnership with the people and introduce a business case for why possibly a PFAS treatment is helpful. And if you can get PFAS treatment with regeneration, then it can enable the whole fluoropolymer polymer industry to actually operate.

Right now they’re under so much scrutiny and w we don’t want to spur on more scrutiny. There’s a lot already there. Like dark water movie is going around and flying left and right. I think we want to try and. Push that aside from won’t be prank, pragmatic, and trying to get close to these industrial sites.

No,

Antoine Walter: let me be the devil’s advocate here because. A lot of the debates with generally speaking, micro pollutants in Europe, you have the Swiss approach, which is to say let’s religion, wastewater treatment plants, because that is the closest you can get to the point of production. And then you’re protecting the full water cycle.

But many of the countries have said, yeah, okay, nice. We’re protecting the environment. But at the end of the day, we want to protect the humans. So let’s put it simply in the drinking water treatment plant. And that way we don’t have to cope with the history of it. So it means the water is. Going to be free of micro pollutants on a very short path between drinking water treatment, plant and Westwood written Benton, the rest of the water cycle.

What, who cares about fishes? I’m really being extreme here, but just to say that on the paper treating as close as possible from the production points, it makes a lot of sense. I’m just wondering what is the acceptance of the producers to be also the one to treat it unless there’s a strong regulation, which forces them to do.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah, I think there’s been a lot on the stick, right? It’s like, oh, regulation, regulation, regulation. And I think in the past we’ve had a tendency to take a very human centric approach to treatment. So as long as the humans did safe water jobs done, now we’re recognizing, oh, there was actually a price tag.

Attached to biodiversity loss. If we just lose the bees were so screwed and the bees also get impacted by these sort of things. So do the other species and the microphones. And so fast, we’ve been like in the beginning, we were viewed as these sort of like hippie environmentalist, because we cared about all sentient beings.

It was like, but we don’t care about it from the good of our heart. We care from about it because there was an economic price tag to it. I think that’s an important message just on that first point. And then the second one is. Yeah, let’s see if we can introduce some carrot. So could we have reuse of PFAS in a secondary face for some of these polluters?

Well, we call them polluters. Now they’re manufacturers, they’re enabling vaccines to be made. They’re enabling space suits to be made. Okay. That’s pretty cool. People want to do that, but they don’t recognize the backside of that. And so I think if you can have that as the second phase, it becomes a much more positive story and about the sustainability of that organization.

Long-term because some of these organizations might have to shut down if they are sitting with $20 billion of PFAS lawsuit, liabilities on their balance sheet shareholders, didn’t just protest. It’d be like divest from that. We don’t care if it’s in space, it’s too expensive. It’s too scary. And so I think those macro trends are in the.

Of doing this thing. And then, yeah, there was a lot of like people with stars on the back from these conversations in the past. But I think at this point we’re trying to be pragmatic with the things that are going on. So if that

Antoine Walter: gets you right, that means that the approach of treating as close as possible from the production wouldn’t necessarily need regulation because actually what’s at stake.

It’s such a risk, even for the company producing it, that they may be volunteering. To remove those

Henrik Hagemann: PFAS. Some companies do that and Trudeau’s to them like you have the Heineken or the L’Oreal, et cetera. Most of them will need some stick. Ultimately, humans need clarinet and stick. So great. There’s a lot of stick.

Let’s try and see if we can build some carrots.

Antoine Walter: Talking of sticks. Do you see the regulations actually coming and being enforced or is it still something which is in the discussions? Uh, still do my, my, my weird analogy with the micro pollutants when the European law came out at the framework directive, which was classifying that you would have to do something on micro pollutants, it was setting the bar somewhere in the future and already, including the opportunity that you can ask for delayed.

And you can ask several times for delays and the delays are each time, seven or nine years. So if you ask three different times for seven years, it makes 20 years where it, you still free of doing nothing. So just to say, there’s regulation and regulation. So w what is in the pipe? What did you see here?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. So I think there’s a chance to work with these different government regulatory ecosystem because they need to see that there’s a cost effective solution. They cannot just only introduce stick because it will close down the local economy and we will lose local jobs. They cannot afford that most economies rely on these things as a foundational element.

So what I think is missing is ecosystem awareness around the cost effectiveness of solutions and those dedicated. And then I think it is a bit like playing with fire. So it’s very powerful if managed, but hazardous, very hazardous to get it wrong. You saw the timing for the arsenic regulations that tilt many at sorbent startups.

And I think for PFAS, it is sadly, roughly proportional to the average income of the citizens within that country or state. Uh, so you have the Scandinavian country. That have actually introduced PFAS regulations. You have some of the dock region with Switzerland as an example, and Netherland, not less so, but that I’ve also introduced regulations.

And then you have these 12 states and the U S again, roughly proportional to average income like in the Northeast and the south west. And basically those two coast areas. What these sites represent, they provide this. Incubating periods, a breeding ground for new PFAS solutions. And then if you can demonstrate that price performance curve, you’re going to bring the regulators there much like Graham Pierce and the other step for membrane filtration back in the day, then show them this works at this scale.

There’s this business taste for the local. You operate it with people also get employed. So there was some sort of carrot as well. Then I think you can start to see regulations having. Before that many of the Western sites will not have enough teeth. You didn’t see the water framework regulations change in February, 2020 for PFAS.

And that was enacted into law this year, January. But again, those are mostly like in my mind, lip services until you see the price performance drove for the technologies, they cannot afford not.

Antoine Walter: So that means you have the technical side of it, which is you can remove it and all of that, but you have also the, the business side of it and the financial equation, which is, it has to be cost-competitive so that you can force people to treat them just because it’s affordable.

So the affordability comes into play with. Leads me to some business questions around what you’re doing. Let me take a preliminary question here, because you remind me a bit of Matthew silver, which I had the pleasure to have on that microphone, who he is a brilliant guy and who was sitting on that microphone.

That’s when he started being an entrepreneur in the water industry, he encountered. Many things he simply had not expected. So I’m just wondering you come with that tech background, you win the second prize and in that MIT contest and all of a sudden you’re sticking with the mission purpose, and you’re in the water industry.

Was it straightforward or did you have a lot of these design test and learn?

Henrik Hagemann: Uh, yeah, I think the first message when we came out and we were looking at doing a start-up out of it was, Hey guys, uh, developing a technology. It’s a battle. Getting to market is a war. And most of my team at that point, we were sitting around, right.

They were like, oh shit, I don’t like war, but I will be very honest. Like from me, I was like, oh, I kind of, I wore, I was like, I like this long cycling trips and like Sean and mark stairs where you don’t get to eat anything else, but like steam Mentos and like eat vegetables. So I think there was a recognition that.

Grow through many battles and Wyndham to get, to have a market adoption of your thing. There’s a massive step for us. And I’ll be very honest. There’s a big tail of agent projects that are Testament to just how few actually make the leap. So in our year there are 250 projects in 2014 and every year, since then, it’s been at least that number sometimes 300 now.

And there’s only about 50 ventures that are spun up. Competition, even though biotech is really hot and really cruel and apparently very fundable. I think one of the biggest ones is the different mindset required in academia. You can get away with developing something cool. If you can publish it. So we put out a publication PNS, if you can do that.

Just continue doing that. And then you’d get a pat on the bag and promotion eventually, but in commercial world, that’s not enough. You need to operate within constraint. And that’s where the engineering part of me is like turned on. It’s like, oh, amazing. So we can search this whole experimental space scientifically, but we’re stuck with just this quarter of it because of safety constraint or because of a cost constraint, we cannot do like 20 steps to making this material.

You got to keep it within. Or five and it’s like, oh, okay, stand up. Like, it’s an interesting challenge. And I think there was obstacles laid on top of IP negotiations with the university lab access. You cannot do this in a shed you’re handling stuff. That’s 50 times more toxic than arsenic. You could get sued so bad anywhere in the world for discharging these chemicals, even at the lowest levels.

And then you overlay that. But the challenge you just mentioned of bringing different disciplines together. So how are you going to get water process engineers talking to high throughput, screening scientists and material scientists under one roof, they speak different languages. They don’t even treat the same coffee.

Like everything is different, different cultures. Right? And I think that catches out. Many of us are startups and there were definitely challenges. We had to go.

Antoine Walter: Not that I want you to depress you here, but see if I recall, what’s what Paul O’Callaghan shared on that microphone. The time to adoption in the water treatment market is about 35 years between fundamental research and mass markets.

So even though you’re going to have early adopters and you you’ll be already somewhere along the way between 12 and 16 years from the moment you start steel, if you go by the average. It’s really a long bowl game, but you expect to be better than the average.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah, I think, I think what’s exciting about it is you’re not stuck with just one thing when you’re doing entrepreneurship.

So in our case, we can develop a solution for PFAS and use that same tech stack to develop solutions for let’s say, just for the sake of it. Anti-microbial resistance and bacterial resistance or for a biological separation for bio manufacturing for the bioreactor. And so when you can do those bets in parallel, it becomes more let’s say for me, uh, satisfying.

If you’re just stuck with one thing for 35 years, it’s like, oh, just bang your head against the wall already because it’s like, yeah, it would be very more monitoring. And then the other thing that’s cool. It’s not just about treatment technology, it’s also about what you can do with it. So if you can have access to these pollution datasets that basically sit on top of the treatment technology at multiple sites, you can inform third parties, be it the government or the local insurance policy about, oh, this is a PFAS hotspot.

Maybe we should handle. Oh, oh, this is a P four hotspot. There is another problem. Just emerging whose cost of a new factory that’s been set up. We should do something that becomes really powerful. And then it becomes about more than just the treatment technology.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned that biotech is a field, which is easy to get funded.

I’m putting the easy into many brackets. And you also mentioned that there were many arsenic startups, which just died by waiting for the market to take off. So I think that’s the two extremes because you’re dying when you run out of cash, I guess, or out of motivation, probably as well, but out of cash is something that’s even more deadly.

How does that look like for you in terms of funding, do you go in to investment funds and you just push the door and say, Hey, I’m into PFAS plus I’m in the 30 and the 30 and the 35 and the 35 Siwa. And they’d just spread money at you. I’m really asking a stupid question here, but how does that look like?

Henrik Hagemann: I think one has to be like we, in general, as a field, have to be really disciplined with how we raise funding because the water treatment space is not just any market. It is a different beast. And I think often whether it’s the us and next startups or something else, we get into tricky situations because we bring on the wrong investors.

So that was one lesson for us. We had investors interested early on that didn’t understand anything about water treatment. And we said, okay, hold on a second. We’re just going to figure out our market. And we spent four years figuring out the market and the product that we wanted to go for before raising equity funds.

And then when it come to racing, VC funds, obviously that’s a different podcast, but really we optimized for. The partner that we could bring in, we want it, what you see again and again, this bankers turned VCs and they basically asked for a lot of financials and that’s, that’s it, that’s the diligence. And that’s what they care about for us.

We wanted to optimize for that risk around regulations. We wanted to optimize for that risk around market adoption that we all know is overlooked in water treatment. Uh, and so we actually brought on their corporate VC from the U S who’s really. Burst in us regulations and government, they’ve spent 90 years investing in sustainability and material science and they’re well connected to these top level officials.

So just before they locked down, they set up a PFAS panel for us. They brought in EPA official. They brought in people from the original PFAS Parkersburg lawsuit. And they brought in tech writers all in one roof. We actually in Carson, I one of the last year of conferences with bipartisan representation.

And I think that is a massive value add compared to just a financial and. And then yeah, well, our financial investors, we basically went out and found operators, turned VCs. So instead of bankers turn VCs, these are people that have run biotech companies or deep tech companies in the past. And they bring the empathy, they know how to build companies.

They don’t know the water treatment space. We lean on the corporate VCs for that, but they know how to build ventures. If I just connect

Antoine Walter: that to my, my question just before on the timeline. I mean VC and venture capital in general is still quite a new route for the water industry. And often, because there’s a disconnect between the timeline, a VC expects between investments and exits and the timing of the water technology adoption on the water market.

Cause if you expect the next day, it’s within six or eight years in the water market is going to be quite challenging. So do you have pressure to the extent you have to be as fast as if you were, I don’t know, Huber or Twitter or what you have some, some flexibility. Due to the markets, your address.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah, I think that what we’re seeing a new breed of funders these days, that focus on deep tech and within deep tech, you might have dropped a strawberry companies.

You might have new quantum computing companies. You might have new semiconductor companies and the timelines there are changing. So they, they still didn’t expect venture returns, so the returns have to be large, but they have time horizons of possibly 10, 12 years. And they have very strict technical milestones.

So they understand the technology and they want to see that. So don’t get me wrong. It’s not easier, but the timelines are much better suited for this. And I think, again, it’s back to my first comment. You have to be very careful with actually stopping out what kind of investors you get on board. If you have a few local angels who are expecting a return in three years time, because they need to buy a car for their daughter, that’s really difficult.

Once they’re on your shareholder register, you can’t get rid of them. It’s worse than getting it. So I think that’s something to take advantage of macro trend for tech startups, aligning ourselves to those sort of large companies being built. And you saw the, the, the recent, uh, who bought them. Was it AutoCAD Autodesk?

There was a large acquisition recently for a software based, uh, water treatment.

Antoine Walter: And for record,

Henrik Hagemann: right? Yes. In a vice you see larger exits within our space and that’s. It’s still very nascent, but if that can become a macro trend, I think we can raise the profile of the space. Either

Antoine Walter: buys was the first of its kind.

So you can see it’s a two ways first way to see it is to, to look at it is to say, okay, it’s a new something, a new trend or a new path. And the other way to look at it is it’s a white elephant and there are not that much white elephant. So probably it’s a bits in between. I realize that. We have 50 minutes within the podcast.

And I didn’t even mention the name of your company, pure affinity. I’m asking you to have a look in my crystal ball. Where do you see pure affinity in five years? In 10 years. And then I have a bonus question.

Henrik Hagemann: Cool. Yeah. So I see definitive becoming a material science leader for these sort of environmental applications.

And define target. There is really to have PFAS as the first asset that we build in terms of ad steel in this sort of 10 year view, I would love for that to be like an institution. So vertically integrated across manufacturing, discovery, application engineering, and working with several partners to do it.

We’re not expecting to do it alone, but at scale that didn’t become a very large company. Trying to have those new breeds of company come out of Europe would to me be very exciting, trying to have them with a more diverse team makeup. So we have like 50% female team members. We have a high BME percentage of maybe 30, 40% trying to have those metrics and show that it leads to superior outcomes would be really exciting to.

Antoine Walter: You do realize that there was never an in history, a unicorn in the water industry. So would that be an ambition for you to, to be the first unique.

Henrik Hagemann: Uh, I think we don’t want to be the first necessarily, and we like to stay under the radar. So if we can be like at DSL to start with that would be good. And then, uh, once we build into a guest cell, it’s trying to become, have that granular media cell is a cash growth engine.

So you’re not just relying on new fundraising rounds and where you put that landmark for, like I said, 500 or 5 billion. That’s the valuation because you’re actually generating. For yourself, not necessarily massively profitable, but that’s where I want to get to. And where I think the water treatments spaced and operate.

I don’t think we can take these boom and bust cycles that the larger text-based content.

Antoine Walter: Well, here’s my bonus question, which is a curved bold. So you allow which transfer joker do you see at some point in time, an exit for you and starting something new or is your intention to, to stick with what you do and to really bring it as far as.

Henrik Hagemann: I think I see a massive chance to bring in more stuff to the pure affinity institution. And many of those new things would basically be like small incubated startups, almost the, where we are taking on new projects. For me personally, I would love to just stick with one. I liked these sort of long journeys, whether it’s a cycling trip or something else.

And I would like to make an example, read this one. We’re not trying to do. To build fond exit, or we are trying to build like really superior financial outcome to make it a case for this application. You can see what what’s possible. So like five years before us, there was an AGM startup that Tim about called Gingko Bioworks.

They’re right now going public with a $15 billion evaluation. And they’ve just been out a startup to do a PFAS biological destruction, which is really exciting to us. And a great example of what can be achieved. I have a

Antoine Walter: last question for you in that deep dive, we had that red threats of the competition that was at the very beginning of pure affinity.

And if I get that right, you won the second price and we’ve seen how that second price brought you to a place where not that much water start-up reached the point where you are clearly. I mean, Not to unicorn because it doesn’t exist yet. But I think your goal of being a gazelle is always something which is on the way clearly who won that competition because there must be crazy, crazy.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Yeah. So the, the winner was Heidelberg from Germany and they had really cool technology for making circular proteins to make them heat stable. And they really tried. They tried to transform a technology. You’ve probably heard a lot about lately it’s PCR. They never spun out as a venture. It wasn’t as novel at the time, so they didn’t publish a high.

Peer reviewed paper, but it probably could have been a unicorn if it was executed as a startup, just about how many PCR tests are taking place. And if those could be more done, more easily with their technology, that would be great. Right. So it’s, it’s back to that question of what are the barriers, why didn’t they spin up something, maybe they were stuck with not access to labs or with IP negotiations and something else?

I think there’s a lot of untapped potential. It’s basically what I mean, there are one example. I think that is one

Antoine Walter: topic, which is on my book, at least for a while about this, how you can better the way and ease the way for entrepreneurs to translate great academic ideas into, into ventures. But clearly if I open that box right now, I have to keep you on that mic for another hour.

So. At some point in the future when you reach that unicornish level or as a level of whatever milestone, I think we have to have that discussion because that is really something which is probably the missing link today in our industry. Henrik has been a big pleasure to have the deep dive with you. I propose you to switch to the last section, which is the rapid for questions,

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Rapid fire questions:

Antoine Walter: So in that section, I tried to keep the questions short and you’ve seen that it’s not my first strength. Uh, and you can try to keep the answers short and don’t worry. I’m the one which is side tracking all the time. My first question is what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on?

Henrik Hagemann: So for me, it’s definitely a trying to see the PFAS regeneration, because I could just imagine that circular world with non Virgin PFAS saving lives, it’s very futuristic right now. But if you could combine that with these sort of engineered living materials, you would have. Materials that sense when PFAS is released, treated and capture it and then provide the means for you to regenerate it.

That to me would be really exciting and useful, not just exciting but useful. Is it science

Antoine Walter: fiction or will that happen

Henrik Hagemann: anytime? It’s science fiction right now, but people are working on it. And the European commission is funding engineered living materials, and people like Tom Ellis is doing this for biotech.

So it’s coming still slightly science fiction, but I think it has done a become science fact. Eventually. What’s your favorite part of your current? Oh, it’s working with, uh, with the team. I mean, just this week, I’ve been humbled to be lectured on new chemical pathway by a 19 year old. And then after that, I get to learn from a long-term water exec about the most efficient treatment train for medium hotness brown water remediation.

And it was about the variations in operating conditions for these two steps. And I was like, that’s fantastic. I just get humbled all the time. How many people

Antoine Walter: are you in

Henrik Hagemann: your, in your team today? Just today we had a new status, so we have 16 full-time people

Antoine Walter: now. Oh, of which two were part of your original team?

Henrik Hagemann: The competition. Yeah. And one of those two is part time. So really it’s a long journey. Yup.

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out in the water industry? And you’re not allowed to answer.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. So I think I’ll just take a step back here. It’s I think to me, it’s translating tools into our space, so let’s be honest.

We’re not first adopters. We’re learning from others because we cannot afford the high development cost. So for me, those are like circular economy, that biotech tools. Decentralized approaches and cloud-based digitization. And what I mean by that is how can we leapfrog other sectors? We want to avoid the whole mess with on-prem digitalization and move straight to cloud for digitalization.

And I think those are some of the core things and then combine that all together. And the coolest trend you’re going to see is pollution datasets for the sector, predictive capability with that and inform policy. That would be, yeah.

Antoine Walter: And they’re getting, if I side for Q we open one hour, because that is also one of my topics, which, which is my bucket is, but which is close to my heart.

What is the thing you care about the most when you’re working on a new project and what is the one you care?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. So for me, the most is how to do this efficiently. So without waste of resource and by applying a failure or originates from the failure to foresee failure mindset, you can see the poster behind, but basically it says the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in.

And I think that applies to new projects, the less you bleed in customer adoption. The thing that you’re least about is basically like exactly which technical approach we use. I’m a more promiscuous founder I want to solve for the problem. Not necessarily for the technology, as long as it’s sustainable, I’m happy to, to learn new ways of doing things.

Antoine Walter: Do you have sources to recommend, to keep up with the water and waste, but the market trends.

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. Yeah. So I think your podcast is obviously one of them are definitely the graphics. They’re amazing. And then another one is like cool, scientific hacker competitions. So you check out just the most recent, let’s say agent projects, whatever, lots of wacky ideas.

And those wacky ideas might be pushing frontier knowledge in five, 10 years from now. And then I love this sort of nature inspired approach has read academic journals and biomimetic design. You can even learn how to design a better treatment plant with the way you connect the pipes, like a leaf and that sort of wacky stuff, and really be very actionable.

Antoine Walter: And last question, would you have someone to recommend me to have them that same microphone?

Henrik Hagemann: Yeah. So I think the Sylmar group is one Peter Sillman, Michael Wardee and lonelier as well alone. Yes. Nicole, who is their CEO might be one as well. I’ll add a foot one because I’m a founder. I don’t follow rules that will, uh, I would say, imagine hates tools.

Tele Ellie trumped. If you haven’t talked to her yet, she is excellent as well.

Antoine Walter: We have something in the pipe. I cannot say it’s done, but we have something in the pipe. They’re amazing. What Henrik has been a pleasure. To spend that little bit of an hour, sorry for that with you. Um, I’d love to have. You again on that microphone to discuss your next steps and all the other topics, which I’ve put in the fridge for today, but I would have had so much more questions for you.

So talk to you

Henrik Hagemann: soon. Yeah. Thanks so much for having me. Yeah. Thanks for listening to don’t waste water. This podcast was brought to you by GF piping systems. Loved this. Head over to apple podcast to subscribe, rate and leave a review. See you next time.

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The post How to treat PFAS out of Water and protect our Health, Economy, and Biodiversity appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

The OPERANDUM Project aims at delivering the tools and methods for the validation of Nature-Based Solutions as a way to enhance resilience in European rural and natural territories by reducing hydro-meteorological risks.

This episode is part of my series on Nature-Based Solutions (check it out )

What we covered:

What Open Air Laboratories are – and how they revisit the concept of Living Labs 

How nature-based solutions are put to work in specific examples, and how they are monitored, evaluated and replicated

How OPERANDUM may enable and facilitate the market uptake of Blue-Green approaches by working on their business plan and replication packages

How Computational Fluid Dynamics and numeric models are a strong support to the OPERANDUM research project

How nature-based solutions are much more than the “Hippie Science” image they may convey

How important communication, pedagogy, and vulgarisation are for NBS to be widely accepted

How development stages of blue-green approaches differ from one country to another

How nature-based solutions induce a shift of paradigm, from CAPEX intensive grey approaches to OPEX intensive blue-green alternatives

The outlook on nature-based solutions, bringing all the stakeholders together, sharing an open platform, the importance of regulations… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Do Nature-Based Solutions Work?

Resources:

Check the OPERANDUM Website

Send your warmest regards to Silvana on LinkedIn

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Do Nature-Based Solutions Work?

Related Video: Do Nature-Based Solutions Work?

Quotes: Do Nature-Based Solutions Work?

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Silvana. Welcome to the show.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Hello. Thank you.

Antoine Walter: I’m very happy because we have a fascinating topic on the plate for today, but just before that fascinating topic, before our chit chat, before hitting the record button, you mentioned. More or similarly trendy and, and fascinating topic, which is a Nobel prize.

And I think you have some elements here and some Italian prides too, to share above the.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Yeah. These are very important days because finally the Nobel prize for physics went to three people that have done a important contribution to the earth of climate and complex systems. Especially the one on complex systems went to an Italian physicist.

So I’m particularly proud of. To see how physics can contribute to society. And the fact that climate is addressed to also within this discipline explicitly is an important step forward

Antoine Walter: to give everyone a bit of background here. Your also an Italian physicist, you are a professor at the university of bologna.

Yeah. That’s a bit what you’re doing at the university

Silvana Di Sabatino: of bologna. Yeah. Yes. Actually I’m, I’m a full professor in that was like physics to the university of bologna, to department of physics and astronomy and one of the few female actually in this field and in this role in Italy fortunately, or unfortunately.

Let’s say professors at university in Italy are very few in this topic. And this is, because the importance of the contribution of physics to the society as it been. Not the taco, the with with the, with the, probably with the, the necessity or the, with the care that this distributing married.

Antoine Walter: And how did you get interested into?

Silvana Di Sabatino: Well, this is an interesting question. I was just studying physics and so I started in 1987 and it was my third year. And everyone around me were talking about other aspects of physics, let’s say physics so matter or I energy physics. And I didn’t, those disciplines didn’t satisfy me.

And I thought that I wanted to study physics because I wanted to study nature. Physics comes from Greek. That means nature. And also I wanted to study the way we could the change the way of thinking. And I wanted to do in a formal way and looking around, I thought that I wanted to contribute to society.

And that’s what that was here is the place where we live and that’s that’s will be where I will direct to my studies.

Antoine Walter: There’s something which which just pushed my curiosity. Reading the operandum what site. And we will talk about operandum in a second, but in your portrait there on, on the website, there was, this mentioned that you tried to bridge fundamental science with applied science.

And I thought that’s really interesting. So, so what are you doing?

Silvana Di Sabatino: Well, we will talk in a bit is a lot of European product that have attracted more than 12 million uterus including 26 partners in Europe and in China and Australia, where we use demonstration sites that we will call open that laboratory.

So we’ll come back to these in a moment and to. The idea is that to really construct the efficiency or the proof of the efficacy of natural based solutions to mitigate idle methodological risks, what it means that differently from the usage of natural based solutions in Albany. Where often there is no, there isn’t this requirement of a really.

Having an engineering type of role in the sense that we use dumps to, have a reservoir. So, or to block a order to control the river flow. Now we would like to really promote a change of paradigm on how we do engineering, using nature. So for doing that. You really need to verify that your solution is effective because if I’m somebody sitting at the bottom of a land slide.

Yeah. And and Teresa, moving land in front of me, I really need to be sure that my solution works. So it’s extremely challenging than that. What we, when we use not to be solutions in a rural context so on no. No. So let’s say to protect the cost time to protect from river flooding, just to mention some, we have to engineer eyes.

I don’t know if it’s good work. And so to transform. What nature teaches us into an engineering approach, but cautious of the interaction with the citizens and the stakeholders. Florida promoting the substance through knowledge. So that’s where the evidence that the comes from, let’s say hard science, that is what is this type of mechanism that we use is monitoring is so uploading data and to also be able to put in a new medical model.

Okay. So to use the scientific method for this specific application. So in this way, we are not talking only of co-benefits, which is very important, but the central in. In a four in our product and also in our sister projects that tackle the same problem. We are three projects working together to solve this easy, to push science in order to proof in order to prove or give some credibility over the methods that we propose.

Sorry for the long answer. But.

Antoine Walter: There’s a lot of deconstructing what you just explained, but let me just start by verifying if I get it right. So that means that if you look at nature based solutions quite often you hear about the welcomes side effects, what it would bring on top of solving the problem itself.

And that is by the way, your topic we’ve addressed on that microphone. A couple of times, one of them being with Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer when we were speaking about. Rereading the rivers, but if I get two rights, that is the part where everybody agrees on there will come side effects, but the core of it is.

Does it one-to-one replace hard engineering and that is what you’re trying to prove. Do I understand that’s right.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Yes or no? Partially, when we talk about natural based solution, we talk about green, blue or hybrid. Okay. So green, blue, whatever is related to to vegetation or to water as a system together or hybrid one is integrated.

Okay. Probably for the next years, integration with the gray will be sold to go towards hybrid. It could be the way forward but it is, uh, it is important, that way. We really replaced the typical engineer. You are really sure of the month and also of that solution over time, because if a specific solution that is based on nature, I will make some examples.

If you wish of the solutions we are testing and demonstrating in operandum they have to The connotation of good health in a, so monotonous is really important and the Montanans is more demanding than the typical engineering. So it breeds or although they have to be maintained as well, but nature specifically.

So it should be a close control of it. I don’t know if I answer your questions,

Antoine Walter: but fully answer my question. I think if we take some examples that can illustrate that if I get right. What you said were mentioning this landslide a bit before. And if I recall, right, correct me, if I’m wrong, you have one of your open air laboratory, which is.

Which is dealing with this landslide. Maybe you have more than one, but maybe I mentioned though that the word open-air laboratory before going to the example, can we maybe define what that okay.

Silvana Di Sabatino: I’m particularly proud of your question on open OPNET laboratory because that’s been a brand for open on them.

Didn’t exist. The old only existed in. Very sparse in the literature. So we are particularly proud of that. We wanted to find. The concept that built on the existing concept of living labs, but tailored for the objective that our natural B solution have to have against hydrometallurgical risks. In a way that the visitation of the living lab that you, we all know in context,

Antoine Walter: but w with Marc Barra, from REGREEN, about the Urban Living Labs.

Exactly.

Silvana Di Sabatino: So this is in a way an evolution or a new let’s say site or of the living lab, but really customized for hydro-meteorological risks. So if we. And then recall, what are the ingredients of a living lab is a place. It can be a visual place or a physical space where there is a connection between the scientists working together also with people.

So, where the solution, maybe the numerical simulation I wanted to make is co-designed together with. The people that have an interest for that solution. So let’s say that I wanted to change the setting. So the environment I want to build the park or build a new second part. It is very important that I consult and also hear how.

People wanted to have the space where they live. So this is at the heart somehow or the living lab. So in a way technical solutions, but those that have the technical solution work together with the people. Okay. So let’s say it, take this for a moment as a common feature. So then we translate in a rural context and there.

Let’s say, as I mentioned earlier, we need to make a step forward. I wanted that to solution. Make people also say. Okay. And if I promote that solution, I’m a hundred percent in boar percent sure that they may work overtime. Okay. So how will we build this? Is that our opener laboratory will have the natural based solution.

The specific solution that these problem. It’s a specific piece of problems specific. So there is no one, a general solution, but it’s specific. And then it owned it. That is the consultation for, with the stakeholders. So the London. Order those, um, business players that have an interest in there and try to understand how to modify the environment, still protecting from, you know, from a flooding that can be very damaging or from a storm surge.

Or the landslides, as I mentioned. So the connotation you need to have is those, the scientific elements that make the scientific evidence for a solution like that. So you need to have the engineering practice, but you still have to have continuous monitoring. The monitoring has to be. Adequate for the solution.

So you may use a satellite, but you may use the drones, but you can use local sensors. You can use laser scans or other, let’s say the best technology you can have according to the budget. Do you have, okay. And then you have use this data for testing, validating your model. And so project also the effectiveness.

Or protect how your MBS would perform also 50 years considering that in our project, we have some also connotation of scientists working at climate protection, customized for the specific areas where we have our opener laboratories

Antoine Walter: talking of this specific areas. If I’m right, you righteous 10 of them.

Yes. Can we pick one of them and try to. To describe what you intended to prove at that place and how you do that.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Okay. I’d like to pick Italy, not because I’m Italian and because ultimately the 10 it’s a one.

how our OPNET laboratories have been identified. Apriori let’s say to tacos specific other. Okay. One could be heavy rain. It could be droughts. It could be. As I said, the storm surge. So some extremes that will go into river flooding song. So the case of Italy that is is, uh, uh, diffuse say open a laboratory because he’s a constituted by three sites.

Actually we look focus on river flooding. Storm search salting through zone. Okay. And so our solutions work it together because the it’s anyway, they’re connected the system. So starting from the Panaro River that is one of the affluents of the Po River. We will have a flooding and in there. Testing, we  are testing the, uh, introduction of seagrass with the deep root we did not the existing embankment.

Okay. So this is a solution that is a hybrid. So the typical, as I said, way of making the embankment safe is. Putting concrete or other typical grade solutions. So we are testing on part of, of, of the lever, this type of solution, but our stellar let’s say MBS, is it the construction of ascend? Using the scent that has been put on the cost to buy previous storms.

And these, we did not for this typology of dune. There are few example in the world. One exist in Tuscany, but uh, As been heavily tested. So it’s an advancement in technology and we will go after to the market expectation at, on these things. We have a patent already filed European patent, where we constructed these, you know, also with the sensors and the vegetation.

What is the role of the dune is. In a way dissipate the energy that comes from waves, Supreme stone and from from waves and in, in somehow not only protect. So, the introduct, the intrusion of water, not land, but also somehow diminishing the stress on the coast. So on will have an effect also on the coast, right at that site.

Because, uh, the, this, this specific solution is also embedded on a system or monitoring and modeling. So at the same time we have forecast or let’s say better projections of the climate of the currents in that area. Let’s say ocean, the currents or sea currents this way, because he said that the Arctic sea and.

It’s the same time we are working through numerical simulation to understand if also introducing Kaposi Donya in a type of vegetation at the backtick level could also work in a synergy with the doom. So in a way we sometimes there is a non, not always one solution, but many solutions. So.

I only talked about the technology. This is probably under understandable. But also in our context of all, we have a series of stakeholders and also contact with, the citizen. That the live in the area at the various level. And try to also understand what is the potential for replication, because one of the challenge of project of old projects, European project is that you have a lung case.

Okay. As well case our Dooney is a hundred meters, 200 meters, but this is not the solution. If we have a coastline like Italy where you’ll have a consolidation or you’ll potentially have some search as in other countries. So the idea is to have a mechanism for, and enough data to replicate and upscale our solution in other countries with a similar problem.

Antoine Walter: I dunno again, a lot to unpack in what you just said. Let me go back to the first example. You, you. You share it around this grass, which is now holding the banks instead of the concrete or the GRI approach we would have. And I’m a second generation hydraulic engineer. So, I was trained to to build that concrete and the rocks.

And that’s the way you, you hold the river and don’t get me wrong. I’m firmly convinced that that you can do differently. I’m just wondering. If I’m the name bore one of these stakeholders that you mentioned earlier, I’m the neighbor of the river. That’s very specific points and someone comes and say, I’m going to make an experiment with grass instead of concrete.

How do they react?

Silvana Di Sabatino: Yeah. This is, uh, then how past experience also Libby lab. And to also the co-creation and the social acceptance uh, or techniques for acquiring consensus or really do participatory science is important. The piece, first of all, to engage with the dos interested parties since the beginning, and really identify.

The best solution together. This doesn’t mean that the typical engineer, sorry, but let’s just to be precise. The typical engineer that works with us, and we have a typical engineering we have, for instance, a. You know, consulting that these eh, large enterprise. So that is one of the largest engineering company in Italy.

And they are part of the problem of a plateau, the Florida, not to the floor. Sorry. Absolutely radiant lobsters. No. So the idea is If we have tested the solution in the similar way that it trained a typical trained engineer will do it’s solution. How can we transfer what we have new into? The typical approach of identifying the problem testing the drawing uh, let’s say the, the, the gaps make the simulation to make also all the calculations that are not only of balances of forces, but also cost analysis and so on.

So to take that I’m not assuming engineer, but there is, let’s say it. Approach for going to the implementational. So we wanted to customize what we have learned and what we have a verified in that procedure, so that we can facilitate also the transition of on a, on an engineer set, where we were trained in uh, on great solution on the solution.

Good over time. Also pick up new ideas to embed in there. A great solution. Let’s say let’s add one component. So that’s why I said probably hybrid could be for the the, uh, let’s say on short term, the best approach.

Antoine Walter: I think there’s also something very important in what you just said, which is that.

Hippy science like you hear nature based solutions, you think, okay. Nature is going to do the job. It’s not that straightforward. It’s still ecological engineering. There’s a lot of research of science behind them. This modeling that you mentioned is that something you need to explain to people that it’s not just all nature, we’ll deal for it, but that there is science, which is supporting.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Yeah, I cannot. The one, one element that time is because of the random is any, let’s say consultant or this type is an, is a multi-disciplinary. So we have engineers, we have physicist, but we have also sociologist and many others architects. So. It is very important to that scientific technological part.

We have a business players as well. So the scientific and the tech technology part look together with the social scientists that work on the co-creation. So on. It’s a, it’s sorry, I repeat. In open-ended we have a good portion of the consultant that is scientific based and on the hardest science let’s see, and technological payers.

So then the way all the buildings. That evidence scientific evidence is also done in the laboratory. So we have two types of traditionally traditional laboratories. So those that you use, if you were an astrology engineer. So let’s say that before testing that the grass of, I talked to. In the field, we tested in a water channel.

Okay. And we do computational fluid dynamics to really optimize how deep should the be that route, how sparse it is. It has to be. And also other, let’s say check conferences on, but it’s not finished. It’s not only in control of. Controlled experiment as it is done in a fluid mechanics or surrounding topics.

But also we have a customized the laboratory it’s the same. I controlled that is opener. So one of our partners that is actually a firm in Spain, they have a network of channels where they can test also different plants, because I talked also of, uh, salt intrusion or. Other type of solutions and they can check through in their in their open laboratory.

Although it’s the equivalent of, let’s say a controlled experiment, but it’s open air. So the data that comes from the monitoring that to core in the laboratory will be integrated to build also that evidence scientific evidence I was talking about.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned that the very beginning that’s the maintenance part is something which is crucial because there is a strong difference in approach between a nature based solution that may need a bit more maintenance than a gray solution.

How do you measure and evaluate that? Because if you have to look for a 50 year lifetime of. Solution. Does that mean you have to make a 50 year experiments? Or can you speed a bit up the time where you’re looking at that maintenance part?

Silvana Di Sabatino: Well, this is not an easy question. I, and Sweden, we don’t have, we don’t have the answer.

We are working on that. So what, but what I can say is. Of course it depends on the specific solution or you’re looking at. Okay. So if you’re looking at a dune is a different that if you are looking at, uh, grass order, order three samples on a slope. Okay. So again, this is different, according to the type of solution and.

The the is a true monitoring. So let’s say that you could check. If you’re talking about the trees of you can check the status of the foliage. You can see the, uh, also of the roots. If you have a dune. Check, of course, as I said, that specific loan as also embedded the sensors. So that also control the shape.

So one can control that the shape is maintain well, uh, within a certain range, let’s say over the tolerability that has been designed in the engineering phase of of the solution and. So that’s that’s the only thing I can say is that the mountains can be only checked through a continuous monitoring.

Okay. So this has to be part of the solution probably differently from the resolution. So let’s say that to me, me anticipating. A question. It may seem more honorable, more difficult and say, okay, oh, this solution will cost me lots of money, but because one of the ambition is also to generate business and the market.

Okay. So it, around those, there are many elements that can put on the market. One is to. Uh, built, order have acquiring disappearance on using the data in our grid solutions. And this is one to use our patterns, but also to work and to this. Put in a technical terms, the, and answer required because for now we don’t have that experience and we know that going, we need to go out of academia to be really convincing.

So how can a professor that the atmospheric physics having a solution? No, we are working together with a team and we are trying to really hear from. The various components, what is uh, sensible, what these, optimal also to to, to do. And yeah. Uh, so it’s I think, that one-to-ones aspect, it’s something that can be exploited at the market level.

Antoine Walter: I think that is the key. That is really the key. I’m not sure. It sounds more expensive to meet sounds more like a differently expensive when you’re building a hard engineering solution, you have a high investment cost and then much less maintenance cost. So it’s a high cap ex lower OPEX when you’re building a nature-based solution.

My understanding because that’s the DD CapEx is going to be quite lower. And then you have an OPEX. You’re basically turning an environmental service into a business service. So. Kind of a lot of

Silvana Di Sabatino: sense. Yeah. And also you mentioned, thank you really for helping me in this identifying this is so much to say is, uh, yeah, we shouldn’t forget then what MBS were sought for.

So the benefits the co-benefits associated. So once we are really sure, or on the terms. We explained, we talked about earlier that, that solution. It’s effective. Then there are other benefits that we could contribute to, to in, um, to have a better ecosystem to the mountains or to the enrichment of the ecosystems.

And also it’s also an opportunity for. We’ll be gaining that contact with the nature that it’s the basis of the spread of these type of solutions. As I said, we doubted that the specific connotation of being engineering, let’s say that acted that. It’s a three-man challenge. So it’s very difficult product.

And but let’s say rewarding because it goes in the direction. I was mentioned mentioning that to do something useful for society at, in at least the, for my contribution from at least from the scientific point of view. And so to be taught or also in the analysis and.

Antoine Walter: You were hinting at the business consequences of what you were doing with the example of the sends you and where you are attending, what you’re doing.

And that to me then result in something which shall become commercial. Is that part of operandum like it’s forcing that you will spin off into some.

Silvana Di Sabatino: It’s um, it’s in, uh, innovation action. Yeah. So, it has, uh, is, uh, objectives also to contribute to European leaderships around those topics and also marketing instrument.

Of course, these are loose terms. If you don’t specific word means market and investment. So let’s be modest or not uh, too large in our vision. And we start to saying that in our consults from there are few firms I mentioned Rena consulting but, uh, yeah, in Spain, but. Also, we have a co services in Slovak that work on the development of our digital platform that I didn’t mention the GRTP.

That is also one of our, let’s say stellar up, of the project where we will integrate the science and technology and social aspects of other results. And then. Also, we have a KKK T ITC in Greece and. What do they ever, we have a piano also in Holland that, do, um, communication and communication, but let’s talk of those business from that are engineering devoted to somehow or, uh, aura informatics as a cardio.

First of all, the Rena consulting have improved internally. They. Knowledge about putting solutions grid solutions on the field with the natural based solutions, they have already increased their portfolio, not to rely as increased already over 20% their are business because they now are those experts in the country.

But also outside of that specific solution. In Greece, it has a Doyle. Bree is uh, one of the example of oil at the early stage. There were no natural based solutions talking English and to that company, as I’ve been already in contact with the ministry with ministry, and now is a. Having contact with other firms in the country to replicate the solution they have for their river flooding and also to, help with the different aspects of all the modeling, but also the, um, categorization of stakeholders and so on.

So it’s it’s a starting small, but if you have these replicated. That example replicated. It’s a good sample of business, because if you’re a firm, you can collaborate with the other companies, each part that the tacos, the chain of the MBS verification and implementation. So it becomes a business model.

Antoine Walter: Beyond the business model. You mentioned you, I KP, which is your web platform where we can see the various initiatives and the various projects. You mentioned also that you have these social scientists working with you to have this kind of connection, I guess. They’re the general population. How important is communication for you and in the success of Oprah random?

Silvana Di Sabatino: It’s a Q and a as a physicist. When I started doing this. Let’s say type oh, uh, let’s say to do also the, the work I do, the science I do in this way, it hasn’t been a shock. I started back in 2016 with my first project in where that had the co-creation also so consultation with the citizens, teaching them how to use.

Sensor for monitoring quality and making sense also have the data they were using console. So since then, so I can say around the now five, six years already, I have really communication and is, uh, uh, the first thing. I do before starting a project order, a new, let’s say a scientific effort.

I have, uh, the way the commission through eyes on as Bush, also the scientist in. B out of the office enter really be integrated with uh, citizens and to stakeholders is really the key. And as, as a change to my way of thinking, but going back to your question communication, is a, um, is a fundamental in whatever we do.

So as a coordinator of , uh, when I talk to individual partners, I always. Ask, what is it impact of what you do and to generate the impact of what you do? It means who have you been in contact with besides your typical scientific conference. Have you spoken to the mayor of that city? Have you talked with that ministry?

Have you talked. Also with the citizens, even in a small terms, but ask to any of the scientists and partners, what do you do? So if you only do the work for yourself and you don’t share and to communicate, it can be on your bookstore. And it doesn’t really change the world. It doesn’t impact anything.

So let’s say communication for me as it being translated in how you’re generating impact, how, what is also the indicator you use to see that what you have generated to have changed the something, even a small thing, even a it’s more like. Aspect. If somebody writes to me an email and saying having heard that seminar have I have learned, and now I use this concept in my research, or rather I S uh, the partners, I mentioned the engineers for Rena consulting say I was a trained as a typical engineer, and now.

I have a new knowledge in front of me to use it and to put it in the context of what I know or if I’m a citizen and they know that I can also make use of the invert on my territory in a different way. This is a measure. It’s an indicator of how we measure. If that communication has been impacted.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned an example of where probably your communication has worked quite well, because you said that there were no nature-based solutions in Greece and that now they’re looking at trying to implement them.

So if I was to look at the other end of the spectrum Greece being a new to the game, what would. A typical country, which is already very advanced in nature. Okay.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Thank you for the question again, another element of put on them as being, learning from experience, it is true that being in Europe, we are cautious that the cultural sector.

The economic setting is a rather diverse, even our perception of nature and how we treat our territories. And as it is true that Nordic countries, Scandinavian countries, or, you know, even the country where you are determine your Belgium. A different perception of nature. If we stayed with the Scandinavian, it is true.

They have a nature around them. We have people and concrete around us. So in Sultana Europe, they say that contact with the nature is really. Not so diffuse because what our common experience is cement it’s buildings. If we look at the Pavale Batalla examples in Italy, but in other countries that really crowded, you know, even in, in, in in, uh, in Greece, but in Greece, there are other aspects.

But anyway, so in our uh, product, we have examples of. Countries that are in Finland, like Finland and Germany. So we have an all in, uh, in Finland looking at around the pool of AC leak. And today, then that problem is how, um, maintain a purity of water. So different. The problem let’s say, or what I mentioned purely to a water.

In case of extreme rain. Okay. So then we learned that if you want to maintain already a system of not base that to collect water in a efficient way that water is used for irrigation and set that off, or that the culture or other aspects you then. Shifted the problem to the effective management.

So what we learn from oil field land and. Say Germany, that is on a part of every river in there. They have the problem of excessive rain. So how you could maintain that territory in such a way that, you know, Bravo excellent because of every rain. So the key in both all is the management. So let’s say those.

Examples where you have already a solution, let’s say embedded in that the system is functional to learn. What do you learn? You don’t only learn the management part, but also you learn that. Collaboration and the communication with the stakeholder. So what have they done for making that solution still working?

What people, how how integrate citizens in the mountainous also of uh, of their natural based solutions. So this is what we learned from.

Antoine Walter: To round off this this deep dive. Let me close with a last question on operandum, which is your timeline. What’s. What do you expect to deliver by, by when?

And and what if we tell you when maybe five or 10 years that you’ve succeeded in what you did?

Silvana Di Sabatino: We are, uh, more than, let’s say a bit more than one year to the antenna completion. Over the cloud. What I wanted to achieve in this one year is integrate the knowledge we are producing. So we have already started the integration.

And as I mentioned, the jerky, KP is our tool to do that. So at the end of the project, we will work in the mountainous or. Continuing, this, this, platform will not end with at the end of the project, we have already funds um, we are working at the university of California and to the company that is paying service for having attracting, uh, new funds for the promotional or this platform.

That is a unique platform because it doesn’t replicate to the existing ones because has been. With the envious dermatological risks at the beginning, with that rationale, we have talks about. So the jerky P now works also at the cost of benefits. It will meet marketplace where you can find. Partners, you can find also investors because investors, policymakers, we didn’t talk about the policymakers, that the idea is also to attract the attention of those local authorities that the could change some of the regulation in order to.

Facilitate the introduction of a natural solution, the typical solutions of advancements with the territory and one day in a to go towards resilience. So the jerky P will be also a place where for every solution, we look also. These benefits, have we talked about the co-benefits but also negative benefits in order to really facilitate the spread of a transparent knowledge and also to acquire two knowledge or pure inflammation, a better understanding of the type of solutions that they want to implement.

Antoine Walter: I said it was the last question. So I’ll cheat and I make another last question because you just remind me of that aspect of the regulation. And is that another way to look at how you could say you succeeded with the project? If in five or 10 years, there’s a European regulation that brings NBS like really in the stone or a local regulation, and you also have labs in China or Australia, if I’m right.

So. Is regulation parts of

Silvana Di Sabatino: your roadmap? Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely because of that process of it’s neology is my, so maybe it doesn’t exist, but working with the nature for engineering purposes, let’s say you need. To tackle that you need to understand the work that. I cannot introduce solutions everywhere.

So I really needed to have an understanding of what are the concrete problems. So despite it’s a project, but we wanted to have the challenge of really implementing the solution. So the regulation learning the regulation is a part of that. Of the process that we have anyway, undertaken for really implementing the solution.

I talked about. There are few solutions, but we did all the steps just to verify at the same time we inform. And also we engaged. Those three bodies in our process so that they through the sentence that has been generated by also including citizens and others also facilitated the process of pushing introduction of MBS in the regulation.

So of course, a typical, not typical, maybe the key KPI or the B to C. How many rules or regulation processes, have you teamed anti many countries? How many countries have you really make that made that change?

Antoine Walter: Very clear. I think that makes for a good closing to that, that deep dive. Of course I’ll put all the links to, to the operandum website and the G I K P platform in the show notes.

But if you’re a. Ready to take on. Let’s close with the rapid fire questions

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Rapid fire questions:

In that last section, I’m asking you short questions and you shall aim for short answers, but don’t worry. I’m not cutting the microphone in case you need a bit more time to explain. My first question would be what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on?

Silvana Di Sabatino: Well, this one of course, open on what has it been a democracy exciting, probably because of the many for dentistry interdisciplinarity that not always see my past project I had at this wider spectrum of experts to work with.

Antoine Walter: What’s your favorite part of your current job

Silvana Di Sabatino: doing this? No, actually it’s to see, um, to see that, good, the workers have been done to see a publication being used to see, uh, a solution being adopted and to work with.

Satisfaction. And to see people really happy to do their simulation because they are contributing for this small part to that, to change and that improvement that we need in our society. So working maybe with my researchers and also to see the good work done with honesty, intellectual honesty, transparency, this is the most important thing.

Antoine Walter: What is the trends to watch out for in the water?

Silvana Di Sabatino: Well, it’s, uh, ha this is a difficult question. I think is, the trend is that we need an integrated knowledge, so to build around that topic, more experts, this is not the job of only one. So to really. Managers that are able to identify those aspects that contribute to that uh, to that area because when one talks about water sinks of a dollar, just, but I think, that, uh, the problem is more complex.

Antoine Walter: What is the one thing we are doing in water management today that will be looked at totally stupid intended.

Silvana Di Sabatino: This is a difficult let me think a little bit. So you said that what would you do in your management? You said

Antoine Walter: what we’re doing today with water, whatever aspect of water today that will be fully gone. And that will be constant. Crazy that we even did it

Silvana Di Sabatino: maybe to do a manual monitoring. So in the future everything will be optimized with, uh, sensors and everything will be also made the model.

Let’s say digital. One of the problem in many countries is that we don’t have access to data. And let’s say older information has not been a digitalized. And this is true in many places in Italy, in the Southern Europe, in Greece and so on. And this will be stupid to say, why don’t you have your data on your computer?

Antoine Walter: That’s a very, very interesting point. And we were discussing that in depth with David Lloyd Owen, the, on that microphone, because he was showing how for many countries, you simply don’t have data on water. And most of the time, not in the country, you would expect. In Europe, you don’t find that much data when you would expect them to be.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Yeah. W we, we, we don’t have a sensing, a proper sensing if you want to use, you know, trendy word of our territory. And that would be in 50 years, probably this is an imagined. That we really use this way of having contact with our territory, that this is so based on the decision of a single and also mistake of a single yeah.

Antoine Walter: How do you keep up with the trends with the scientifical news? What are your sources?

Silvana Di Sabatino: Well, let’s see. I’m, I’m a scientist of the role. So what I do is of course I try to keep the front or my specific business. So as that once, like physics physicist, I also look at an interaction between the surface and that was your, so what is called micro metrology or boundary layer physics, and also missile scale dynamics.

So one. My first, let’s say duty is a to keep at the front and to be able to be, to really be at the top in my specific field for the rest. I try to watch newspaper or YouTube protocols and and also participated to conferences that are more general being contact also. With the municipality or also ministry.

And so that, I try to understand what are the needs. So from what part, try to be at the front of what I’m able to do in my specific field at the same time to keep a good contact with what is going on into society. I don’t know if it’s a good answer, but it’s the best answer I could give.

Antoine Walter: It’s a very good one.

Last question. Would you have a fantastic speaker that you could recommend me that I should definitely invite on that same micro.

Silvana Di Sabatino: Well, as I said the, the ministry of every country looking at ecological transition, I think this those that may really be able to implement the good the science we have in our reality, and in the context of where we live.

Antoine Walter: Perfect. Since by now, it’s been a pleasure to discuss with you for the one that would listen to the podcast first and then to the conference, I’ll have the pleasure to have you in our common conference at the innovate for cities conference on the 13th of October and for the one that do it in the reverse order, make sure that you also listen to my interviews with Marc Barra and with James Murray, if you want to go really at the bottom of nature-based solutions.

And again, Thanks! Thank you.

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The post Do Nature-Based Solutions Work? These New Case Studies Will Verify It! appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

The REGREEN Project promotes urban livability through fostering nature-based solutions in Europe and China using evidence-based tools and improved urban governance to accelerate the transition towards green, equitable and healthy cities.

This episode is part of my series on Nature-Based Solutions (check it out )

What we covered:

How we’re experiencing a shift of paradigm in engineering practices, from grey approaches to blue-green and hybrid solutions

How nature-based solutions shall be evaluated on their ability to deliver one-to-one equivalent results to hard engineering

 How REGREEN aims at quantifying the welcome side-effects of nature-based solutions in cities 

How Urban Living Labs support the scientific approach towards REGREEN

How Paris’ international and domestic image may differ when it comes to ecology, biodiversity, and climate action

How we shall move beyond the monetary quantification of nature-based solutions

How we shall pave the way towards the economy of limits and biosphere, through economic and market incentives

… And how regulations may still be a surer way to complete the transformation than market incentives

How there’s a lot of technology in Nature’s functions and processes, and how it’s crucial to understand and grasp it

How you will have to embrace uncertainty and accept that Nature rules overall

But also Veblen Effect, Over-Confidence in Hard Engineering, Ecology beyond the buzzword, Carrying the message across, and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Nature-Based Solutions

Resources:

Check the REGREEN Website

Send your warmest regards to Marc on LinkedIn

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Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Nature-Based Solutions

Related Video: Nature-Based Solutions

Quotes: Nature-Based Solutions

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, mark. Welcome to the show. Hi. So we have a traditions with those episode, which is to open with a postcard and I let you decide where you sending your podcasts from, because you’re not directly within Paris. You’re next to Paris. So what can you tell us about your place of Paris that I would ignore by now?

Marc Barra: Yeah. I live in a city called , which is a funny name of seating in French. And it’s just a nearby Berry. It’s this part of that we call it the first crown of of Paris, which has been urbanized in the last year. And that’s that’s a nice city to live in where where there’s a lot going on the, on social events, a lot of animation and a great atmosphere.

But that’s, that’s also a picture of how Paris is a concentrator being an urbanizing in that place.

Antoine Walter: I think we may come back to the, this, this small Chrome at some point in the discussion, because I’ve seen that you had some activities around that, but now I’m a bit spoiling what we might be discussing in the deep dive, right?

You’re French. I’m French. Your job title is equal log in French, which I tried to translate. And in, in English I could have ecologist or environmentalist. What would be your definition?

Marc Barra: Actually, I always struggle to translate it in English. That’s true. So usually I say that I’m an ecologist or an ecology scientist, and to be maybe to be more precise, I say that I’m an urban ecologist and I study urban ecology, which is the, and the study of urban ecosystems.

So my work actually on a daily basis is to produce knowledge and science-based evidence on an expertise on how to integrate nature based solution in.

Antoine Walter: So nature based solutions is going to be our deep dive. And I was just wondering right before we dive into it, you know, we are part of a series of a trilogy of three interviews.

And I was discussing that with James Moray and we were opposing hards engineering with nature based solutions, not opposing in the fight sense of the name, but still posing. And you know, I’m a hydraulic engineer. So I’m a bit wondering because I may be on the hard engineering side. So what’s your take here is it’s really one against the other.

Do both work together or is one supposed to replace the other on the long run?

Marc Barra: That’s a good question where yeah, actually we could feel that there is like, this fight, between, uh, ecologist and hard engineering, well, soft engineering and hard engineering, actually in the reality, I think it’s more a combination of of nature.

And when we talk about nature based solution, it’s often a combination of civil engineering and soft ecological engineering. And I work a lot with with engineers and hydraulic engineers and I liked them. I, I think, I think it’s a fight actually with. The how the engineering profession at the moment what’s happening with ecology is that some hydraulic engineers are turning back actually to a century of hygienic ideology where nature was sent outside the CT when rivers were dive on the  ground and on the urban river where channeled, buried and sanitized.

So I think that’s some engineers have still this. Excessive confidence in, in, in technology and control of nature railroads, some other now are kind making a U-turn from what they learned at school mentality are changing. And now they understand that the use of infrastructure, can be green and that we can use plants and souls and green spaces for stormwater management uh, flooding management, and that this need is increasingly in cities.

So, so actually I would say that and classic engineers or hydraulic engineers are partnering at the moment, but there are some conflict conflicts within the profession of engineers at the most.

Antoine Walter: I can relate to that. I can really relate to that. And that’s a discussion we had regularly on that microphone, because for sure, it’s hard to change what you’ve been doing for decades, especially when, from Europe point of view, it’s just fine.

I mean, you tend to something which is broken it’s harder to change something that appears work, but we’ll dive a bit deeper into this appear to work in a second, you mentioned this, this, this re greening, which offers me a very smooth transition towards regrowing which is the program, which is going to be at the center of our discussion today.

Can you define it? What is the.

Marc Barra: Ray green is is a four year of project and H 2020 program, on nature based solution in urban areas. And it’s it’s a project involving almost 20 partners from Europe and from China. And well, the overall goal of this project is to show that nature-based solution can solve.

Many urban issues and sometimes replace a gray infrastructure to ensure climate change adaptation and also biodiversity recovery in cities. That there’s a lot going on in, in this regreen project, through the different work packages. There’s a work packages that deals with children and youth experience and wellness of nature-based solution.

There’s also people working on. Quantifying and modeling ecosystem services and challenges under the different ULS monitoring values also about nature based solution and nature in the city. Another work package working on the systems of governance and planning and how we mainstream nature based solution into these the, these, these governance.

And of course a lot going on about exchange of knowledge, about experience, about training in the different urban living lab and what we call it. Urban living lab is usually a city or a province where all these work package apply and where we do demonstrators as well as uh, of the project.

So we are three in, in Europe, Aarhus in, in Denmark, which is a medium-sized city Velika Goricain Croatia, which is more city near. And the Paris region which is a combination of cities, it’s the province scale and it’s the larger ULN in the projects. And so we have different types of city where we can show different things and different approach about about nature based solution.

And of course there is also the Chinese partner with differential Alliance, like, Beijing, Shanghai, and Ningbo which are quite large cities. So the challenge are not exactly the same, but that’s always interesting to look at the differences between those continents in terms of nature nature-based solution approach.

Antoine Walter: How did happen that you were working with China? What was the rationale behind.

Marc Barra: Well, actually that’s something that is asked by the European commission to find a an international partner outside of uh, of Europe. And I think the researchers that we are working with have a very good relation with research in ecology, in, in China and research in forestry.

So that, that, that made sense from the beginning to work with those people. And there are very good and, uh, and people working in mapping that help us to do some more packages. And there’s also I think in China nature-based solution, or always in very large project with a lot of density in in, in the project.

So that’s also for us another way to see how we could implement nature based solution on the big surface.

Antoine Walter: We’ve been discussing on that microphone with Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer around the, the sponsored cities in China, which is a really large scale application of somehow nature based solutions.

It’s not only nature-based solution, but that’s a broad part of it. So if you’re interested to dive a bit deeper into that and recommend you, that, that specific discussion, my question is. What do you want to demonstrate with regreen? Is it that’s nature-based solution work is it’s to further develop them or is it to measure what they can do so that you have hardcore proof that would then be useful for future developments?

Marc Barra: I think we want all of this actually, and that’s why we took part on, on, on this project. Of course I hope that the. The production phase and the different technical reports and tools and products uh, will provide us with more evidence, more arguments about the efficiency of nature based solutions and help us to visualize also because there’s a lot of mapping on this project.

So help us to visualize where we can implement nature based solution in the Paris region. We, we also look for wild of seeing the communication power of this kind of European project and hope that regreen, we’ll we’ll highlights what we’ve been doing in the Paris region, but also help us to convince and prove that NBSR efficient to our local government.

And th th that’s one of the role of this European project is to give a legitimacy to our work, apart from regreen. We also involved in another NBS project called the autism, which is a life plus project uh, hosted by the French national office of of biodiversity. And so all these European projects are actually.

Powerful to convince the local government is not just our small agency that are working on NBS. It’s a whole bunch of researcher at the European and international level. So it’s more credible

Antoine Walter: let’s focus on one of your urban living labs with the Paris region. You said that you are trying to monitor and to prove what you’ve been doing.

So it sounds like something which happened already in the past and in the re green name, there’s this notion of green again. So I’m just wondering, where are you in that scale? Is it something that’s already well advanced and you’re fine tuning and putting the cherry on the cake or you really on the beginning of that roots and there’s still a lot of concrete to, to replace probably with some blue-green infrastructure.

Marc Barra: It’s difficult to answer. I would say that, yeah, it depends of the people you are talking to. Of course, for some people they’ve never heard about nature based solutions, so it’s quite a new concept for other they have already worked and implement a nature-based solution. But about the Paris region, I think we, we are at the same level than other big metropolitan areas, meaning that uh, there’s a lot of urbanization.

Ecology issues are popping at that time. And then they, they really integrating the political debates. However, I would say that in the Paris region regarding the different. I can say that 25 years ago th the French government was approving a master plan for the Paris region.

And at that time it was really dominated by gray infrastructure. And the, the, the main objective was to develop buildings, power lines roads, railway, switch planes but in 2013, there was this first regional ecological plan that drove, the new, uh, green and blue pathway. What we go, yeah the, the protection and the restoration of reservoirs of biodiversity interconnected by corridors, this green.

Pathway actually, that was the first time on a fairly detailed scale that we have this picture of a green and blue grid that was integrated in, in, in this master plan. So I think it’s we are moving forward. Actually. We still have to confirm that ambition on the field that actually then when we look at the cities level within the Paris region I think it’s, it’s going even quicker about nature based solution.

A lot of municipalities have relayed some, some nice project of ecosystem protection or ecosystem restoration using their own power at the city level, using their own planning document. We just spend the last week, we spend three days of visiting some, a nature based solution project in in Paris area with the rigging team.

And we went, for example, in the Northern part of Paris in a city called center where the municipality has turned the former brown field of 1.5 hectares into an ecological reserve which is made of of nature, of course. But there is this cooling effect, objective behind. There’s also this wildness objective of, of, of biodiversity and that that’s really cool to protect this kind of ecosystem when we know the strong competition.

That there is a, in this kind of place in the Paris area. We also went to another plate called goodness and another city called the sausage where we visited the river restoration project. And the there’s a lot going on actually in in the Paris area about river restoration because there are incentives about the water.

We also visited in Gunness, a flood expansion area that that’s a 12 hectare wetland that has been created in order to mitigate the flood risk. And actually the houses that were nearby this place used to be flooded every year. And this wetland now ensure the mitigation of the flood, but it’s also a place where biodiversity can thrive and also a new green space for people that can go there walking and burning and et cetera.

Right. So, actually at the, yeah, at the city level, I think a more and more project of nature based solution. Now I implemented and that’s a good, new,

Antoine Walter: not to end back in what you just said. Let’s me try to start. What you said is now submitted to go about Paris being somehow in the average of cities.

I had the discussion on that microphone with Claudia Winkler and Alice Schmidt. They wrote a book called the sustainability puzzle and in their book, they were giving some berries example and there was citing any they’ll go as as a political leader, which was having an impact. I’m not taking that discussion on the political level.

That’s not my aim. It’s just, I’m wondering when you’re inside friends which I, I am, sometimes you hear a bit of what you were saying that Paris is probably average and and that there is a lot of communication and maybe not always the same effects in real life. But from, from a foreign perspective, quite often, Paris is seen as still a lighthouse.

I mean, the, the, the Paris treaty and there’s ma many things happening in that field, or at least communicating that feed around Paris. So do you send your points as a, is Paris average, or would you say that. There’s a bit more meat on that bone.

Marc Barra: Yeah, I would keep on, I’m thinking that we are still average comparing to other places, but what you’re saying, I hear it a lot from my friends that live abroad or from other researchers that leave abroad.

And they say that they have this feeling that uh, Politico and elected representatives such as that go in Paris are doing very great. And and that we talk about greening everyday on the news. And that’s actually true. And I think, I need Algoa and other politicians have done the loads to um, to, to talk about ecology on the, on, on their program to set some objectives even if not, all of them are reachable, but to set some objective about uh, great ingraining the city and that’s, I would say that’s part of the.

Actually if politician, don’t take this subject, don’t embrace this subject and don’t set objective. We will never go for one actually, so we need that the politician take the step and then order the services where we will follow actually. And that’s the most difficult because uh, I know the technician of the city of Paris, for example, and from other cities.

And it’s really hard for them when there is a political decision to follow, because you have to, to be, to get organized, you have to change the way you work. You have to find the budget for that. So sometimes the political decision is quicker and the. What you can actually realize on the on the field.

But, but it helps. And a, and I’m really happy that politicians are changing the way they see uh, an ecological strategy.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned that project you visited, which has this cooling effect one of the advantageous being that cooling effect is that the first thing you try to overcome with nature based solution, these this urban heat,

Marc Barra: You mean in the Paris area,

Antoine Walter: Yeah.

If you have to look at the various area, what’s the number one threats is it that’s urban heat and what would be the other one?

Marc Barra: Well, actually the, there are many threats and many challenges about about climate change at the same time in the Paris region. It depends where, where, where you look at.

If you look at a very dense urban area and and the Paris city center, for example, of course that uh, urban heat island is one of the main challenge actually, or according to climate scenarios there will be sharp increase in temperature and sharp increase in the occurrence of heat waves. By the end of the century we talk about an increase of two to four.

Degrees in Paris cities that means more people affected by hit, uh, actually. And what is interesting is that there are strong territorial contrast between the inner suburbs of and between Paris and the nursing homes and the countryside. , which is the reference into methodology says that there’s been in 2003 during the heat waves there’s been between.

Eight and 10 degrees difference between Paris and the countryside. So, so that’s huge and that’s actually a real challenge, but if you look at other parts of the Paris area, the second challenge is of course water. And also the climate say, now you will say that they will be an increase in increasing in flooding and in runoff as well as a shortage in water supply in other parts of the of the years.

Even with a little, an annual changing in precipitation, but stronger seasonal contrast. We have already, we’re actually experienced some flooding, big flooding in the last 10 years. That was four years ago and three years ago. And, uh, there were caused of course by, by climate change. But also by, by the impervious surfaces that is surrounding Paris and in Paris and also the intensive farming that is applying that around power around Paris.

Consider as a artificial elevation. So yeah, I would say that challenges are overlapping everywhere in Paris and and that we have to find against all of that. And even, and I don’t even talk about biodiversity, which is declining at the same time. So that’s a kind of simplification of landscape changing weather standardization of biodiversity.

All the challenges in GS are overlapping. And so that requires a strong political response to, to take on this,

Antoine Walter: which brings me to this other exemplary we’re sharing about river restoration because that will solve a lot. I mean, if you are having a wetlands, it’s solving the urban heats because you have some green again it’s, it’s solving that the floods problem, of course, and it brings back the biodiversity.

But on the other end, it means that you’re losing some, some space, which can be very expensive in the berries region, I guess. And there’s always this tempting solution to say, Hey, if I have flood problems, let’s big. Let’s build big walls around the river. That’s going to solve locally. My problem, probably gonna kill many people in hall, down the river, but but in Paris itself, you would be solving it by putting big walls.

So I’m just my question here, guess, is how would you make this how do you find the middle point? How do you. How would you concile opposites interests when it comes to to greening something, to, to restore a river?

Marc Barra: It’s a very tricky question, but I would say it’s it’s negative negotiation between people between the elected representative and, and, and we sort of come back to your first question about this opposition between hard engineering and ecological engineering, but you pointed out that one of the reason we choose nature based solution is because there are multi-function.

And that when you restore a river you, you, don’t just you don’t just manage the water and the runoff, you also provide a new recreation area for the people you also provide habitats for biodiversity. And that’s exactly the point of nature based solution. Whereas when you build a dam or you build a wall or a concrete stuff, you just answer one issue.

So even if a nature based solution need more space and that’s that’s quite true. And that’s one of the power meter about the price and the cost of NBS solution is that they need some space and space can be expensive depending where you are. So even even about that there are multifunctional and the one visit we visited in sausage in the north of France.

It’s in a very. Part of the city where there’s a growing lack of greenspace from people. So reopening this week, we have seen on the field when we went there so many people using it from young people to adult people to remote people that didn’t have any place to go. And so, so that’s, that’s also profitable for health and wellbeing of people.

Antoine Walter: How do you measure those benefits? Because it’s a fuzzy benefits on that microphone. We were discussing again with Microsoft, at least offer a study from the university of Michigan, which shows that when you put $1 in river restoration, especially if it’s in the city and you’re recreating some area and you add all the outbursts, it’s going to bring you about $4 in return.

So you put $1, you get $4, it sounds like the best investment ever. But the problem is that. It’s not going from the one Spock it’s to the other’s pocket. It’s very diffused it’s less people which have mental health problems because they’re in contact with nature. It’s a less less costly consequences.

The next time there’s a flood. It’s it’s more biodiversity, which means you have less of this. I mean, it’s a series of series of consequences in a of Evans and it’s quite hard to quantify. So how much do you have to zoom out and how do you evaluate the impact of nature based solution?

Marc Barra: That, that’s what most of the project on nature research and try to do actually is try to put a value.

I w I would say, well that there are none monetary value and any economic value, but to put a value on those nature based solution. And I think that the first job is to assess to, to quantify actually the, those benefits in terms of ecosystem services, in terms of contribution to carbon storage in terms of water retention, in terms of biodiversity, that it can host in terms of a cooling effect and the decreasing of temperature.

And and I think by providing this kind of. Quantification, it will be helpful for the public bodies or the private owners to, to invest in nature-based solution. Of course there are some other economies that expect some uh, some monitor revalue uh, about the nature based solution. But I’m, I’m, I’m not sure that that, that it will help actually to, to, to understand the priority of bringing nature back in the nature, back in the city.

There, there there’s been a lot of economic assessment of ecosystem services and of nature, and I’m not sure it has helped actually to mainstream them into into businesses or into cities. What what I feel on the field is that most of the people. Doing or investing in nature based solution.

Do it. Because they want, they wanted for the people they wanted even for their own image, even because it’s fashionable. But it’s, it’s always the, the, the monetary value is not the only one target of nature based solution. That’s what I feel when I discuss with w with people. For example, I studied green roof.

We, we went to 40 green roof in, in the Paris region and most of the green roof we visited having been done because you can save money for the heating in the building because you will save some water from runoff it’s been done because it’s beautiful. And because of aesthetic reasons, because of recreation reasons because it’s part of the fashion of the building.

So I think we’re, we’re getting a little. Out of uh, the, the monetary indicator only to, to, to explore other part of of the benefits.

Antoine Walter: It’s interesting. I think it’s a cool trend, but it’s also a dangerous trends because, you know, if you can afford to do stuff, then no problem. But as soon as you will have to make some choices, and I think it was David Lloyd Owen on that microphone and I’m sorry for the name dropping, but he wrote a book called global water funding and he’s in his book.

He shows that first as a big gap in funding, and especially when you have decisions to take, which is actually the case with the COVID crisis with. Maybe come to an end and then you have to finance the, the, the restart of economies. And then when you have to make some arbitration between a nature based solution or providing a sanitation for all, or making something for the nature and and hard jobs straits for people unfortunately the decision is going to be quite fast and it’s not going to be in favor of nature, even if, then you can debate and argue that on the long run, it’s the stupidest decision you make, but steel, if you’re only on the emotional level and only on the almost identity level.

Well, when it comes to two really simple and hard choices it’s, it’s might push it back on the agenda. Is the risk that you think will simply disappear because our associates you have changed or is it still something that we could be facing in a closed.

Marc Barra: Yes, of course, this is a risk and this is what we, so, during the COVID crisis, the priority where jobs or employment where, uh, taking care of the people and and leave nature way for another time.

But, uh, I would say as a. The other ecological crisis will come in the next month in the next years. And that’s just the beginning of climate change and of biodiversity decline. So, if we always were produced the same pattern saying that, first is the economy and enterprises and business, and then after nature, there will be a point where there will be no more economy because it depends  on nature.

So, so actually I think that w w we can do both I mean, we’re, we’re on the transition towards another economy the economy of limits the, the economy of of, of biosphere. And during this transition we can start to use the, the, the current, Uh, economic incentives and market incentives to orientate our project.

For example, on investment, we could have cross compliance tools, uh, to say that if one year Euro is invested in construction, when you’re already investing on transportation, it has to be done in an ecological way or with if possible nature based solution. That’s the first transition then? Why not think about another economy where, uh, the, the priority is to maintain the, the health of the ecosystem, the health of nature to maintain the climate.

And then the economy is embedded in this vision. So, so that that’s actually. A different vision of, of the economy that we have to pro page. But waiting for that time, of course, we have to use the economy and the tools of economy, the tax system, the incentives, the investments to, um, to foster nature based solution.

Antoine Walter: I’ll keep you on the economic topic. And I’m sorry for that. But quite often in the discussion, natural based solutions are presented as cheaper than part engineering solutions. First is that true? According to you? And second, is that a good argument? Because if it’s cheaper, you know, Because of this Veblen effect, you might be tempted to say, well, more expensive is better.

Like both of the water, which is 100 times more expensive than tap water is probably 100 times better. So that is now my personal benchmark. What’s your, your, your feeling here, because you said some minutes ago that we have to move away from the economic discussion. So would you still be using that argument or is it a dangerous.

Marc Barra: Well, that’s also a tricky question for me as an ecologist. I feel like a I need to be better in economy, but but yeah, I’m very interested in index in that question is it’s of course it’s true, then that are. Than usual on gray infrastructure. There’s several literature about that um, on investment cost as well as on management cost.

It’s, uh, it’s cheaper to have, for example, a bias way than pipes and water tanks to to treat weather, of course. But as I was saying before we have to take into the account, the place that is needed and the surface that it needed for a nature based solution, which can rise considerably the, the costs.

So I think that’s a fact we can rely on nature and nature, be cheaper about the Veblen F. I would say that I think that it doesn’t apply yet for nature based solution which some way, our way are less material than usual conception products, such as a bottle of water or an apple for, for which Veblen actually did.

It’s theory. I think that the problem is mainly culture. About the confidence that we have on a nature based solution. And today, if we don’t want to give a dollar or Euro for a nature based solution, or if we don’t want to invest in nature based solution, it’s because we fear that it is not efficient.

And, um, cities are usually more confident about what they know and what they know is generically technology. They’re generically CVL and hard engineering, and they want to pay the price for it. They don’t know nature based solution. Well, and so they don’t want to pay for it. So we have to wait for our changing mentality.

And, uh, and then naturally I would say that people will go towards nature based solution. And even if it’s cheaper, I think they would apply for it.

Antoine Walter: This change in mentality. I’m an engineer. So to me, it’s very comfortable to think that for whatever problem there is in the world, I can engineer a solution with nature based solution.

I have to rely on nature to be better than what I can do with an excavator and a, and some concrete. So I guess there is a learning curve and in confidence curve to, to build. So that’s the general population believes that what nature has done for 3.8 million years of R and D is probably better than what a human could be.

Building hymns.

Marc Barra: Well, I, uh, I’m not sure I can convince everyone and nobody knows where’s the truth and the truth is, but I would say that I know a lot of engineers from, from industry, from from civil engineering that, that, that, that went to to nature knowledge. And that, that are very interesting about what’s happening in nature.

Because if you look closer at the nature processes, the nature of functions then you understand that there is a lot of technology in it actually. And there’s a lot of engineering. I have a training mate. My training is called ecological engineering. And that means using living organisms, such as plants, such as earth warms, for example and using the environment such as the soil, such as the rocks to build a system and to be on something that is working and that a creator creates some, an advantage and some services.

So I think more and more engineers, I understanding that there is engineering in nature, that there is a lot of knowledge we can have some skills and, and that could make the difference. So, yeah, I teach in a ninja entering school in, in, in Paris. And I can see, um, the, the. It’s a, it’s in a war now by various, it’s an agronomy engineering school.

And I can see that through the years they, they used to be only engineers in agronomy with classic agriculture, et cetera. But today they really interested in, in, in ecology and try to understand how they can bring nature into the system and how it can solve problems. So I think that this is also a matter of generations, I would say.

And, and new people coming in the market have been raised with this climate change issue have been raised with this biodiversity decline issue and are more interesting in nature. So, we have to need for that time. But that’s a

Antoine Walter: message dude to bring across. So some there must still be a way to bring it across because I remember you know, there was a micropolitan trigger removal regulation that came into force in Switzerland five, six years ago.

And they went for ozone and activity Carmen to treat the wastewater. And at the time there were some studies which showed that Reid beds would be very effective as well. But when you say that Reed beds would be very effective first, there’s a belief to build with the people so that they believe that, yes, it’s true.

But then, you know, the image you have is that’s what is going to flow. We plan some reeds and by some magic micro pollutants will be removed. And that is not true at all. You have to have the right sequence of the right plants in the right order with the right soil and with the right current and retention times.

And if you do all of that, right, and you do all your ecological engineering rights, then yes. To remove micro pollutants, That message that it’s incredibly complicated is very reassuring because it shows you that it’s not just, you know, hippie science, which says, Hey, nature is going to deal for it. It’s serious science.

I’m really sorry to make this a position, which now sounds a bit stupid. So my question here is how do you bring them the message across what is the key message you have to give to the general population so that they start feeling that there’s a science.

Marc Barra: Well, I actually, I think you, you said it all, it’s exactly that it’s convincing people, that ecology is not just a, a dream of some political people and that ecology is not political at the beginning.

It’s a science of living organism and of the environment. And there’s a lot of skills behind the end. There’s potentially a lot of jobs for, for people jobs, uh, like you said, on ecological engineering, for example, using plants to treat water, using plants, to treat soil using this knowledge restore ecosystem.

This is actually a Boulevard for jobs. So I, yeah, my message to people is that uh, Being interested in, in, in the science of ecology and also that will be an opportunity for you in the, in the next future to work on it.

Antoine Walter: And how is it usually received? Do you have harsh feedback or is it always very.

Marc Barra: It’s not a waste, very positive. I mean, people want to have always been separated between, between visions and I think you can feel that also on the, on the media and on the price, there, there is this kind of separation between people that rely only on technology and on the control of nature and on the power of men, of our nature, always in a ways.

And there are other people that believe that we have to learn from nature. There is this biomimicry field that is growing, I think, and the and bringing with it all the people that think that we have to learn on nature and also um, have less control. And that nature. I think that the human beings hates when they don’t have control over something.

And that’s the same for nature. They hate the the uncertainty and nature based solution is all about the uncertainty. Of course, we know that it can be efficient for some stuff, but we never know what will happen. But I think this, uncertainty is useful in society. If we master, if we control everything, what is the point?

I mean, so, so, so not everyone will be will be convinced by that, but I think there’s more and more people in interesting in, in, in this

Antoine Walter: issue in re green, you have to communication path one for the adults and one for the children. My rough feeling would be that it must be much easier with children.

Is that true?

Marc Barra: I don’t know. Both are important. Yeah, it’s, it’s kind of true that that communication to adults it’s it’s much more challenging because as as we said, adults have already been trained. They have a background, they have a vision, they have some concrete ideas. So I don’t believe.

The board can change a lot in the, their vision of, of society. And this is the case for children. So of course, by using training and education, we we, we can change it. But I, I get back to my private sensor of I, I think this is not only a generation problem. It’s, um, It’s also a society matter.

And the cultural problem about about, about nature based solution. We, we saw it for example, for green space management in cities, it’s very difficult to turn a loan in, in a city to uh, Mido or to aggressiveness. And it’s it’s difficult for old people, for example wishing this is dirty witching that as soon as there is a flower in the sidewalk, this is dirty, this is cold.

People are not taking care. I’m not managing the city. And it’s quite different with the young people that, that like actually to see a flower on the sidewalk or to see a crazy plants and a kind of why wilderness in in, in green spaces. So here we see that there is a. A generation gap between those people.

Antoine Walter: Does that mean that you should wait for the younger generation to, to take over or is there a more course that you’ve way to solve that, which is probably to come with more regulation and you’re partnering with China, which is kind of, well, it can be a lighthouse or, or, yeah, how to say that.

It can be, something to emulate or something to fear because the Chinese approach of regulating it very much and very strong has very impressive results. I mean, spawn cities are really built out of scratch and when they say that they will reach the target by 23rd year by 2060, I would say, I believe that much more than most of the other countries.

But is it an extreme approach or is it something to emulate this regulate regulatory.

Marc Barra: I think we, we have to find a way in between. I mean to excessive regulation can be bad for democracy or or for people and, and to light regulation, then we never developed the project that we want.

So we, we, we have to find something in between with using the, the market, for example and incentives and education for, for people. But also, regulation. Actually, I think we cannot do it without without regulations. And I know economists hates a little bit the the regulation and prefer market incentives, but um, um, there was that For example, if I take the carbon market it’s been years that we rely on the carbon market and on the price of carbon to for its regulation.

But have we noticed that the carbon dioxide have declined in the atmosphere? No, that I’m not sure. So if we don’t plan a reduction in carbon emissions through regulation, I think it won’t work. It won’t work. It’s my opinion. And it’s the same for, for ecosystem and nature. If we don’t plan protection or restoration into urban policies, into investment, into planning documents it will remain quite little and not not grow actually, as we wanted it

Antoine Walter: regarding that the carbon analogy, I would say that carbon has a very strong assets, which.

Nature-based solutions don’t have today is that everybody knows that when you hear climate change, they associate carbon emissions. It’s really embedded. It’s there’s one single thing to measure and it’s carbon emissions. And then you can debate if that’s the right benchmark or not, but still that’s one that’s passed through the, the general yeah.

Clouds of things that we have around us in terms of information, when it comes to nature-based solution, do you think you can one, when they find such a lighthouse that is going to be the one like biodiversity index or I don’t know at all, actually, which one may be a writing.

Well, you’re completely, right.

Marc Barra: There’s a gap between the awareness on on climate change and the one on the, on biodiversity. And so I’m, I am hoping that one day we’ll address both issues uh, at the same consideration. Actually I I think it’s, it’s moving forward. There, there was this IPB. So the equivalent of IPC four for biodiversity that released the report in 2019.

And so that was the first time we addressed globally this issue of biodiversity. And now they will be a new conference overlapping this IPVs report with the IPC report answers. So I think in the next years, we’ll understand that uh, climate change and biodiversity are the two faces of the same coin and that we have to address them identically, actually, so, so of course, in terms of regulation I think we, we cannot do it tomorrow.

Like this. We have to wait. There is a big need for knowledge and that’s, the role of saying. Providing knowledge about biodiversity, understanding why species are declining, where they are declining and why this, the same job that we did with climate change. And then after that, we could think about regulation.

And that’s kind of interesting when you look at the climate regulation we noticed that some of them are actually it could be harmful for biodiversity. For example, I work on the Nate nature in the city and with the building industry sometimes, and we noticed that some climate regulation that targets the isolation of building and that allows you to make very.

Yeah, very high isolated building. Actually, they quite harmful for birds, for example, which have no more space to put the nest or to, to live in the building. It’s uh, sometimes the regulation to another route to green the wall or green the roof, et cetera. So yeah, we have to understand that those issue must be addressed at the same time.

So if tomorrow we’ll make a regulation for climates, this regulation has to be valid for biodiversity as well. So that’s another level in the complexity actually of the then the ecologic crisis.

Antoine Walter: So that means that you need to have nature as a stakeholder when you’re making B to regulation or beat a new project.

I mean, just to concentrate at some point as a stakeholder, because you’ve, may I wasn’t aware of this this issue of green walls or green roof, which may be forbidden. But it sounds like, you know, uh, a narrow thinking when you focus on one thing, maybe the best solution for that very one thing is not to have a green roof, but if you zoom out and you have a system approach and probably that changes their the position.

So I guess, but that’s more of a philosophical discussion than anything else. What is your horizon with with regreen, what will tell you that you succeeded and, and when do you intend to succeed if you succeed?

Marc Barra: We have two years to go uh, for, for a green. So

Antoine Walter: I said, so you’re three years in.

Yes.

Marc Barra: It’s uh, it’s a four years program. So we’re two years in a two years to go. So we will see, I don’t know yet. W what I hope is that I talked about this Paris region master plan that th this one is being updated nowadays, well, in the next four or five years with this ambition of Being a regional environmental master plan that integrates the objective of uh, uh, reduction of urban sprawl but also reduction of carbon footprint and et cetera.

And so I hope that regrouping the production of free green will be included in this master plan and that women age to include nature-based solution as a pillar actually of the this master plan. I think that the problem is that today in planning documents, we see biodiversity only for the curation or for battery mono, history.

Uh, so when we say biodiversity, we think about uh, historical, natural places about yeah, natural environments and that we don’t declare. W we don’t integrate, sorry, but diversity into all fields of society including the human activities, the cities, et cetera. And they think that will be the goal, try to achieve this translation of nature issues, biodiversity issues in, into every part of the local government.

And that would be a great horizon for us.

Antoine Walter: I’ve seen that in, and you have a work package around business. Who’s in charge of that. And how is it connected to, to, to the other work packages?

Marc Barra: Yes, it’s a work package, eight about, uh, about business, Andrea, she was waiting that that work package.

So, th the goal actually is to there are several aspect of of this work package. The first one is to identify what we call the nature-based enterprises and try to. Have a kind of a directory of businesses that are working on a nature based solution, or be able to find those enterprises that are involved in nature based solution help them to develop the activities.

That’s um, that’s the first bar. There’s also a part of podcasts as the winner, as we are doing today to, to explain into, to show the business actors that there is an interest for for, for nature based solution. But actually in the green project, we don’t work a lot with enterprises on the field, on the, on the, on nature, basically.

However, I think like, like four jobs. Yeah. There’s a Boulevard for job creation and in the field of ecological engineering, we need so much new enterprises. For example, for supplying seeds, for registering soils, for supplying plants for doing the consultancy of the project, we need the enterprises that monitor.

So we need material for monitoring of the success of nature based solution monitoring the species, for, for, for biodiversity. Actually we need so many people working on a nature based solution and at the moment they are just a few. So they there’s really this this business issue.

Uh, about the business of of nature based solution. I also think that uh, we have to be careful about uh, kind of standardization of a nature based solution into big businesses. For example, they, yeah, I feel like they, some suppliers try, tend to standardize their products. If I get back to this green roof examples 90% of the green roof in in cities, look the same.

And for example, in France, there’s one supplier that has almost 80% of the market and they all look the same. Whereas whether you are in Masi in the south of France or in the Northern part of France green roof out the same and I think that’s the wrong direction. We don’t have to make the confusion between.

A product and a service. And for me, nature-based solution, shouldn’t be a product that you will find on a catalog and that you will install everywhere for market purpose. It should be a service that you will design regarding the local context regarding the people you are working with regarding the climate conditions, the nature condition and, and.

Businesses at the moment are ready for that because it is there. If they want to lower their costs, they have to produce at a great scale, those kind of uh, of solution. So how do we invent a business model that is different from one province to another, that is different from one nature based solution from another.

Otherwise they will be this risk of standardizing nature everywhere in the same way that we standardize. For example building and houses that used to be very different from one culture to another. And now that tend to resemble everywhere.

Antoine Walter: So that means you have to still love to invent maybe green roof as a service or who knows, but it’s a field of creativity, but it’s interesting because it’s somehow close to what you saw, what you see in may.

Many aspects of this blue-green industry, if I may say so, it’s that if you standardize that has some perks, but you also commoditizing and commoditizing can have some caveats as as well. I’m not opening that box because if I do where we are, we have to restart for one hour of deep dive. I propose you to switch to the rapid pro questions.

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Rapid fire questions:

So in that last section, I try to keep the questions short and and I’m not cutting the microphone, but the, the, the goal is for you to have also short answers. My first question is what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on

Marc Barra: and why there are many of them? I would say that we’re working at the moment on uh, D paving, potential.

Project. And it’s so exciting to to think that there’s a huge potential in cities for removing concrete paving, impervious surfaces, such as oversized box schools, building yards unused public spaces. So I really believe in this project show that there, there is a great potential in institutes for re greening.

And I would love to make it happen in one place and and go with, with my hammer and then throw some concrete to plant some trees.

Antoine Walter: You see, in one place you have one specific place in mind

Marc Barra: or for the moment we don’t get the potential by mapping. So actually it’s we work on the computer and we map, and then we want to go in the field and find some specific place.

But there’s a lot of barrier. It can be very expensive. It’s hard to find a place because uh, we need to find a known owner and that is agree, and it’s sit around six around, so that’s quite of a fight, but we will find it.

Antoine Walter: What’s your favorite part of your current?

Marc Barra: My favorite bot is every bot.

I would say that every day is a new one with this job. Th there’s no routine actually. And that’s what I like with my job. I’m working on several projects that can goes from research to teaching, to expertise. I can work, in the office and on the field. I can travel sometimes. So that, that, that’s what I like in, in my job, but it’s never the same.

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out for?

Marc Barra: The trend, well, for my point of view, I would say we were talking about that. I think that there’s a huge potential of FITO desperation of waste water. I would love to see that even more. And I think that’s a trend in countries such as Germany, such as uh, Switzerland, for example, but not yet in, in France.

And I’m very interested in that in that possibility of plants treating water. And as you said is very complex. So we have to be careful what kind of plant we use, how we design the the, the model. But that’s, that’s a huge opportunity to create wetlands in, in, in number burned areas. And they really loved the complexity of that kind of system.

So. It’s trendy for me.

Antoine Walter: I think it’s really trendy. There, there are many places in the word you’ve cited some, but I would add Australia for instance, to the problem quite working in that direction. But there’s, I would guess a link to the space you have, which is a bit more prevalent in Australia than it is maybe in the Paris region.

But nevertheless for sure that there’s much to do. And beside, I mean, it’s everything we discussed in the past hour. So besides just the treatment of wastewater, you have welcomed side effects, you have green spaces, you have biodiversity, you have many additional stuff. What is the thing you care about the most when you’re working on a new project and when is the one you care?

Marc Barra: Well, I would say when I’ve worked on a project, I want to make sure that it has a new utility for people or at least for a current society issue. And that, that’s what we go apply that research actually that’s uh, we’re, we’re somewhere in between the scientific research. We work with them.

We read the article and between a society where we try to provide them the knowledge from the scientists to the field and to translate it into something very concrete. So that’s what I care about. We have to insert a society issues, and I think that biodiversity is a society issue. The least, maybe the way the politics are using the acreage.

It, well, actually I care about that. But I don’t care about the different kinds of discourse around ecology and I like to keep on the technical point of view and on the evidence and on the facts. And I think that. Or a really great political power actually to keep on the facts, to keep on the scientific evidence, to build your political strategy,

Antoine Walter: Jeff sources to recommend how do you keep up with.

Marc Barra: My, my first source is actually scientific literature and an article. So, eh, and I think that we there’s actually a gap today between uh, articles that are written in literature, in scientific reviews and the, the, the society and there’s something to do to vulgarize and to translate the scientific research into something readable for, for the people.

And most of the, the issues that we address now, they all answer actually in scientific articles, but nobody knows him who, who would like to read a PhD? I mean, it’s 1000 pages of um, so, so we, there’s some thing. In between to, to translate this work into something accessible for for the people.

Antoine Walter: Yeah. Is it what you’re able to do with the podcast you were mentioning earlier?

Marc Barra: Yeah, probably yes. Yes. It’s a, it’s trying to synthesize the scientific research and scientific background to, to people. Yeah. It’s part of the,

Antoine Walter: I’m sorry, I didn’t want to cut you off, but it’s a fascinating topic.

Yeah, I’m really sorry because now I cut it. You really? But

Marc Barra: no problem. Yeah, I had finished.

Antoine Walter: And my last question is, would you have someone to recommend me that they should definitely have on that microphone as soon as.

Marc Barra: Whoa. Many people potentially. But, uh, as we were talking about uh, nature based solution and water in particular and those example I gave you this one of goodness the, the new wetland created for what our mitigation, I would definitely recommend you to invite Eric Chanel, which is the director of this that we can call syndicates for hydraulic management in the city of of goodness and other cities in the north of Paris.

He’s, he’s in charge of river restoration and wetland creation. And I think he’s the kind of guy that has understood the importance of nature the importance to work on. With ecologist and hydrologist and different kinds of people. And, and also a guy that remain very pragmatic and very engineer about the efforts that need to be done when considering this kind of ecological engineering and also the time it takes to uh, make people accept this kind of project, the time it takes to to do the management.

So he’s really a guy that I would love to hear on your podcast.

Antoine Walter: Well, that sounds like a no, some recommendations. So thanks a lot. Well, mark, it’s been a pleasure. I think I’d be very interested to to have you again, When you’re brewing project comes to an end to see what would be your conclusions at the end of all of that.

And what’s next because I guess it’s never the end of roads. If it’s the end of the road it’s quite kind of sad and boring. So, you’re welcome back whenever you want.

Marc Barra: Thank you. Thank you for inviting me. I had the little pleasure this catching and I would come back

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The post Can Nature-Based Solutions Better Protect Cities from Soaring Environmental Risks? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

the Metropolitan Glasgow Strategic Drainage Partnership (MGSDP) thinks about and manages rainfall to end uncontrolled flooding and improve water quality.

This episode is part of my series on Nature-Based Solutions (check it out )

What we covered:

How the Glasgow Region built upon the 2002 flood to turn its water management approach on its head 

How they decided to leverage nature-based solutions and sustainable urban drainage systems

 How you can’t put nature in a box, and what that implies when it comes to NBS 

 The perks and pitfalls of Blue-Green approaches 

 How confusing it can be to understand the meaning behind a return period of “once in a century”

How climate change affects the frequency and intensity of meteorological events

How Nature-Based Solutions come with a wealth of welcome side effects: improving mental health, fostering biodiversity, limiting urban heat, or enhancing the air quality 

How a smart approach enhances the overall system by feeding it the right data

How Sustainable Drainage can create tensions over land use, and what to do to overcome those

Glasgow’s long ball game, adapting regulations, COP 26, public education… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Manage Flooding

Resources:

Check the MGSDP Website

Send your warmest regards to James on LinkedIn

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Manage Flooding

Related Video: Manage Flooding

Quotes: Manage Flooding

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi James, welcome to the show. Hi, I’m fine. So, um, we will be going into a very interesting topic in just a minutes, uh, and talk it out. Let me spoil a bit about blue-green infrastructure and, um, and a lots of stuff around what you’re doing right now around that in, in Glasgow. But, um, we have traditions that starts with our boss for today, and you’re sending me a postcard from somewhere in Scotland, but what can you tell me about the place you’re at right now that that would ignore.

James Murray: Milan. And at the moment I’m sitting, uh, at home, um, as a lot of people are doing at the moment, but, um, yeah, so I’m in the west coast of the Western side of the central part of Scotland, close to Glasgow. Um, I don’t actually live in Glasgow myself. The part that I feel, I love this part of the way down metropolitan area there, the city region, we call it Glasgow city region, which, um, yeah.

Uh, um, has a total population of about 2 million Glasgow. The city itself has a population of about 600,000, but, um, uh, as with a lot of, uh, settees that tends to, to bleed into other areas and other smaller towns that, that, you know, people tend to include as part of the bigger area. Um, but, uh, yes. So then here we’ve had, uh, Dry summer, um, relatively speaking, certainly for Glasgow.

Um, and for, for Scotland more broadly, um, going into drought in some areas of Scotland, which is surprising for a lot of people that Scotland would ever get to drought. Um, we have had a few big flood events, and so far as heavy rain has caused flooding for people in properties, but nothing on the scale of what’s happened elsewhere in Europe and around the world this summer.

So, uh, Glasgow has yet, again, been relatively lucky in that regard. Um, but, uh, yeah, as I said, it’s been, been pretty dry, but with one or two thunderstorms,

Antoine Walter: I think we’ve come back to the topic of floats climate change, how to adapt to all of that, what you can do, what you can plan, but right before, when it was reviewing your, your path.

Um, and as I already spoiled that we will be discussing a lot about blue-green infrastructure and how we can have natural based solutions. I saw that you’re a civil engineer. That’s your background, where you were trained as a civil engineer. And I was just wondering, you know, because I’ve seen that also in the material that you shared with me before having this discussion, there’s this hard engineering on one end.

And then there is the blue green approach. And to me, those are somehow two different tracks. Is it true? Or I’m really making that to.

James Murray: Um, yeah, I, I would say, uh, as a civil engineer by background, um, my, my, my degree was in environmental civil engineering. So that may be mixer, a slate deference. Um, but yeah, traditionally, uh, civil engineering has been about the big projects, the construction, the hard stuff.

Uh, but as we’ll probably go on to talk on, talk about later on, um, we, we need to transition to softer approaches these days, uh, for a whole variety of reasons. And my career over the past 10, 15 years has been doing that. Um, so yeah, w less of the less concrete and steel these days and, and more of the vegetation, um, as is the direction that I’ve been going in with my career, but also the industry as a whole has been going and, um, Somewhat slowly, um, challenges that are many of, um, and yeah, we’ll probably talk a bit more about that, but, um, yes, the direction that I think most things are going in these days

Antoine Walter: to place all of that into, into a frame so that we understand where you are right now and, and why we’re having this discussion together.

Can you define, um, what the, the metropolitan Glasgow strategic drainage partnership is? And maybe in the next step, I might be saying mg SDP.

James Murray: Certainly most people do tend to defer to his M GSTP and even then you get the letters in the wrong order. It’s it’s not very friendly to see. Um, but yeah, the MGSDP are.

Um, non-statutory collaborative partnership of organizations that, that basically have a responsibility for the drainage systems and the, and the, uh, Glasgow city region. Um, so there’s, there’s the usual suspects in terms of local authorities, but also damn Scottish water and SEPA, um, and other organizations like sort of, uh, clay gateway and Scottish canals, um, and other sort of slightly removed organizations, but key stakeholders for us.

Um, and the, the MGSDP really came about as a result of flooding that happened in Glasgow, primarily class school, and 2002. And, uh, following that flooding, um, there was quite a bit of finger pointing between organizations saying that was your fault. No, no, no. That was your fault. So, uh, the, the, the main organizations and the council and Scottish water, uh, working with SIPA and who’s the environment or regulated.

Basically. I said, look, we need to be doing a spit out. We need to stop pointing fingers at each other because you know, water doesn’t observe a constituency boundary. It doesn’t look to see whose papers going. And it just goes where water goes. So we need to have a joined up approach in terms of dealing with the, um, the impacts of, of flooding and trying to reduce flooding.

So the them GSTP was really born from that and needs to work more collaboratively, um, that, that needs to work more collaboratively became part of, um, I guess you see law in Scotland and so far, and in 2009, the flood risk management act puts a duty on certain organizations to, to work in a collaborative manner.

And that’s really been strained by the process that them GSTP has adopted in terms of working together. Um, so it’s. Originally stemmed from 2002 has been going for a long time, the mgs GSTP, but you know, to be in a modern forum, probably around 2009, but it’s really come from recognizing the need to walk with others, to try and reduce flood risk primarily, but then being able to put things into that as well.

Antoine Walter: So that means that your approach, which started almost 20 years ago, without those floods in 2002, became the law. Does that make you a pioneer? I mean, was it copying or emulating something resisting somewhere else or did you really create some

James Murray: well, I, um, I’m not sure we could ever claim to create it and a thing, or I created there have been the foster recognize that there is merit in working together.

Um, and you know, all, you know, a lot of big organizations have silos with a numb and between each other. Um, so yeah, whilst we wouldn’t clean to have come up with that idea, um, it’s certainly true that and formulating the legislation for the 2009 act, um, I think all organizations that were involved in the management of water in Scotland recognized that, yeah, there’s a, there’s an issue here.

We need to be working together better and putting something in the act or own that will help to ensure that happens. Um, because of what learning was being drawn out of those initial discussions as part of the, the M GSTP coming in.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned that the phone thing given was this floods and that the funding topic around what you were working was really this prevention of floods.

And you said also in the introduction that these old matter of engineering and hard to soft engineering transition has changed quite a lot over the past 20 years or a bit more. I can tell you a bit of my personal story here. My, my father, um, was a professor of hydraulic engineering and of river management.

So how do you prevent those floods? So I’ve been raised into, into the topics since, since as long as I recall, but when you say flood prevention, the first thing that comes to my mind is, oh, great. You can build a huge stuff out of concrete, uh, stones, upstream, downstream, and you’re going to control the river from, from the beginning to the end of you.

Region where you’re active and then whatever happens downstream is someone that is his problem. If I get your rights now that I made read this David David advocates approach, your approach is totally different, but was it from, from the one that you said you want to go to this soft side of things or.

Come on the way of this almost 20 years of history.

James Murray: Um, I think for what was also happening in parallel in the industry, certainly in the United Kingdom. Um, and, and certainly in Scotland was, um, the formulation of what. What we term as sustainable drainage sometimes referred to as sustainable urban drainage systems or suds that specially fold principles of best management practices that, that come from the U S um, quite a number of years ago.

And it’s basically around trying to manage water closer to where that lands, um, trying to get, trying to reuse surface water if we can, but certainly trying to slow it down and control it before it gets into the formal pate drainage network. So, um, since, uh, rowing the boat again, also as I’ve, and I’m going to struggle to get the dates rate here, but, um, yeah, the late, bleats sorry, early to late two thousands, Scott Scotland, Broughton sods legislation, um, under the water environment, water control act, and that basically requires any new development in Scotland.

So if you’re buying. Two or more houses, then you need to have sods as part of that. You need to have a sustainable drainage system. And that basically means that you need to have some form of attenuation and some form of water quality treatment for your development. Um, so suds is very much played a kid on trying to use natural, um, as far as possible methods to, to control water.

And, um, that very often well-meaning using green infrastructure, blue, green infrastructure as we use the term. Um, but also things like attenuation, um, that may be below ground. So not very good in, but at least pervading, attenuation, at least slowing down runoff as it comes off. Before it gets into the formal drainage network.

Um, and that’s really driven from recognizing that particularly in our urban areas. And this is the same all over the world. Um, during the systems, when it starts to be in any significant degree are usually very quickly at capacity. Um, the, the space and the dream of system is very quickly taken up. Um, no that’s particularly true for PA systems.

Um, but also for revers, uh, as we build more and more urban area with more and more impermeable surface sheds water more quickly. So, uh, yeah, as I say, as M just fuse coming together, the sides legislation came in for Scotland and that has helped to drive, um, the, the way that the M GSTP partners have been thinking about managing water and, um, moving less from, from trying to less concrete.

And big walls, et cetera, to managing water closer to where that lands, um, source control, slowing it down before it gets into the pipes gets into that of ours. Um, and using getting blue-green infrastructure where we can to do that. Um, one thing I would just pull you up on in terms of, um, the terminology, you know, we, we, we try not to, and I trip up over this, but we, we try not to uncertainly.

When we’re speaking with politicians or counselors, we, we try to avoid using the word prevent because, um, it’s, it’s about flood risk management. If we get enough rainfall, flooding will still happen. And we’ve had some recent experiences of that in Glasgow at the start of July. And the start of August had some intense, effectively summer thunder storms and the system just got swamped.

And in one particular location, the people flooded out their homes. Some of them are still out of their homes. Um, And, uh, there was a project delivered in that location, uh, about five or six years ago, a couple of million pounds worth of projects to pervade additional capacity in the system. And despite that these people were still flooded desk team and, um, you know, the quite naturally react and see a bit, but you told me I wouldn’t flood again, this project who did would prevent.

And someone probably they’d say that at the time, but this shouldn’t have, we shouldn’t have said prevent. We shouldn’t have said stop the flooding. We should have said, this will reduce the risk of flooding. But as if, you know, if you get enough rain, you’re probably still going to get some flooding. And it’s saying about managing what happens with that flooding when it does occur,

Antoine Walter: is it a difficult message to bring across?

Because somehow it’s saying, you know, engineering will not save you from everything. I mean, you have to be having a bit of humility. We are living within this. And sometimes nature is still stronger than we can anticipate.

James Murray: Absolutely. It’s very difficult to, to try and communicate particularly with, with non-technical people.

So, um, you know, I feel like Juul, public, uh, the man and woman on the street who doesn’t have a background in engineering, doesn’t have a technical background. If we, if we talk about reducing risk, they don’t understand what that means. If we talk about return periods, um, it’s very easy for them to misinterpret for return periods on what they mean.

Um, and an example being it’s very common for, for people to talk about a, a one in 100 year event. No, that doesn’t mean that event is only going to happen once every 100 years. That means it has got a 1% chance of happening in any given. But the public don’t understand that. Um, so, you know, you have to try and be careful with the language we use the terminology.

Um, but, but similarly, if we see it to someone, you know, it’s an event, that’s got a 1% chance of happening in any given year. They don’t really know what that means either. So it’s, it’s a difficult area. Um, but certainly trying to, and we, we continue to do this with our politicians and counselors, trying to stop them, seeing, you know, the scheme will prevent flooding.

The steam will stop flooding. We, we say, you know, see, it will reduce the risk of flooding. It will help to manage flooding. Um, it will help to, uh, reduce the impact of flooding, but, um, it’s very dangerous to see that something will stop flooding, um, because. Sod’s law says, you know, next year you’re going to get a big storm event and the flooding will happen.

And, um, you’ll, you’ll get a lot of flack and pressure from the police and from, from, uh, the people who are impacted by that.

Antoine Walter: Let, let me sidetrack, you hear a bit and I’m sorry for that, but I, so that’s, uh, in the, in the documentation you sent me that you noticed that the events were getting a bit worse over the past decade compared to the average of what they used to be before.

And to that extent, does our perception of what has one person chance of happening every year still pertain true with the consequences of climate change? Or do you also have to adapt they’re the thresholds and to say a Sentinel event is now something. Different from what it used to be. No books.

James Murray: Yeah.

It’s, it’s a, it’s a very good point. That, and again, something that’s difficult to communicate, but undoubtedly, with climate change, we are seeing, um, more rainfall in total. Uh, although, uh, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it will always be, um, a lot of rain, you know, there will be dry periods of the say Scotland for the past three months has had well below average rainfall, but we have had a couple of days where we had intense funder storms and some are don’t, some are storms, um, that did cause flooding.

Um, and yes, schemes that were built, um, 10, 20 years ago that at the time using the cotton design gates, um, and, uh, the claim that allowances at the team, we would probably see that that scheme had been built again, using this. All terminology for, to protect to our a one in 200 year level of service nowadays that that may have gone down.

It may only be protecting to, again, to use the old way of referring to 160 year event level of protection. So yeah, with climate change, we are definitely seeing more in, um, and it will impact the level of protection that is being given to, um, to, to properties, to businesses that, that have had schemes delivered already.

Um, seeing that you very rarely get exactly a one and 200 year event. It will be a bit bigger than that, or a bit smaller. And that sort of, um, you know, the, the, the, the, the design criteria that’s used, um, should reflect your best understanding and, and the accepted principles at the team. But yeah, with climate change, um, yeah.

We are going to see more flooding. We are seeing more flooding happening

Antoine Walter: regarding this. Um, I try to, to be careful with the words I picked. So with this mitigation of flood events or with, uh, yeah, whatever you can do to, to, to smooth and the consequences of a possible flood event, there was one, uh, in, in the, in the list of projects that are so far from what you did, which honestly, I have never seen nowhere else in the world.

So maybe I might be really totally ignorant here. So you’re going to tell me, but that was this concept of the smart candle that you, uh, you can preventively notice that, um, metallurgically speaking, something will happen in the next days or in the next hours. I dunno. Um, so you can take the level of the candle and bring it down by 10 centimeters.

Gives you so much more retention and capacity. Hello. Tell us a bit about that. How did you come with the idea is it’s as new as it sounds or,

James Murray: yeah, I mean, it’s, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s not a new principle, um, which, you know, at its core, the principle is, is using an existing asset and trying to get more value out of it.

Um, and it’s, it’s using an existing storage volume and trying to get more out of it in this case for, for, um, glass was smart canal, it’s using the fourth and clade canal. They have what we call a summit Poland section of the forest and clay canal that goes through the north of Glasgow. Um, th th the driver for it really was the fact that north Glasgow, God says as a was that is still.

Quite a lot of vacant and derelict clans, um, a legacy of posts and industrial use, or some, some contamination challenges and some of these areas of land, um, quite high levels of deprivations or, um, you know, low income communities, but, um, with the push to deliver more homes, more housing for people, um, that we really looked at north Glasgow and said, right, we know that there’s big areas of land here that we need to develop.

We very quickly came up against the issue that, um, and most of north glass school, there are barely any remaining sense. There’s certainly no remaining little small watercourses, you know, the little tributaries that go into the big rivers, uh, because over the years there were just particularly with the industry that, that took place in the north of clients.

They were just lost to the sewer system. You know, some of the sewers and north of Glasgow, one example is the parcel barn. You know, that used to be a barn, no, become a sewer. And that’s, that’s the name that we know the sewer line. It just gets swollen into the system. And that’s generally because it’s just too complicated to try and pick out all the pollution sources that are going in there.

So you just covered it and call it this year. Um, so yeah, so in, in Glasgow, you know, we, we, we want it to deliver a lot of regeneration. Um, we had these areas that we could do it, um, except we came up against a problem that there’s nowhere to put the surface water. And, um, we certainly couldn’t put it into the combined sewer because that would just cause flooding, there just wasn’t capacity when it rained, it was capacity for the fall element there, not the surface water.

So we looked at, you know, th th th th the two options we really came up with was build our drive a new tunnel from the north of Glasgow down to the clade, which 14 million pounds, something like that. Um, or could we do something

Antoine Walter: in we’re good to go.

James Murray: Okay. So, yeah. Um, so th th the idea for the smart cloud basically came from, um, having significant areas of north Glasgow that were vacant and dead elect, um, uh, derive to, to deliver more housing.

That’s a particular challenge in the UK, um, and wanting to, um, find a way to deliver that housing in the north of Glasgow, um, where we realized that the constraint on the housing, um, in addition to other things like contaminated ground, et cetera, was around the, um, drainage capacity. You know, the, the, the combined sewer in that area and convenience Euro, most of clients who just didn’t have capacity to take the surface water under the foal was faint, but the surface water couldn’t go in there.

Um, and there are no remaining small tributaries and water courses left in the north of clients where they’ve all been lost to the sewer. Um, so one option was to potentially drive out a tunnel all the way down to the clade, um, which you’re placed at maybe something like 40 million pounds. Um, the other option was to look at the canal.

The canal already moves water about central Scotland, um, and try and utilize that existing assets to, um, manage surface water for the north of classical. Um, saw the, the idea that was developed was to use weather forecast data, um, to look ahead and see when there’s a sense of fairness that are going to be a big storm likely to impact the north of Glasgow and install on the canal on the inlets to the canal controls and on the outlets from the canal controls.

So that when we, when the weather. Radar data tells us the storm’s coming, um, to up to 24 hours in advance or along section of the canal by only up to a hundred millimeters. So it’s not a huge amount that’s been lowered by. Um, but if we lower it by that much, all that available long stretch, then it provides a significant volume to Jack that sponge to soak up the water, the surface water coming off, these development sites.

Now each of the development states will have its own suds or so it will already be attenuating the, the, the floor to some extent, but they have limited capacity and they still need somewhere to discharge. So, um, using the, the, the weather forecast. Control the inflows, we can lower the outlets. Um, most of them are weird.

We just lower them a bit. And that drops the canal down by up to a hundred millimeters, which saying pervades the capacity for the surface water to come in when the storm hits. Uh, and, um, uh, Rainwater’s coming off surface water is coming off these development sites. Um, so it’s, it’s a fully autonomous, um, smart as is the badge that we give it.

Um, it’s, you know, it’s not a brand new concept I would see, but it’s a, it’s certainly the first thing that we had a, we had all that it’s been implemented on this scale and, um, it, uh, it is operational. Now we’re still catching up with building out all these development sites or the foster development site.

The floors, um, were connected just about two weeks ago. Um, and there’s more sites to come online, but the system is there. It’s operational. Well, honestly, don’t want to drop the debt to the canal too much, because that could have an impact and the stability of the banks of the canal, uh, and also would have a slight impact on navigation and the canal.

Um, so we don’t want to drop it too much, but, um, by dropping it a hundred mil pages, a significant volume, um, and allows us to regenerate significant areas of north Glasgow. So, um, it’s, it’s, you know, I get a, and um, I see no where we’re waiting for more areas to be connected and we’re waiting for a big storm to come to really tip.

Antoine Walter: Yeah. Which is kind of tricky because you, you, you have to wait for a storm, but on the other end, you don’t want to storm neither. So it’s a, it’s a bit. Yeah, absolutely.

James Murray: Yes, yes. And the other batch dads just do the question, people do ask is, so where does all that water you take out the canal gore and it goes to the river Kelvin, but, um, it goes to the river Kelvin before the storms arrived.

So, um, uh, the water has to get taken in terms of that where the hydrographs meet. It’s good time to put it into the Calvin, to put it into the, and oats to the, to the, uh, cost before the river. Calvin comes up because of any storms as well. That

Antoine Walter: brings me to another piece of the puzzle, which is the water quality, because if you were taking the first runoff of a storm and putting it in the kennel, that may be a problem because that, that first runoff is probably the most heavily polluted.

But on the other end, if you really look at all of that into a system, you mentioned that first, the sets are going to absorb the first wave, which means the part, which is the most polluted it’s going to stay somewhat somehow there and be treated naturally. And you only with brackets collects the run-ups, which are almost just rainwater to, to, to the kennel.

Is it really that, that systemic approach that you are.

James Murray: Absolutely. Yeah. There, the suds, as you say, um, and each development say that will have its own sods elements or, um, you know, the, the, the foster seat that is connected to St hell and it’s got basins and it’s got street trees and its rain gardens, and it’s got a linear canal feature.

Um, and all those sides of providing that initial bit of attenuation and also, um, water quality. So help me to treat the water before it goes into the canal. And what we do also have as part of the system is, um, various sensors in terms of not just floor, um, and level sensors, but also various water quality parameters that have been taken as well.

So, um, as the system starts to really bear down and, and the development sites are connected, we’ll also be able to track water quality and see what impact it has on the canal itself.

Antoine Walter: How networked is all of that? Because you mentioned that. Uh, said to something, which is if I got right mandatory from a, to a double house on, so up to much bigger, I guess, but, but starting with the, the, the double house, and I guess that’s on the, on the level of a double house, you probably don’t have a fully digital IOT, all the buzzwords, which I can drop at you, uh, which is implemented.

So what you are doing on the cannot probably you cannot do exactly the same in every small sets. So you also have a global approach to this full network of smaller pieces of the puzzle.

James Murray: I know it’s a big issue, I would say for the United Kingdom as a whole. Um, and certainly for Scotland, there’s that, um, you know, we, we designed put these two, two houses or more will require suds, but they’re generally don’t have any monitoring.

They don’t have any smarts attached to it. So, yeah. And Sally and Scotland and less, unless there is some reason someone, either phones up to complain about the quality of the state or the, the, um, the condition of a suds feature, then they’re not monitored proactively. Um, it will really just be reactive maintenance and saw for the smart canal system.

We do have some monitoring in the app because it’s it’s, um, um, because it’s important that we, we try and retain the good water quality that’s in the canal. Um, so we will be able to see if there’s a problem from any of the develop individual development sites. If there’s a problem in terms of what quality we will see that, but you know, for, for the rest of developments in Scotland, suds are not monitored in terms of quality or quantity.

They have a design there they’re constructed and the basically just leave it to county on now. And Scotland suds, sustainable drainage systems can generally either be maintained by the council. Um, so the city council will adopt some elements of sides. Uh, some will be adopted or a term is vested by Scottish water.

Um, and suds that are adopted are vested by a scotch water, or the council will have. Um, oh, you have more confidence in the maintenance that they are getting because they will have a maintenance plan, which talks about how often it should be inspected and you an inspection should then pick up any issues.

There’s a third strand to side says that quite a lot of sides will be privately maintained. So either by individuals or organizations, and, um, we have less confidence around how often they’re doing that maintenance, how often they’re doing that inspection. Um, but you know, it is the way the system set up in Scotland that you can have sides, elements that are privately maintained.

Um, and it does give us, I think, in the industry a little bit more, cause for concern as to what the, the quality of the maintenances and how quickly they would pick up any problems.

Antoine Walter: There’s one thing that’s really catchy. I have, sorry, that’s my French by English, something that caught my attention when it was reading your, your documentation, you have a strong take, which is you want to, to, to, um, to keep the water as much as possible on the surface first.

Why then? How is that perceived and how do you do bring the message forward that that is important that the water stays on the, on the surface.

James Murray: It’s, uh, it’s a challenge that it continues to be a challenge. Um, I think the developer community, so basically the contractors, the people who are designing homes and who are building homes, communities are getting better at it.

Um, the general public, I think as part of the wider growing claim, awareness are possibly getting better, but only really have scratched the surface on it. But yeah, if we can keep water on the surface, it just slows it down and it gives it a chance. It gives her a chance to be used by vegetation. Uh, it gives it a chance to be, um, evaporated by the sun, even, even in Scotland, um, before it gets into the drainage system.

So you can use up, we don’t tend to have much infiltration, certainly not in the west of Scotland, because we’ve got very heavy, clear soils that don’t lend themselves to infiltration. Um, but if we can, you know, take up and use some of the water by plants and, and, uh, by loss, by, um, uh, evaporation, then that just reduces the amount of it.

That’s getting into the Papes drainage network. So w you know, we’ll use basins and pollens and swales and rain gardens, all those sorts of futures. Try and slow it down, but also try and try and improve some of the quality of it as well, because a lot of sides, well, ultimately discharged to a river or a water course.

Um, so if we’re wanting to improve the quality of the water courses, then doing that treatment and quality upstream, coarser to the source profitably on the Sophos. Well, um, helped with that. The other thing about managing water on the surface is that it makes it much easier to see if you’ve got a problem and to see where that problem is, is it becomes obvious and.

Um, so it does make for easier management. Um, and you know, at the start of sides, it was really about quantity and quality. It was a bit slowing it down and improving the quality of the runoff from the seat. Those were the primary drivers, but I think, you know, all the industry recognizes these days. You can get so many additional benefits through managing water on the surface with blue-green infrastructure.

So there’s, there’s stuff around biodiversity there’s there’s, um, health, mental health benefits, there’s there’s um, heat to benefits, there’s air quality benefits, there’s, um, um, noise benefits through having more blue-green infrastructure. Uh, but we do come up against challenges on that and, and there are, there are 10.

Um, particularly in, um, developments, we are, uh, for developers that are ultimately looking to build as many houses as possible to maximize their profit. Uh, and some will see an argument that the nice blue green infrastructure helps to add value to the property so they can sell them for more. Um, but generally as they’re trying to get as many units as possible on a site that takes up the available land, um, and you have certain criteria for types of land that you need to pervade and provide some open space for that community and you need to provide parking for that community, et cetera.

So it introduces tensions around land use. Um, and if you’re having, if you’ve got sods, whereas managing water on the surface, then you obviously can’t park your car on top of a subspace and not a suds point. So it’s a little bit of tension now. So developers. We’ll generally try to put any sods below ground.

And, and in that case, you, um, arguably lose any water quality benefits. It’s more just about attenuation. Um, so there are, there are definitely tensions there with developers. There are still also tensions we find with local communities. We are, I think it’s, it’s particularly in Scotland. Um, maybe the UK, certainly when compared to our, our continental cousins, that we have a more risk averse approach to open bodies of water.

We are not as comfortable having open water around us. Now this is despite the fact that we’ve got a canal through partner Glasgow, and we’ve got one of our claims going through in so many areas. Um, You know, some people will perceive a point as being a danger to people are dingy or to life and Faust.

You know, there is a little bit of truth and that it represents such a small danger that when contrasted with the benefits that you can get from that, um, it’s, it’s usually outweighs the benefits usually where those risks, but, but some people in the communities still don’t want to have an open body of water where they think there’s a risk that a child will drone or something.

Um, it’s, it continues to be a source of frustration for us when we will have our whole community service by multiple roads. And, you know, people die on roads as well, but, um, in general people think, well, we need to have roads. We don’t need to have what are managed on the surface, put it in a pipe, put it underground.

And then that risk has gone. So it’s a challenge, but again, you know, we’re improving on that, where we’re getting the message out there as more and more of these suds are delivered. People, see them in the communities and are beginning to be more comfortable with them. Um, particularly if it’s a new build community.

So if the houses are being built at the same time as the sides, then people move into that community and the water. We’re an unfortunate, trying to do these days, M JCP is, is trying to do more retrofit. So we’ve got an existing community, existing homes that are already, I feel like used to not having water on the surface.

So when we come along and we say, we need to do some retrofit and we want to manage water on the surface, that that is particularly where the tensions come to the surface, because you’re, you’re the way they perceive it as you’re introducing a risk to them. They’ve already been used to living with the roads, for example, but they haven’t had open water.

So when you blame that to them, um, it does, it does prevent, present a bit of a challenge in terms of communication, understanding

Antoine Walter: there’s many things to uncover in what you just said. Uh, let me first, um, send the people back to a discussion I had on that microphone with Michael Stanley Gallisdorfer , where we were addressing.

The benefits of investing in a river in a city. And he was citing a study, which is showing that whatever dollar you invest into Rena to rating a river in the middle of the city, if you put all the benefits together, it’s $4 for one, which is not too bad as an investment. When you think of it, um, I’m really interested in the how, how do you convince people that that is the right way to do it?

What is your approach? How do you approach people to, to take them on board? Because you cannot change the way you manage water against a population. So I guess you must have kind of a way to take them on board.

James Murray: Yeah, I fly, I would say is that there’s always going to be some people you’re never going to convince.

Um, so you, you always, as you. Do a feasibility study into what as you want to do, and you have engagement as part of that. Um, and you try and explain to people what it is you’re doing and what the benefits will be. Um, one of the things we tend to find, or we can find is that, um, people, well, we’ll not, we’ll, we’ll be interested in the benefits for themselves, but not necessarily for other people.

So that can be to some extent, selfish, um, Some extent, that’s human nature. You want to see, do you want to, you want it to focus on things that are important to you and not necessarily to the person who’s doing the bottom of the hill, who’s being impacted by the flooding. So, you know, as you say, w what our doesn’t observe boundaries, um, you know, constituency boundaries or local area boundaries, a gauze with a wants to go.

And, and that, that is a challenge for, you know, if we are looking to put something further up the catchment, that’s going to provide us a flood risk benefit for, for the donor and the catcher and the people up the catchment are saying, well, what, what is in it for me? Um, Nope. You can talk about the, the, the benefits that we we’ve mentioned a bit biodiversity and heat and cooling, et cetera.

And, um, some people will be persuaded by that. And some people want, uh, particularly if you’re doing retrofit in the urban area, there are a couple of really what we found really sensitive areas for. Um, existing residents and, and that’s really going to be around, um, car parking, uh, and it’s going to be a round, uh, um, litter and it’s going to be around access for their property.

If you’re going to be reducing the number of car parking spaces and an area, um, it’s going to be very difficult to get everyone on board with that, but, um, if you can tie it in with active travel, um, measures that you also bring in as part of the overall scheme, then that can help to soften that outlaw for some people.

But yeah, I think it’s, it’s about trying to explain the, the overall benefits that are coming, um, and trying to get people to see that, uh, it’s a benefit, not what should just be a notch. Shouldn’t just be a benefit for their community, but for the wider community. But at the end of the day, you won’t get everyone on board with it.

There will still be people who don’t like it. Um, the other point, the other particular issue, which comes up time, and again, is trees. People are very passionate about trees, existing trees and losing trees. Um, and as you know, for a, for a number of the schemes that we’ve delivered, particularly if we are delivering a surface water intervention in an existing park, we will have to take down some trees to, to build that base and or that point, um, We, we always then plant some more trees, not necessarily on that same park, but it might be another park elsewhere in the city.

So, you know, we’re trying to keep that overall balance. And then the fact we’re planting more trees than we ever take down. But again, some people become very passionate about trees. Um, now as long as we’ve got the eight days of design and as long as we are comfortable that it’s, it’s needed to take down those trees and we don’t take down trees that we don’t need to, then, you know, we’ll, we’ll go forward with the scheme, but again, you won’t convince everyone that it’s the right thing to do.

Um, it’s interesting when we also talk about the benefits of, of delivering this. And, and how much benefit you get for, for the pony that you’re spending. The challenge that we have, and this includes even with colleagues within the industry, is who actually gets that benefit. How is that benefit realized?

Because if you’re talking about there, the mental health benefits of having nicer green space around during the urban area, it’s generally not Scottish water or the council that gets that as a direct poned in its pocket. It’s, it’s the health service. That’s getting that. So for Scotland overall, it’s, it’s, it’s beneficial, it’s the right thing to do.

But, um, for the person who is putting up the capital funding to deliver that project, they might not get that, that particular bit of the benefit. Now we will do our cost benefit analysis for the project. And as long as that stacks up, then yes, there’s a benefit to deliver it from a capital and funding point of view.

But these additional benefits may be realized by other sectors or the community or other organizations. Um, and, uh, you try and you try and draw the links to them to help make your argument for funding to deliver projects. But some people will just see, well, I’m not getting that Poland in my pockets, or that’s not going to convince me.

Um, it’s it says a challenge. It’s a challenge, but in general, we’ve had support for all the projects we’ve delivered. Um, the wall was be one or two dissenting voices.

Antoine Walter: Does that speak in favor of extending your approach to, to a broader scheme? I don’t know if it’s different in, in Glasgow than it is in, in other cities in Scotland, but, um, do you think your approach can be replicated.

Enhanced can become a national approach or does it, is it the perfect shape to say though the regional, um, the police in that area I run Glasgow is the, the best size in terms of magnitude of things.

James Murray: Yeah. I mean, it’s the general approach in terms of collaboration and, uh, engagement, and then trying to ultimately pool resources and deliver projects together, uh, can be applied in if we are.

Um, it is really in Scotland, it was M GSTP that foster started doing it as an area, but yeah, it can be applied in if we are and. The, um, the drivers might be slightly different in different places. Um, but you know, Glasgow, we’ve got the mix of all the drivers we’ve got, we’ve got existing flood risk, we’ve got water quality that we want to improve.

And the, and the, and the, the water environment, um, we’ve got regeneration and development that we want to deliver, uh, with are predominantly combined sewer catchments. That’s, you know, can take the fall, but it can’t take any more surface water. So, um, we’ve got the whole full range of circumstances. That’s, that’s helping to drive, um, a collaborative approach, but yeah, I think it can be delivered anywhere.

Um, but whether you need a formal organization like the mgs DP or whether it’s just a case of the main parties working together, um, you know, will be very much area specific, but they’re the, the thrust of going from. Blue green infrastructure, um, really is, has been rolled out across Scotland has been driven by Scottish government and we, you know, terms like placemaking and terms like what are resilient places are becoming much more, uh, common usage.

It’s been driven partly also by the claimant emergency. Um, people realize that I need to do something. I think one thing that I would reflect on is that, um, as part of the clown in emergency, um, there still is a huge focus on, on, um, climate mitigation and net zero. We must get to net zoo, uh, and claim adaptation still lags behind in terms of, uh, finance and delivery.

Um, so we certainly could do more with rebalancing that because even if we get to net zero by all the various targets that have been set by cities and governments around the world, um, we’re still got a lot of climate change we’re going to have to deal with. Um, no Glasgow’s already got flood risk and that’s just going to get washed with the changing climate.

So we need more adaptation and that is helping a bit, but, um, There still is a bit of a, I think this term, the adaptation gap, this gap between investment and action on mitigation versus adaptation, but that, that adaptation element is growing and that’s helping to deliver blue-green infrastructure as well because of the additional benefits.

Antoine Walter: What is your longterm game? What’s, we’ll tell you in some decades, I’ve seen 20, 60 as a whole horizon in your documentation that you you’ve made it, that you achieve something and you have in-between steps, which will tell you that you are on the right path.

James Murray: Um, so it’s a very good question, but very difficult to answer because, uh, personally, I don’t think we’ll ever get there because we’re going to be, you know, we we’d like to get to a stage where we don’t have any uncontrolled flooding and that means.

We recognize flooding will still happen, but we want to, we want to be able to manage where that flooding happens and how it happens. Um, so that’s, that’s, you know, putting in measures to reduce the risk of flooding, but also recognizing that with exceedance you’re still, and if you got a big enough storm event, you will still get flooding, but know you’re going to be managing queer.

That happens. You’re going to be recognizing that hopefully the work that you’ve done means properties aren’t flooding, but maybe rods will be flooding and that’s more acceptable. Certainly parks will be flooding because that’s more acceptable than roads flooding and roads is more acceptable than hoses or businesses flooding.

So we want to get to a point where we say, you know, we’re not going to have any uncontrolled flooding. Ultimately I don’t think we’ll have to get there. Um, but that’s, that’s the direction we’re going. And, um, so w you know, we haven’t put down any hard metrics to see if we’ve delivered X amount of investment, or if we’ve delivered X meter squared of blue gas infrastructure, then we will have done it because, you know, we will, I don’t think we’ll ever get there.

Um, we just need to keep working at it. It would be good to have, um, this, this, um, target for 2060, and the difficulty with having a target, that’s say 20, 60 is so far away that it doesn’t really engender any sense of urgency, but to the same extent. We think that, you know, is going to take as long as 20, 60 to get to the point where we think we probably have stopped uncontrolled flooding and it’s snow controlled flooding.

I, we know where it’s going to happen and we can manage that and we can manage the impact. So, um, so yeah, I, I don’t know if I directly answered your question, but I don’t know. I don’t think we will ever quite get there, but we’re going to get better and better, and we’re going to take those steps along the way.

But, you know, as we make those positive steps where we’re going to have to deal with climate change and we’re going to have to deal with more rainfall, no, we are going to be getting more reinforced and we are going to be getting those intense summer downpours are particularly difficult to manage. Um, and.

Other places. Um, I’m sure in Scotland, but also around the world are also having to contend with, um, squeeze on budgets for doing things like maintenance or, um, that, that presents a challenge as well. If we are delivering bluegill infrastructure that, you know, they just station grows and needs to have some level of maintenance.

So you need to allow for that in your funding cycles and for traditional, um, traditional, uh, ways of managing pate systems and roads, you maybe have to change the way you do things slightly, which, um, requires a little bit of art. There’s a little bit affliction near in terms of getting people to change the way they’re doing things in the way that they’re managing things.

But again, we’re, we’re going in the right direction. Um, but yeah, I, I don’t think we’ll ever quite get there, but we are delivering more, but it takes a lot of money. I mean, that’s, that’s the big, the, you know, the one thing that drives this, the new. New belt is relatively easy because we know we need to do, it’s trying to unpack the existing urban environment and the existing cities and tones where we’re not wiping it clean and starting again.

We’re having to work around those existing blocks of properties and streets, uh, and. infrastructure back in the eye, we’re trying to retrofit it. And my goodness that that’s expensive and it’s, it’s difficult to do, and it causes significant disruption. Um, and it’s not just to people’s homes, but it’s to people’s businesses as well.

So, um, you know, if you’re going to dig up a road to put in blue-green infrastructure, you might have roadworks there for a year, a year and a half, and that’s a significant impact upon our business. Um, so you need to consider those things as well and your projects as you’re delivering and what is for the overall pluses and minuses of what we’re looking to do here.

Um, but yeah, it’s expensive. You know, you get services everywhere. You’ve got, uh, you’ve got potentially in some, some areas contaminated, grown that you need to deal with. Uh, the other thing that we have here, and I’m sure it’s the same. In many other cities, Israel is conflicting priorities in Glasgow is trying to do a lot of, um, active travel measures and necessity.

Uh, someone that’s been very successfully done through COVID and it’s going to be retained long-term um, so if you’ve got a road that’s a certain size and you want to put in some blue-green infrastructure and you want to put on a cycle in that brings tension again, that brings tension between that of travel and the existing cars and congestion and flood risk and water quality and health and biodiversity benefits of this blue-green infrastructure.

So it’s not easy. It’s not easy.

Antoine Walter: Last question in that deep dive, what is your role in all of that?

James Murray: Um, I, my role is as well, I guess the, the, the. Um, possible where you could describe as mostly administrative. So I try mine tasked with trying to keep the, sort of behind the scenes wheels turning in terms of the mgs GSTP and the various partner organizations working together.

So a lot of that’s basic administration, um, but there’s project management in there. Um, I also get involved in a technical aspect, uh, relatively higher level on some projects as well. Um, I’m, you know, I get active in terms of involve engagement with the communities, um, on certain projects. But yeah, my role, I think is mostly, almost, almost behind the scenes, but helping to keep the, the, the fuels going and keeping the partners meeting, uh, ensuring that things are flowing smoothly in terms of information and engagement.

Antoine Walter: Well, James, it’s been a fascinating, deep dive into that. Living matter, which you are dealing with, uh, uh, Ms. GDP, um, I propose you to switch to the rapid-fire questions to run that forward discussion. Okay.

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Rapid fire questions:

So in that last section, I try to keep the questions short and the, your duty is to try to keep the answers short and not cutting the microphone.

But, um, we have to play by, by the rules of the game. I will do my. So my first question is what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and

James Murray: why? I think it was probably the smart canal, because it really is bringing forward. And so as soon as cliched, but 21st century technology, um, and bringing in that smart element, because there’s so much more, you can do, you know, you apply that smart process to other things.

So we’re, we’re, we’re about to build a couple of necessities in Glasgow that we’ll have, um, rainwater harvesting, but we’ll also link to weather forecasting. So, you know, rainwater harvesting, you tend to store a volume of water to reuse it in the building, uh, and reduce your portable water draw. Um, so these necessities will be.

When a storms forecast, they’ll drain down these tanks ahead of the storm. So that, that maximum capacity is available for attenuation when the rain does come. Um, so that the smart canal is really leading the way on that, that it has done a huge scale. Um, but you know, we’re, we’re going to see more of that happening and more of that rolled out across the settings.

Let me

Antoine Walter: sidetrack you here. So you see I’m guilty. I’m the one which is not going by the rules. Do you know, Brian Moloney? He’s the founder of Stormharvesters. It was on that microphone explaining how his company is aiming to do exactly that to, uh, to playing with, uh, to, to, to, to have the weather forecast and to then preventively empty some, some reserves and then use some green water as well in the building.

So if you haven’t listened to his interview, I would recommend you to have a look. And if you already know him,

James Murray: I’m familiar with the name, but I haven’t listened to the interview. I will do that. They’re um, yeah, it it’s, it’s, it’s kind of a no-brainer, you know, it just makes sense. It’s just when, when you bring in smart stuff, um, it has a level of complexity that then needs managed longer term.

And, um, yeah, it it’s, I guess the, the Luddite view would be it’s more to go wrong. Um, but I think that the benefits are clear to see if you can get that system up and running and working well. What’s your

Antoine Walter: favorite part of your current.

James Murray: Um, I think my favorite part is getting to skin to see, uh, a relatively high level, um, all the various things that the partners are doing.

So I am so plugged into all the different projects that the partners I’ve got underway so that I can help them share information and awareness and share that knowledge with our wider community. Um, so I really enjoy the fact that I am privileged to have that sort of overview of, of what people are doing.

And, um, there’s a lot going on that it really is a lot going on glass was, had a lot of investment, hundreds of millions, of pounds of investment, and there’s getting a lot more investment and there’s a lot more coming as well. Um, it’s, it’s sometimes a challenge when you’re asking for more money. People will say, but you know, you’ve already spent lots and lots of money.

They didn’t help fixed it yet. So I know we’ve still got a long way to go.

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out for in the water industry?

James Murray: I think the trend to watch out for those again, the smart, um, so w we’ve touched on it a couple of times, it’s particularly if you’ve got existing assets that you can really make work a bit harder.

So, um, building new stuff, great. Let’s put the smart on that, and that should be relatively easy, but with all these existing assets, can we get more out of them by applying some technology by, by making them work a bit harder? And I think that’s the direction we’re going in because particularly with the climate emergency and carbon and, um, trying to reduce our carbon, then the more we can do with existing stuff, the better, because if we have to build new stuff, then that’s carbon intensive.

Usually.

Antoine Walter: What is the thing you care about the most when you’re working on a new project and what is the one you care the least.

James Murray: Um, I think I care most when Rocky, our only project, probably our own probably on the, on the money, because it it’s, it’s the money that deceives it’s the cost that decides whether it will go ahead or not.

And if you know, some of the projects that we’ve delivered, we’ve had to trim out elements of the scope as we’ve gone along, because costs have gone up for a variety of reasons. Um, you know, whether it’s it’s more services or contamination, um, or just unexpected stuff, or whether it’s for things like COVID, um, and the, the costs and delays that, that resulted in, or whether that’s things.

Breaks and getting supplies and materials now and, and all that. Um, so I cared about the cost because if you don’t look at the bottom lane, then the project’s probably not going to go ahead or it’s not going to deliver all that you want it to deliver. Um, or Ikea. Yeah. What do I care listed there? I probably care least about the, um, hopefully there’s the clash from my previous answer, but the program.

So yes, if your program stretches out is generally going to cost you more, but, um, you know, if you’ve got handle on those costs and you can, you can manage the costs and I’m not too bothered about it. Getting done exactly on. As long as it gets done, um, now has a knock-on impact for many other things, um, in terms of the overall program.

But ultimately I want, I want to deliver that thing. If I’ve decided it’s the right thing to do, I’ve got the money to deliver it. Then I want to see that done. I want to see it finished. Um, no matter how long it takes,

Antoine Walter: do you have sources to recommend, to keep up with the water and wastewater market trends?

James Murray: And I think the, probably the best website for the UK as a whole is one called Sostrin, um, S U S D R E I N. Um, and that really focuses on sustainable drainage, um, across the whole of the UK. So it’s got good examples of projects and there, um, it’s got good links to case studies. It’s got good reference to, uh, key sources of literature.

Um, so yeah, that’s probably the place to go, I think, in the UK or. Accepting naughtiness that there are differences and the UK is Scotland, England Wales, even Northern Ireland have different, slightly different setups and slightly different ways of doing things. Um, but yeah, it’s Australia I think is probably the best website.

Overall.

Antoine Walter: I put the links in the show notes. If you’re, you’re looking for that, um, would you have someone to recommend me that I should definitely invite on that same microphone?

James Murray: Well, that’s a, that’s a good question. And I would see. If you can get hold of a person called Julie Walden who works for Edinburgh city council, um, Julie’s actually been, uh, has won the title of the champion of the year, um, uh, for this, this year.

Um, so Julie’s doing pushing a lot and, um, Edinburgh city council in terms of, again, bluegill infrastructure and placemaking and resilience and adaptation. So yeah, I think, I think Julia would be a good person to try and get on.

Antoine Walter: Well, Jim, this has been a pleasure to spend that a bit more of an hour with you.

Um, I’d love to, to see how, how you’ll be presenting all of that in the upcoming events. Um, you, you mentioned shortly before we started and we pushed the record button today that, uh, you’ll be involved with cop 26, which is, I guess, a big chunk of bread on your table.

James Murray: Yeah. So there’s, there’s a, there’s a lot, a lot going on for cop 26.

Um, I think the difficulty for, for any organization or initiative during cop 26 is just trying to be seen because there’s going to be so much going on. Um, but yes, it’s certainly going to keep us busy. It’s a big focus for Glasgow as a city. Um, it comes with its usual challenges around policing and access and there will undoubtedly be protests as well.

And it’s good that the community makes its voice heard. Um, but yeah, it’s, it’s certainly a busy team at the moment. Um, and certainly on, on mgs GSTP stuff, I can talk for ages on that.

Antoine Walter: Well then I’m looking forward to us, those next talks, which you will be giving. Thanks a lot.

James Murray: Thank you, Antoine is good to talk to.

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The post How to Manage Flooding and Improve Water Quality without Steel, Concrete, and Hard Engineering appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) is the world’s leading, independent non-profit organization dedicated to ocean research, exploration, and education.

What we covered:

How Iceberg drift in oceans can be modeled and what can be learned from it

How large an Iceberg shall be upon arrival in Cape Town, to cover 20% of the city’s water needs

How that Iceberg would behave all along a towing route that would lead it from Antarctica to South Africa

How challenging it would be, to harvest the Iceberg’s water upon arrival

The ecological impacts of an Iceberg tow

The bigger picture around Day Zero and Water Scarcity in arid places in the world, like Cape Town

How the ecological impacts of a one-time tow are probably negligible while the consequences of a repeated commercial-scale activity would have to be studied

How a successful proof of concept would enable verifying theory and possibly build the suited infrastructure to extract the best out of the Iceberg.

How an Iceberg tow to Dubai is a different game than a southern hemisphere destination

The financial equation of an Iceberg towing project, the scientific approach that would enable us to learn from the first tow, Nick Sloane’s project… and much more!

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Teaser: Iceberg Harvesting

Resources:

Check WHOI’s Website

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Iceberg Harvesting

Related Video: Iceberg Harvesting

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

Antoine Walter: Hi, Alan, welcome to the show.

Alan Condron: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.

Antoine Walter: I have to say it’s a very interesting and intriguing topic. We will be covering today, but before jumping into that part, I’d like to open with our good old traditions. And that’s the postcards and you aren’t going to send us probably a salty postcard compared to all the postcards we had so far.

So what can you tell me about the place you’re at? Right.

A postcard from… Cape Cod

Alan Condron: I can tell you it’s beautiful. They have around Cape Code and Massachusetts. I’m actually at my house right now, mainly because of some COVID restrictions and getting my kids back to school and juggling schedules. Yeah. That’s about it. Really moved about a mile from the beach.

Antoine Walter: So there’s a reason why you were a mile from the beach it’s that has to do with your job. I mean, many people have the beach has something to do with the holiday for you it’s everyday. So maybe you get bored by the beach. I hope not. But can you tell us in just a simple words, what you’re doing?

Introducing: Alan Condron

Alan Condron: Yeah. So we can say a bit about myself too. Yeah. I’m a climate modeler by profession, essentially using numerical models to simulate the climate system, to understand climate change past climate change, to how things could glacial time, scale, and also future climate as well. So, you know, what’s going to happen.

If we keep putting more CO2 into the environment, what could be. Feedbacks, you know, from doing that right. Or the consequences from doing that. So my work kind of, spazzes out a range of timescales, as you say, being close to the beach, you know, it’s inspiring as well, because in my work is obviously based, you’re looking at the ocean circulation and how that changes.

So, you know, the drive to work and you can get some inspiration from driving along the beach and looking out at the sea and thinking, yeah, I can see, I can model that using my computer.

Antoine Walter: You’re working right now at the woods hole ocean Institute, which is according to what I read on the website, at least the biggest Institute of that kind worldwide.

Can you tell us a couple of words about WHOI

Introducing: the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution

Alan Condron: yeah. So pronounce it when you say hurry. For sure. Yeah. So I may end up saying here quite a lot in this talk. Yeah, no, as you say, it’s a national graphic research Institute. It is large, even on Cape Cod. It’s I think it’s the second biggest employer on Cape called the parent of the hospital was bigger.

But yeah, I know it’s sort of from a scientific standpoint, though, it sort of comes with a lot of prestige. So it’s got in quite feel quite fortunate to work here, actually. And yeah, we’re doing a range of, not myself, but there’s, I think there’s over at least a thousand, you know, sort of science employees doing a range of things and I do computer modeling, but there are people that will say, you know, go out on research boats, you go to the arts.

Yeah. They’re taking measurements of the water. Oh, you’re dropping in gliders and robots, you know, even now into the water and you’re sending them down. And I Woods Holewas also quite famous for finding the  Titanic, which, know, sank 1912, I think, it was Bob. It was, he was at woods hole for a while and he was on the expedition that originally found the Titanic.

So it’s this kind of cool!

Antoine Walter: It sounds like, like the perfect transition to our deep dive for today because we are going to be talking about icebergs quite a lot, and that all starts with a story I just saw popping up and some auditors that podcast, reach out to me and told me, Hey, why don’t you think about iceberg as a source of drinking water?

Getting introduced to Iceberg Harvesting

And the first time I heard that. Come on. That must be like a welcome side effect to welcome being into brackets of climate change that we are now, considering this kind of marketing moves because, you know, there’s iceberg bottled water, which is incredibly expensive and all of that. So I was really negative about it, but still curious.

And I started looking into it and the more I was looking into it, the more it turned out. Totally wrong. This sounds incredibly legit and hence our discussion today. But before going into the core of the matter, I’d love to hear your own feedback. How did you first hear of that topic of towing icebergs for the sake of drinking water production?

Alan Condron: Yeah, it’s a great question. I sort of came up sort of from it from two angles. I guess one is when I started out. So. My research itself. I look a lot at the polar regions and ice sheets, and I spend the sort of last five to 10 years writing this model. Um, it’s almost like a computer game in a way to simulate icebergs and how they drift in the ocean and sort of, you know, the goal of that model was to think about, you know, things like the Greenland ice sheet start to melting faster on top to go, you know, no more ice bugs going into the ocean.

Might that influence global climate. And then at the sort of same time, you know, having them built this iceberg model, the media, you know, if you, and this kind of gets back to your point, that the media seemed to sort of, you know, periodically put out these ask who was about people who want to tow icebergs, and it sounds a bit sort of.

The recurring topic of Iceberg Harvesting

Science fiction in a way, perhaps right. As you sort of dig into the litterature has been around for quite a while. So I’d say I came across it with the last sort of five years, and then having this iceberg model that I made. Curious, we can talk about this a little bit more of answer about how I could actually use my model to sort of investigate this problem.

But yeah, so the media kind of, so occasionally puts out these are scores and I think, you know, people read them and go, wow, it’s just sounds nuts. Right. But then you, you know, you do a little literature search and you look back and as you’ve just said, you know, you find, since at least since the 1970s kind of a wealth of.

Information. I think it’d be exciting to talk about in a minute is how, you know, how that’s developed over time or not developed actually. I mean, there haven’t been any iceberg toes really performs despite lots of discussion about it. Yeah.

Iceberg Harvesting: a 200 years old project

Antoine Walter: That is a fascinating aspect of that full topic. It’s that I found the first record to be Meade’s 19th century of iceberg towing or iceberg towing projects.

Some people wanting to tell some icebergs to India to sell them some others, trying to bring them to places where they could be crushed for drinking water purposes. So really that is around for two centuries. And. Pretty easy to find the beginning of every project and the full rationale of builds up. But then the reason why it never happens is something which is rarely documented.

So do you have a known explanation of why it’s never happened so far?