with Henry Cordes, Principal at Sciens Water

Sciens is a research-driven investment fund that identifies uncovered, under-researched, or misunderstood water sector opportunities that are undercapitalized.

What we covered:

How Private Capital can and should play a role in solving America’s water challenges

How the American Water Market is a $100 Billion market opportunity, growing and attractive for private capital investment

3⃣ How both ends of the centralized/decentralized debates are a good investment opportunity and how they may be synergistic

How private capital will also play a role in consolidating a highly scattered sector and why we shall all support that

Being an impact investor, opening the way, educating investors and money holders, getting the ball rolling and the word out… and more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Henry on LinkedIn.

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser – How Bringing In Private Capital can change the path of Small Water Utilities

Full Video: My conversation with Henry Cordes

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, Henry. Welcome to the show. I’m curious to get to understand a bit better why we are here at all.

Henry Cordes: That’s a very big question!

Antoine Walter: You’re the right person to tell me a bit about that. So what is it that we have to rethink in water?

Henry Cordes: There’s a very long answer to that probably, but I’ll try to give you a shortened, condensed version of it.

Private Capital can play a role in improving America’s water infrastructure

We’re here because we, as Sciens, Sciens is a private equity investor in the water sector in the US, believe that… We obviously recognize that there’s a lot of problems with the water sector and, and challenges, but we think obviously private capital can be a, a major solution to those challenges. But we think that there needs to be a different mindset around how we think about improving our water infrastructure in this country.

Right now, you know, there’s a lot of political, social, environmental considerations. I think we, we need to kind of take a little step back and, and say, what is it that we’re trying to achieve and how can we do that, with private capital? So part of this whole initiative is sort of bringing together as many different disparate, stakeholders as possible through this event and try to begin to have those conversations.

Because as we know, in, in the US 85% of the industry is publicly held. Utility companies we’re investing in a, primarily in the private piece of that. But we think that private capital has a role to play. Across the industry.

Investors like Sciens Water want to spread the Word

Antoine Walter: Why does Sciens water take that torch? Why is it your duty and your mission to do that?

Henry Cordes: First and , foremost, we’re investors, right? And we’ve been investing in private equity for over 25 years. But what we saw with water is quite frankly, an opportunity for private capital that maybe is either, doesn’t exist in other areas because they’re already very competitive. There’s a lot of capital going into them, or they’re very well understood or other reasons that mean that we think that there’s a real white space of private investors in this sector.

Those are not just sort of in because it’s in fashion, but rather are committed for the long term to be invested in the space. It’s quite challenging to do that, especially at scale, which is what investors like, right? Because it’s the same amount of work to invest a hundred million in one transaction as it is to invest 1 million in the transaction.

So we think that there’s, there doesn’t exist that private equity investor leader in the space , and we would like to play a role in that because we think, Frankly, that the investment is needed, but there’s also obviously a huge sustainability and impact component to it. That is really everything in water. You have to come back to that.

You can’t invest in water without having an impact, and we’ve invested in a lot of other sectors, but that’s not the case in the past. And going forward, we think that that’s where we wanna spend the next 20 years, 30 years of our careers is really building that.

It is possible to invest in Water as an investor

Antoine Walter: If I got it right, the event of today shall lead into the writing of a white paper.

Who do you intend to influence with these outcomes and bring the nuggets, which were shared today to a wider audience?

Henry Cordes: What we’re hoping to do with that is to tell people that it is possible to invest in water as an investor. It’s obviously not without its challenges, but we think that there’s an opportunity for a lot more private capital will be going into the, the sector.

We obviously want to be a leader in that, but we think that it’s beneficial to everyone to have that capital coming in and let us explain to you why that’s the case and how can we do that? Leverage what we’ve learned by being an investor in the sector to help people see that there’s a role to play for private investors.

The American Water Industry is a $100 Billion Market

Antoine Walter: How is that beneficial to Sciens water if more people want to invest into that sector? Won’r it raise the valuations and create more competition?

Henry Cordes: You know, it’s a hundred billion dollar industry in the US alone. We think there’s plenty of room for investors to participate. And the more confused people are about water, the harder it is for them to invest in the first place.

If that remains the case, one, we don’t solve a lot of the big problems we have to solve. And two, it means that the opportunities for us are not as great. We think more capital coming in creates more opportunities for us, essentially.

And water isn’t seen as sort of some confusing niche sector, but rather part of the mainstream that everyone feels that they need to be investing in, and everyone can feel that they have an opportunity to make returns in otherwise without the opportunity for returns, there’s no investment.

There is still education to make around the involvement of private capital in water

Antoine Walter: Do you ever face some backlash from people who don’t understand exactly what you’re doing in water?

People who are like, okay, you’re investing in water, but isn’t that supposed to be like air a common good? I’m playing, delivers advocate, don’t get me wrong, but…

Henry Cordes: We’ve spoken to hundreds investors over the years in raising capital and that is a commonly asked question for many people. That’s a view that they take because that’s just sort of how it’s been viewed , in this country as water is a public good, therefore any private investment is seen skeptically!

In our view, obviously, that investment is needed, but the opportunity is really to invest that capital, to bring new ways of thinking, to improve the industry for all participants. And quite frankly, in this country, what you’ve had is a situation where people haven’t properly valued water because it’s been heavily subsidized by various entities and no one really knows what the water costs, therefore they don’t value it properly.

Then you have problems that because of deferred maintenance, it’s very sort of challenging to change that mindset and say, this is a good, that is, is incredibly valuable. We should be treating it as such. We should be pricing it appropriately. And private capital has a role to play in sort of getting us to that point.

I think. I mean, we’ve had that experience with some of our portfolio companies that once you can educate stakeholders, educate customers on what is the real value and what are the challenges that we face right now? If we do nothing or the status quo is kept, they start to understand that, and I think that that you can actually change people’s views and, and show that private investment is actually needed and beneficial.

Education starts with explaining everyone what’s happening with their water

Antoine Walter: And how would you educate them?

Henry Cordes: Part of it is really just explain to them what’s happening in their own community. We’ve invested, for example, in utilities where people in the community don’t even know where their utility plant is. It may be a small community, 200 people, 300 people, they don’t know where their wastewater treatment plant is.

Mm-hmm. , even if it’s just around the corner behind some trees. Part of it is that, and then once you show them actually there’s real infrastructure, there’s physical equipment in the ground that needs to be maintained and invested in, and then you can show them, actually, you don’t see it, but right around the corner is totally septic, wastewater treatment plant.

Then they start to realize! And I think it’s just through engagement messaging and continuing to kind of tell the story of the state of the water infrastructure in this country that you can kind of begin to change the minds , and people begin to really value the infrastructure.

Both Centralized and Decentralized Water are interesting investment opportunities

Antoine Walter: One of the red threats from all the conversations I had so far today is that maybe the future isn’t really for the centralized utility anymore, and it’s going much more in direction distributed.

Up to the point that we might be seeing like point of use, point of entry treatments. Isn’t that more difficult to grab as an investor? Because something central, there’s one asset and you invest in that asset. When it becomes distributed, then you have like a multitude of assets which you could be investing in, following in. For you, does it make your work more complex?

Henry Cordes: I think there are opportunities to invest in both themes. There’s a role for centralizing regionalizing utility assets. There’s also an opportunity for decentralized assets that make a lot of sense. And we like to invest first and foremost in companies that can facilitate that investment.

One of the opportunities with decentralized infrastructure is the opportunity to actually, to achieve some significant scale and economies of scale through the deployment of decentralized assets. So I would say that they both present interesting, slightly different opportunities.

Sciens Water’s investment thesis is not common

Antoine Walter: Sciens water’s investment thesis is not that common.

If you look at the people investing in the water sphere, you have people investing in venture job and which go in the early stages of the companies, most of them being technology companies. And more and more people try to avoid hardware and really go into the software solutions, machine learning, ai, and they’re incredible companies in that sphere, not judging at all.

What attracted you in that other sphere of hardcore hardware? Utilities, consolidation of utilities and building, from the grassroots.

Henry Cordes: Part of it is the limited competition for those opportunities, particularly sort of below a certain threshold. There’s a lot of capital looking for infrastructure.

Antoine Walter: No competition is not necessarily a good news.

Maybe it’s simply not interesting.

Sciens Water gets the ball rolling for larger investors to jump in later

Henry Cordes: Competition is really a function of scale more than anything. What we like to do is find those opportunities that maybe subscale for larger investors who, want core infrastructure assets, for example, but they’re not gonna look at an opportunity that’s below a hundred million, 200 million, okay?

Or even in many cases, much larger. But can we find opportunities where we can identifying really strong management teams aggregate some of those assets and those opportunities through a platform approach that can build something that is of interest and become scalable for those larger investors?

That’s a lot of work, right? So there’s a reason that there’s less competition. Is that it takes a long time patient capital and the right management team , and a lot of those things are particularly hard to find I think, in the water industry, just given some of the fragmentation and the lack of managerial capabilities.

It just comes with being a subscale business, so it’s not easy. The opportunities are not everywhere, but I think if you’re patient you can find them. And that’s really what we’re trying to do across the portfolio, it’s build those platforms that then larger investors with potentially lower cost capital will find attractive as more core infrastructure type of investments.

Can Private Capital help consolidate the scattered municipal water sector?

Antoine Walter: Talking of this consolidation element this morning, during the keynote of Seth Siegel, he mentioned this, 52,000 utilities in the US. It’s funny because I had a chance to read his book to see his conferences. So when that comes up, usually when you look at the people, they get really shocked. Like, what? So many, like really the word hasn’t spread that much yet.

And when I had the conversation with him on that microphone, he said that if you reduce it to 5,000 to 500, it’s might be more approachable, but, Probably still too much. So if we go into that consolidation of the sector, what is the role you can play as a strategic investor in that work of consolidation?

Henry Cordes: We’re doing that right now with one of our, one of our portfolio companies, Central States Water Resources, which is acquiring small, privately owned utilities in need of capital improvements to meet regulatory requirements. We, right now play that role by bringing the capital, bringing the management team with the capabilities to run a scaled utility, even if it’s numerous disparate small systems.

And part of that is by leveraging a lot of the great technologies that are. Exist today as you ran for a lot of companies in both hardware and software that really make that possible.

Right now, that’s the role that we’re playing. That role may evolve as the opportunities to evolve, as I expect it will and may become an opportunity to bring private capital to the municipal segment.

And that can take a number of different forms. Right now, that can be quite a challenging thing to do is I think, many of the investor and utilities find it’s a long process, but we’re hopeful that those opportunities may become more frequent and more efficient. We think it’s gonna evolve over time and we’re sort of just getting started.

What will generate the biggest impact?

Antoine Walter: And if you look into the future and into the next five, 10 years, what will tell you that you had a positive impact as Sciens water?

Henry Cordes: It’s interesting, you bring that up because that’s obviously something we spend a lot of time on is, and one of the things we really like about water is the impact is very measurable.

You can measure how much water’s going in, what’s in the water, how much waste water is coming out, what’s the quality of that waste water? And then taking that information, which is fairly scientific and you could say, okay, we removed how many tons of ammonia, for example, and that’s great.

What does that actually mean for the environment? What does that mean for people living in the community?

And so that’s what we’re really working on as the next step of quantifying our impact is how can we measure the impact on the environment. From that removal of pollutants, how can we say, look at what was the community before we invested?

What was the state of the community after we invested? And that’s not easy because often the data you need is sort of comparing before and after. Well, often you don’t have the data Before!

Josiah Cox, who’s the CEO of Central States Water Resources, one of our portfolio companies mentioned one of the first utilities he bought was in a community of maybe 500 homes.

There was a moratorium on new building, because of the multi-week boil orders and the enforcement actions going on at that wastewater treatment plant. Since investing, that community has grown by 30% through new home building. Those are the kinds of impacts that we’re beginning, to look at and measure, and hopefully once we’ve exited investment like that, we can.

Point to and say, here is the impact we had on the people living in these communities from the standpoint of health, the environment, economic growth, and start to quantify those. That’s gonna be how we try to do that.

To some extent, Sciens Water is an Impact Investor

Antoine Walter: So if you’re heading sustainability and impacts, does that mean that science water is an impact investor?

Henry Cordes: Impact investor can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. We don’t necessarily lead with that as a sort of organizing principle of how we invest, but it is something that we set out to do intentionally when we invest is. Portfolio companies that do have an impact and that we can measure however people want to define us, that’s okay.

What is the impact gonna be of this investment opportunity? Does it meet the criteria that we have to invest and solve the big challenges? That’s sort of the primary mission of our fund, is solve the big challenges facing the US water sector.

Antoine Walter: I could keep that going for a while, but have to be cautious of your time as well, so I propose you to round it off with two rapid fire questions, if that’s fine for you. Yeah.

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Rapid Fire Questions

the first is, what’s your favorite project you’ve been involved in and why?

Henry Cordes: I would say it’s our first investment in Central State Water resources, which I’ve mentioned. Many times already, because that’s sort of what I spend much of my time on at uh, at Sciens.

What I think has been really exciting about that is the problems. People kind of know about the problems in the abstract, but when you are actually investing through a company like Central States, you can see them firsthand. You can see. Literally the visual of the, the wastewater treatment plan that is broken.

You can hear the actual stories within that small community and you can see before or after it’s very clear, you know that, that you’re actually making a difference by improving this infrastructure and just being able to invest alongside such a amazing management team to support them through their growth.

A company that when we first invested seven. Today, 55 people. And growing, being alongside them on that journey has just been incredibly exciting and continues to be. And, and we’re very excited for where, where that goes and, and the opportunity for years to come because I think it’s, they’ve done a lot, but it’s still sort of 1% of the available market to invest in.

And, and so we think there’s long runway there.

Antoine Walter: And last question, what is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Henry Cordes: The aging workforce and lack of, um, workforce coming out behind the, on the operation. And I think that the trend is gonna be twofold. It’s gonna be one is applying new technologies to, um, be able to do things more remotely.

And, and we’re, we’re doing that across our portfolio companies is how can we leverage digital technologies to make them simpler, easier to run, require less manpower. But I think it’s also gonna be a trend of seeing the water industry lead more with technology to get younger employees in a the new workforce.

Coming through more engaged and seeing water is somewhere that is exciting to work in as other fields.

Antoine Walter: Well, Henry, it’s been amazing to speak with you and I don’t want to prevent you from attending your own event, so, Thanks a lot and talk to you soon!

Henry Cordes: Thank you very much!

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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The post Can Private Capital Change the World of Water for the Better? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

with Meshal Alduraywish, Vice President at Sciens Capital Management

Sciens is a research-driven investment fund that identifies uncovered, under-researched, or misunderstood water sector opportunities that are undercapitalized.

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

What are the biggest gaps an actual investor sees in the Water Sector, and how can we turn this into an opportunity

How getting a sense of the potential technology adoption goes beyond gut feeling and requires real-world data

3⃣ How digitization opportunities are still highly under-addressed by the water industry and how we may get inspired to look at the energy sector

How having a portfolio of companies is an interesting pool of data to dive in to identify new needs and trends

Water being still undervalued, cybersecurity applied to the sector, building a portfolio… and much more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Meshal on LinkedIn.

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser – How the Water Industry lags by a 7 years factor compared to the Energy Sector

Full Video: My conversation with Meshal Alduraywish

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Meshal, welcome to the show.

Meshal Alduraywish: Thank you!

Antoine Walter: I’m curious to have yet another discussion with someone from Sciens Water, because I’m still trying to put my finger on what’s special about Sciens. If I’m right. You are working on the research part of the company, so what are you exactly looking into?

Meshal Alduraywish: First, thank you for having me.

Of course we’d love to talk more about like what I do, like anyone else. Well, so basically to your point, I do the kind of the research part, but also more of like an actionable research, not just like a research that ends up in like a drawer.

Researching the Water Market to identify the most interesting trends

Based on my research and the team’s research, we find kind of, emerging trends, challenges within the water, and we address these challenges with investments with finding the right companies or technologies to address these challenges.

For example to make this more concrete, I can talk about our effort in the digitization of water and wastewater utilities. Our portfolio companies work in the water sector at different kind of levels and across the value chain, but one of them is a water and wastewater utilities company where they own water systems across the US.

Looking at that specific segment, which is the water operation and the municipal water cycle from the source until the end user, we saw a huge opportunity in digitizing this value chain.

The energy market is more advanced by 7 years

Maybe as a key stat to give you a sense about the digitization level of the water sector, if you compare it to the energy sector, it lags by seven years.

To paraphrase, this one is basically

it’ll take the water sector today, seven years, assuming the energy utilities, like stop their digitization as they are now. It’ll take seven years to catch up with it.

So imagine kind of like how this gap is widening.

This is kind of just like to give you a sense of how late the water sector in adopting new technologies as simple as smart metering, and this is just like something that you can see and like sense, but also goes into kind of like the operation and processes of the actual plant.

Translating best practices for the Water Sector

My point is that we saw this kind of challenge that how can these utilities become more digital?

And by doing that helps utilities become more efficient, optimize operation, optimize resources, both human and financial, et cetera. And there’s like a lot of opportunities to realize, like the impact obviously cuz now you can quantify it, you can also mitigate some environmental risks, et cetera.

What I was trying to say is that we look for challenges among the companies we own and we kind of developed the capabilities to address them. And the digitization challenge is one thing that we’re working on now.

Why is digitization a challenge for the Water Sector?

Antoine Walter: So digitization is a challenge because we are late as a sector compared to the energy. Okay.

But beyond that, why is it a challenge? Why do we need digitization? I’m playing the devil’s advocate, sorry. But…

Meshal Alduraywish: That’s a fair point because this is the question we’re asked every time we try to like sell technology or like convince an operator to adopt a new technology. Like why do we need it as long as it’s like working now?

Dealing with the Water Assets outside the Fence

Well, I’ll give you like an another example to simplify it. When you own a water system, you have some assets that are within the fence or inside the fence, but also you have assets that are outside the fence that are like sometimes like tens or like a hundred mile away from the main plant.

And these assets are various, you have lift stations, pump station, manholes fire hydrants, and you need to make sure they’re working.

You need to make sure, like if there’s like an issue, if there’s flooding or anything, you need to keep track of all these assets.

We’re still doing it as we did it 20 years ago

20 years ago, how do you keep track of like these assets, what. Is you have to send someone driving their truck and check if the lift station is actually working or there’s like a light or an alarm.

So they drive by it and they see if the alarm is like on. Then there’s an issue. Nowadays you can do this with just looking at your phone and checking whether the sensors that are attached to this lift station, whether it’s working or not.

For example, like with this simple technology, the technical name is the remote scada or the remote monitoring of these remote assets. You would think every utility has it, but in reality there are some utilities today still using a technology that’s called auto dialers, which is basically when something goes wrong with your lift station, there is like a connected to the towers and the intranet to calls your phone.

In 21st century you would think this technology is outdated, but still people are using it.

Getting early customer feedback on potential evolutions

So for us, this is how we sell it to the customers. We give them an example, we tell them, okay, how do you do this job? Let’s give you a pilot. Let’s try a pilot and like tell us how is your life?

Afterwards, this is how we can attack it from like a need and necessity than kind of just like, oh, because it’s like fancier to have like, this dashboard where you look at all the numbers, so it’s like addressing a certain need.

How to build up your water impact as an investor

Antoine Walter: Once you’ve identified that need and you want to address it, how do you address it?

What, what’s your vehicle for impact?

Meshal Alduraywish: This is where it comes kind of like our portfolio companies now, we have a, a platform, a digital water platform where it’s focused at finding these technologies that the water sector needs them and then introducing these technologies to them from the pain point. And we do this through our extensive network of companies and distribution networks throughout the US and by actually going, talking to the operators, understanding their issues, inviting them over, having them learn more about the technology.

And like slowly have them adopt these technologies. And what we see, we start with some systems that are 30, 50 lift stations, each would require sensoring, et cetera. Usually they start with one, we don’t have a problem. Takes them probably like couple of months, if not a year to adopt one or two.

From pilot to beachhead to becoming mainstream

But then later you see them asking for more and more and it just like, you see the curve upward trending, but it happens with every customer. But then the good thing is like because of how the water sector is structured, it’s very local and people need to see it before they actually adopt it.

Mm-hmm. by having a technology introduced into a certain community, after some time we start seeing other customers coming because they saw their neighbor. Is actually using his phone to check the performance of his assets. So there’s like, kind of like the word of mouth, but also being close to your customers, listening to them and understanding their concerns.

You know, no one is gonna go to Amazon and like buy the latest sensoring technology, even if it’s like way cheaper and it’s like way accessible because it can get to your door. People need to trust you need to see it. There is a, a kind of like natural. to adapting the technology.

A cheat sheet to doing research as an investor in the Water Sector

Antoine Walter: Can you take us a bit behind the scenes to understand how you run your research?

Because what you’re hinting to sounds like something we experienced out there in the field, that digitization is late in the sector, that it covers a lot of needs, that if you want to go distributed, you need something to power it and digitization will be that vehicle to power it. But beyond this kind of good sense, common sense, which are the facts you’re building on to identify a trend?

Meshal Alduraywish: That’s a, a good question, basically this is the first question I asked myself, how can I do it? When I was first assigned this task of building our digital platform and like doing the research, I mean starting with kind of like top down, what are the research out there?

What are the challenges that the water sector is facing? I’m kind of like, this is the macro view. , which basically everyone knows you can find it in Google. It’s just like accessible. Mm-hmm. easy to find, easy to do, but you need structure it, clean it, and then the next kind of like. Step, which many people struggles actually going and like talking to the people, understanding from the people who are on the ground, how do they perceive these things?

Don’t fall in love with your desktop research: try it out in the field

Countless times when doing the desktop research, I find these technologies that I think are just mind blowing. Like, wow, this technology can actually tells you, for example, where’s your leak detection? Exactly. Like this technology can do this. This is like a no-brainer. Of course every utility is gonna jump over it and like adopt it.

And then you go and talk actually to the operators and like understand their concerns, understand their challenges, their resource limitation, budget limitation. Then you recalibrate your sense of like these technologies. That’s why you are working as a technology provider, as like someone who’s like introducing or investing in new technologies.

Sometimes I see there’s a mismatch between what’s needed and what’s being offered, and to answer your questions through our portfolio companies because we have. Direct access to them. They are in the first line, we get all kind of insights and firsthand experience of what will work, what’s not gonna work.

And also, especially through CSWR, since they’re the case in point here, they experience all these different challenges

How do water investors measure their impact?

Antoine Walter: to round of that, that conversation. I’d like to have a crystal ball question. You’re looking at the trends. You’re looking at how to action the. Do you have a kpi which tells you that you had actually an impact on a five or 10 years outlook?

Meshal Alduraywish: We’re now in the process of developing our KPIs across their portfolio to Okay, quantify this. But I think one of the tangible impact we see, and like we hear this from our customers is that you go and introduce the technology of like, let’s say remote monitoring into like a certain utility, but then you hear back, it’s like, oh, actually now we’re attracting younger generation because the perception of operating utility and like, not necessarily like tech savvy, but no, we’re actually giving you the opportunity to use technology, utilize technology to make your life easier.

So then we see, because we offer also like customization and different kind of services, we see customers coming to us saying, okay, so can you add, for example, different kind of sensors or can you add, like for example, we have this customer, they monitor tank level, which is like basic.

An example of rolling out KPIs

You find it everywhere. But then they realize the value of like sensoring the value. Like monitoring the value of data. They were like, okay, so we have issues with the tank maintenance and how sometimes there are cracks, there are leaks that we didn’t know about until after it happens. So how can we solve it with this technology?

For example, like working, like technologies that address emerging issues that are not, like if you go on like Google sensor, To help me with the tank cracks, it’s not there. You know, we work with our customers to develop the next gen technologies to help them address their issues. So to your question, how do we know whether the impact is there or not is by them kind of reacting and like even like wanting more to adopt even more.

So this is something, positive and we hope to see at. Some point that the water sector is like caught up with like the other industries. And even further

Antoine Walter: to round off these interviews, I have a couple of rapid fire questions. So it’s short questions, aiming too short answers, but I’m never cutting the microphone.

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Rapid Fire Questions

The first one is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Meshal Alduraywish: Talked a lot about digitization, but I think helping water and wastewater utilities to become more digital. And to bring more talents into the water sector where they can like, have impact through digitization and working and technology.

And this is, I think is very exciting. And also kind of like good energy.

Antoine Walter: What is the one single thing which you’re doing today in your job, which you will not be doing in 10 years?

Meshal Alduraywish: I think it’s kind of like ex. Explaining to people why water like matter. Hopefully in 10 years, you know, people will get , why water is something essential and not just like the water we drink, but also the water infrastructure and everything around it.

Antoine Walter: I would love that you’re fully right here. I just fear . We might have to still explain it in 10 years, but fingers crossed And last question for me, what is the trend to watch out for in the water sector, which is not digitization?

Meshal Alduraywish: One trend that we see happening in the water sector, which is not digitization, but also has to do with technology, which is cybersecurity and how now the threat of cybersecurity is very understated.

But also very significant in terms of like the threat and the risk it poses to water systems and like, utilities, but also it’s like a national risk. So I think more focus in terms of like from the different stakeholders is something we’re gonna see emerging and it’s an opportunity for small companies, operators, and everyone is like to start.

Ahead of the game.

Antoine Walter: Awesome. Well, thanks a lot for sharing this, insights this behind the scenes, and I’ll let you have a good rest of the conference. Thanks. Thank you

Meshal Alduraywish: so much. Thanks a lot. 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 What do you Need to Know to Invest Wisely in Water Technologies? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

with Antoine Walter – Podcaster in Chief at (don’t) Waste Water

(don’t) Waste Water is the Water Industry’s reference podcast pursuing this simple mission: Understand Water, Solve the World!

TED Talk: What’s the Value of Your Poop?

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How do Spaceships deal with Water?

There are two inhabited spaceships in the Universe.

The first one is the International Space Station, which has many perks. Think of it:

• It offers a stunning view of the stars.
• It is equipped with the best human technology.
• It gets rid of boring things like gravity.

But the ISS also has a major drawback: it doesn’t have any natural resources. No air, and no water, unless someone brings some.

Water in the International Space Station costs 22’000$ per Liter

So every quarter, you have a new spacecraft at the door. Who’s that? John or Igor, depending on who’s turn is on, I’m here for the water delivery. Oh great, how much would that cost? Well, 22’000 dollars per Liter.

How much?!

Sure, that’s expensive! But it also makes sense. To bring that water up to the space station’s door, you have to build a rocket, gather a crew, plan and perform a launch, burn a gigantic amount of fuel and ultimately pay for John or Igor’s salary.

The ISS reuses 80% of its Water

Now the beauty of that is that I’m a water engineer. And with such a clear benchmark, I can dive into my process book and find out a way to produce water at a cheaper expense.

This is how, since the beginning of the international space station’s life, water has been reused, first at 60% and nowadays at 80%, thanks to upgraded technology.

What does that mean? Well, let’s say that an astronaut drinks a cup of coffee; he will ultimately pee a good portion of that coffee, that pee will get re-treated, and the next day he’ll somewhat drink the same coffee again! 

Bottom line:

• We have all the technology it takes to run water in a circle.
• It’s safe and healthy.
• We can do it for much cheaper than 22’000 dollars a liter.

We only reuse 4% of the Water on Earth

So now, if we look at the second inhabited spaceship, also known as Earth. There’s something weird in the way its 8 billion crew deals with water.

Indeed, only about 4% of the water gets reused today – even though we’ve seen that we technologically can easily reuse 20 times more.

Maybe, that’s because we have plenty of water on the blue planet, and hence everybody already has their fair share of it!

If I was to poll you today, I’m pretty sure I would get that answer. Water? Yeah, we have water!

3 proofs we don’t have enough water, though

Yet, projections show that by 2030, we will be missing 40% of the water we need for our World to strive. Water to drink, water to irrigate our crops, and water to feed our industry. 

By 2030 still, we estimate that 700 million people could be displaced by water scarcity. To give you a sense of scale, that’s ten times more than the second world war!

Finally, today, 2.2 billion people still don’t have access to a safe source of drinking water.

But if we have the technology to solve these problems, how can it be that we still face them?

Well, technology is one thing; finding the money to pay for it is another one.

So what would be Earth’s budget for one Liter of safe drinking water?

Planet Earth has a 0.0075$ budget per Liter of water to Reuse. Is it enough?

If you remember, the calculation to get to John or Igor’s invoice for the space station was simple: NASA added up all the costs and divided it by the number of liters to supply. 

Thanks to Gary White and Matt Damon, we can actually do kind of the same for Earth. 

Why “kind of”? Because the founders of Water.org have calculated what they called water’s coping costs. Basically, it sums up all the costs involved by the absence of safe drinking water.

Water’s coping costs: how much does it cost not to have access to safe drinking water?

People will have to walk around for hours to get to a water source; they will have to boil it; they will lose working hours or school hours to do so; they will still sometimes get sick and need care, and so on, and so on.

All of that together costs the World, every year, 300 billion dollars.

So let’s do the maths. We have a 300 billion dollars yearly budget, which we have to divide by 2.2 billion people without access to safe drinking water, who each need 50 Liters a day, 365 days per year.

This provides us with a budget of 0.0075 dollars per Liter. Or 0.75 cents per Liter.

Let’s make a side-by-side comparison. 

A side-by-side comparison between water management on the ISS and water reuse on Earth

An astronaut on the ISS needs 0.5 Liter of water per day. A human on Earth, though, needs one hundred times more!

And while an astronaut’s budget per Liter is 22’000 dollars, an habitant of Earth only has 0.75 cents.

If we do the maths again, that’s a 300 million times smaller budget.

Houston, we have a problem!

So what can we afford for 0.75 cents per Liter? Well, let’s take the problem the other way around, what would we need to turn wastewater into drinking water?

How much does it cost to reuse wastewater?

First, you would need to screen the water, to remove the large floating things, then use a fine screen to remove smaller particles, oil, and grease, while some sludge gets sedimented and extracted from the bottom.

You then send your wastewater to bioreactors, where microorganisms break down organic matter, and then send your water to clarifiers to separate the microorganisms from the water.

At that stage, you have sludge on one end – and we’ll come back to that later – and treated wastewater on the other end. 

That water is clean enough to be safely discharged to the environment, yet, it’s not potable yet. 

After wastewater treatment, wastewater reclamation

So, if you want to turn that water into drinking water, you need to undergo a new process. You feed that water to a first ultrafiltration pre-treatment, then reverse osmosis, and finally, you disinfect it using ultraviolet.

Now, you can drink that water. And studies prove that this kind of water is of better quality than any other source of drinking water. 

But I do get that even if perfectly treated, you maybe still don’t want to drink water that just went through your neighbor’s body. By the way, every molecule of water we have today, went through a dinosaur at some point. But arguably, that was a long time ago, that’s psychology, and I’m not arguing against it because I only have 14 minutes today. 

And now, Drinking Water Production

So let’s do the following. We take that perfectly drinkable water, we mix it with some other good source of water, be it rainwater, river water, or groundwater, and we treat it again.

We take that water, we run a coagulation and a flocculation, then we remove large particles in a sedimentation, then we filter it, we disinfect it with a combination of ozone and activated carbon to remove any possible micropollutant, we finetune the water with Lime, Chlorine, Fluoride and Ammonia and now we serve it to your tap.

It already was the safest possible water; we still treated it a second time, so now the only question that can be left is: how much does it cost?

Will it fit our 0.75 cents per Liter budget?

Well, that entire treatment train costs 0.27 cents per Liter. How do I know? Well, that’s the exact process Singapore is using to reuse its wastewater and cover 40% of its water needs today and 50% by 2030.

So, with our 0.75 cents per Liter budget, we can cover three times the cost of wastewater reuse.

And that’s not the end of it.

Wastewater is Renewable Energy

We’ve seen how you can efficiently take water out of wastewater and potentially solve many issues. But if I take water out of the wastewater word, I’m left with just “waste.”

Yet all these things mixed with water are everything but waste!

That’s where it gets colorful. Ready?

A human produces 5 tons of poop in his life

On average, every human on Earth produces about 5 tons of poop over his lifetime.

You know, sometimes I wonder. How often have humans looked at the sun before realizing the energy value it has? How often have humans felt a wind breeze before realizing all the energy it represented?

So here’s an existential question. When you go to the toilet, do you look at your poop? And if you do, what do you see?

Well, exactly like the sun or wind, your poop is a source of renewable energy!

Zero Carbon by 2050 commands for Renewable Energies

And talking of energy, if we want to limit the effects of climate change in the next century, we know that we have to phase out fossil fuels like oil and gas with the vision to reach a global net-zero emission by 2050.

In 2050, we will be 10 billion humans on Earth, happily pooping 5 tons of shit each over our lifetime.

How much energy would that represent? Well, translated into clever wastewater engineer lingo, that pee and poo become chemical oxygen demand. 

10 billion humans on Earth produce one million tons of chemical oxygen demand every day. And a series of studies conducted by Elisabeth Heidrich determined each gram of chemical oxygen demand to represent 16.1-kilo Joules of Energy.

I know you love maths, but I’ll save you the calculation details. Here’s the bottom line: that makes for 4’472 gigawatt-hour of energy every day and about 1’600 Terawatt-hour of energy every year.

Wastewater is Liquid Energy!

That’s the equivalent of 320 nuclear power reactors or 140 million tons of oil being burned in thermic power plants.

Just with pee and poo, just with our households, not even talking of the untapped pool of industrial wastewater!

But, there’s a but.

This energy really is in our wastewater, but we haven’t yet found the perfect treatment process to tap into it. 

There are very promising prospects with:

Microbial Fuel Cells

See, for instance what Cambrian Innovation does:

Microbial Electrolysis Cells

A topic we’ve covered in the past with Aquacycl and Microrganic Technologies:

Supercritical Water Oxidation

And if you remember right, we’ve discovered SCWO with 374Water:

And interestingly enough, many of these technologies have been seeded by NASA – because mastering them would be very useful to life on the international space station, the moon, or Mars.

Yet, I can’t reasonably ask you for such a moon shot today.

Luckily, there’s a steady, proven technology that taps into some of this potential, and that’s already fully available today! 

The Workhorse that enables to tap into Wastewater’s Energy: Anaerobic Digestion

That technology is anaerobic digestion.

What it does is pretty simple. It mimics your body’s digestion to turn some of the wastewater sludge into biogas. And that’s already pretty efficient for tapping into wastewater’s energy: depending on the studies and the technology you leverage, you can extract about 40% of wastewater’s chemical energy!

That’s already 56 million fewer tons of oil to burn every year: thank you, emoji Poo!

So, we’ve seen that wastewater reuse can cover your water needs and that it can support covering your energy needs. What else can it do for you? Well, it can feed you!

Wastewater Reuse can Feed the World

To feed the 10 billion people I just alluded to, by 2050, the World will have to increase its food calorie production by about 50%.

To do so, like it or hate it, we need fertilizers. And our wastewater contains ammonia and urea, which makes it a potentially great source of nitrogen-based fertilizers! We could actually cover 30% of the World’s needs just with what’s in our sewers.

In the same spirit, phosphorus is a mineral in finite quantity on Earth, heavily mined today in China and Kazakhstan, then sent around the World for a variety of applications, like, for instance, fertilizers. Well, our pee and poo could, for instance, fully cover our white phosphorus needs, and that’s not science fiction; it is currently rolled out in Germany.

And wastewater reuse can also unlock resource recovery

Well, if at that stage you’re still not convinced that there’s a treasure in your wastewater, let me be even more literal with rapid-fire examples. Industrial wastewater is rich in lithium, which we can extract and valorize in batteries!

We all pee about three liters of potassium every year – which we could sell for about 40 dollars.

Recovering the toilet paper we flush in our toilets would cover 7% of the World’s Pulp & Paper demand – so much fewer trees to be cut.

And there’s heat trapped in our wastewaters, which, if recovered and by my podcast guest Aaron Tartakovsky‘s count, could power all the electric cars on the road in the United States.

Let’s wrap up.

Conclusion: Let’s reuse more wastewater!

The water alone contained in wastewater justifies treating and reusing that wastewater. And if today, we only treat 56% of the World’s sewage and we only reuse a fraction of it, the rise of water scarcity will be a strong driver for adoption. 

Even better, wastewater treatment plants can transform into water resource factories that produce not only water but also energy and a bunch of valuable raw resources.

That will not only support the decarbonization of our World, but it will also enable us to really enter into the new realm of a circular economy. 

Water reuse is already well developed in certain areas

And that circularity exists at many scales, from the treatment unit in the building’s basement to the country-wide approaches in Singapore or Israel, through the city strategies in Los Angeles, or the community projects in India, Africa, or Brazil.

The beauty of the field is that there’s no right or wrong approach to reuse. As long you reuse.

Fast-forward to your next visit to the toilets. Look up your poo. That’s an investment, and if things are done the right way, you’re gonna see the windfall of it at some point!

Think of it before you flush. 

Download my Latest Book - for Free!

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 What’s the Value of Your Poop? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

with Upmanu Lall – Director of the Columbia Water Center

The Columbia Water Center aims to creatively tackle water challenges of a rapidly changing world where water and climate interact with food, energy, ecosystems, and urbanization.

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

How many of the water challenges we face fly under the radar in places where no one actually expects them – and what to do about it

How centralized infrastructure may not be future-proof and how decentralized and distributed systems rapidly take over

How that takeover of decentralized water treatments already induced a kind of post-utility era in places like India

What the rapid evolution of the Amazon Water Filter segment tells about the expectations of end-users and the reactivity of some sections of the Water Industry

How the rethink goes beyond under the sink water filter to also address flood mitigation, engineering approaches, and risk management

How the best example for a successful roll-out of new water management approaches may well come from China

The Columbia Water Center and its missions, disrupting century-old approaches, reinventing water utilities, leveraging digitization… and much more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Upmanu on LinkedIn.

Check Columbia Water Center’s website 

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser 1 – Water disruptions are happening right now – and not only in remote places

Teaser 2 – The Difference between Centralized and Decentralized Water Infrastructure

Teaser 3 – 70-75% of the costs lies in the Water network and pumps: is there another way?

Teaser 4 – Set quantitative targets or you’re just talking!

Teaser 5 – Amazon Water Filters have been rapidly evolving in a short period of time

Teaser 6 – Central Water Utilities won’t like the new opportunities in radical decentralization!

Full Video: My conversation with Upmanu Lall

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, Upmanu. Welcome to the show!

Upmanu Lall: Hi, how are you today?

Introducing the Columbia Water Center

Antoine Walter: It’s interesting because I’m hosting the host. I’m here in your house somehow. What is the Columbia Water Center?

Upmanu Lall: The Columbia Water Center got established in 2008, and the idea was to, from an academic perspective, study issues related to global water sustainability. And to do it specifically with the idea that we would start solving problems because a lot of academia studies what’s going on and reports on the problems, but not so much on what we can do to actually change that situation. Hence rethinking water!

What is the Columbia Water Center?

The Columbia Water Center is a research center at Columbia University that focuses on water resource management and climate change. It is based at the Earth Institute at Columbia University in New York City. The center conducts research, provides education and training, and works with governments, organizations, and communities to develop and implement solutions to water resource challenges.

Some of the research areas that the Columbia Water Center focuses on include water availability, quality, and accessibility; water-related disasters and their impacts; and the role of water in sustainable development.

The center also works on projects related to water governance, policy, and finance, as well as the intersection of water and energy. Overall, the goal of the Columbia Water Center is to improve the management of water resources and promote the sustainability of water systems in the face of changing climate conditions.

What is it that we should solve about Water?

Antoine Walter: So you’re looking for solutions, but that has to start with identifying the problems. What are the most pressing challenges?

Upmanu Lall: Water is one of those most interesting things in the sense that the number of problems that people bring to you is unlimited.

If you pay attention to the way the UN presents the situation; it’s a water sanitation health issue. We have people who don’t have access to clean water. We have people who don’t have access to the ability to discharge wastewater. So these are the most publicized problems associated with water.

If you look at it from a sustainability perspective, people start talking to you about scarcity and places where people are no longer able to grow crops. Obviously, they don’t have access to water as such. These are things that I think get well publicized.

Water challenges in unexpected places often come more as a surprise

The fact that even in places such as the United States, People have these issues today similar to what perhaps were experienced in the 1920s, and they’re unsolved comes as a bit of a surprise sometimes. But maybe there are not so many such people.

Water issues also mean floods. Water issues also mean that we will have droughts in a place that is normally well-stocked with water. In that context, we had a few years ago, Cape Town and Rio as day zero. So they got a lot of publicity.

It’s not that easy for people to connect to these issues in their own life because they seem remote. Jakarta, with a lot of pumping, is now going to be replaced by a new city because it’s sinking. Oh, that’s interesting. It’s Jakarta. It’s not happening here. Well, it is happening in California. It is happening in Houston.

Going from problem to solution in tangible actions

It’s happening in various places. We just don’t realize that sometimes. So one of the things as an academic institution is yes, we want to bring the solution to those problems. Think about what are the ways by which we can solve them. And solution here means something that is technical, something that is financial, and then how is it going to be implemented and stay fixed?

Not that, you know, somebody flies in, has a flashy thing, and then a couple of years later, there’s nothing to show. It’s an academic field in that sense because what we are studying is the diagnosis of the problem. All the way through to sustainable solutions, from an interdisciplinary perspective, and that’s what we do at the Columbia Water Center.

Rethinking Water in Concrete Steps

Antoine Walter: So when you say you have to rethink water, how does that translate into facts?

Upmanu Lall: Yeah, so let, let’s take one example because it’s useful to actually get specific on these things. So the way our urban water infrastructure is designed nowadays for the last century has been dominated by what is called centralized treatment systems.

And what is meant by a centralized system is that typically you may have one large water treatment plant, one large reservoir, one large well field… And these are all where you collect the water, store the water, treat the water, and then it’s piped to every place where it is needed on the return side.

Because most of this water is in an urban setting, maybe 90% of the water actually is not evaporated or lost. So it’s brought back as wastewater. And so that’s in large sewers. It’s pumped to a central location, and treated there to some standard, which would meet environmental needs. And then discharged.

A city that’s downstream of that location perhaps picks that up, treats it some more and supplies it to the people.

Rethinking centralized water infrastructure

So this is kind of the structure that we have developed. It’s difficult to maintain this infrastructure. The cost of maintaining it is not borne fully by the people, and as a result, there’s default maintenance, and it breaks. And then, since the cost of replacing all this is huge, and there’s no subsidy available to do that, this just gets worse and worse and worse.

So that’s a situation, that’s a problem that’s evolved over time. There was nothing wrong with the original thinking, perhaps because they were recognizing that there were economies of scale in building one large treatment system. Economies of scale in building a large reservoir because you don’t use up as much land as you would for storing the water in many places, and you won’t hire as many chemists as you would need to run treatment plants in lots of different locations.

So the rethinking today is that we realize that once you look at the existing systems, around 70 to 75% of the cost is actually in the pipes and pumps, not in the treatment and not in the storage. So you look at that and say, well, these pipes are failing, and they cost half a million a mile to replace, and people aren’t willing to do that replacement.

So they’re putting, you know, bandages all over the place. Should we keep doing that, or is there a different way of approaching that?

Digitization offers new perspectives on water management

And today, one thing that is different than at the beginning of the 20th century is that we have a lot of digital information that we can gather using sensors and actually even control infrastructure systems remotely.

You don’t really need ten chemists at ten treatment plants. And ten pump operators at ten pumps to do this. We can do all this remotely, and when we look at things such as Flint, Michigan, where people are talking about lead pipes and so on, what we learned there is that really there was no excuse for these people to be drinking water, which contained lead for two whole years before someone made a story out of it.

We should have been able to sense that we should have had sensors at the point of view, which told us this was what was going on. So once you realize that and you say:

Hey, I really would like to have in my kitchen where I drink the water. Something that tells me is okay, or it’s not okay.

Kitchen Water Filters and Under The Sink Sensors: The Future?

I don’t need to know the details of 50 types of analysis. I just need to know yes or no. Yeah, if I could do that, then if I could put in a treatment system just in my kitchen and at the output of that, I could see that this was okay. That’s fine. I don’t need my shower water. I don’t need my toilet water treated to the same standard as my kitchen. So the rethinking now goes to, okay, if this becomes feasible.

Maybe the wastewater that I’m generating could be treated and reused also, maybe not just at my house scale, but maybe at my neighborhood scale. And if that is possible, I’m really shooting for a much higher quality of service and safety for myself. But this is going to cost. Where do I save the money?

Oh, I could save the money on not having these giant pipes bringing all of this stuff to me because if I can deal with more localized systems, the smaller pipe would cost a lot less and. It turns out that this story is true. So there’s one concrete example of how we are rethinking what our infrastructure system today looks like, how it has evolved, and where it needs to go.

Are we Rethinking or Disrupting Water?

Antoine Walter: But that is maybe beyond rethinking. That is disrupting because, yes, basically, you’re saying the central utility time is over. Let’s go to the distributed era and let’s go to a water fit for purpose. Hence the specific water filters for drinking water and maybe different types for the washing machine and so on.

Upmanu Lall: This was one example. If I talk about floods, we have other examples. So what’s happening today is that a lot of environmental groups are pushing the idea that we should do green infrastructure for flooding. We should use nature to control this. Historically, what did we do? We built levies.

Another field to rethink: flood management

We built big dams to control flooding. So this is going in the other direction, and in reality, if you think about it, there’s merit to both. Because if you have a very extreme event, there’s no way that nature-based solutions will win. There’s a limited amount of effectiveness that you can have.

So nuisance flooding events, moderate flooding events, you, you could probably reduce the impact of those. But then you need something which is bigger. If you build only the bigger thing, then you have a huge expense. You have a dislocation of people. That’s not a great idea either. So how do you combine those two?

Rethinking water risk mitigation and insurance

And then the third piece there that comes up is what? Insurance. So what people do is that they think about insurance, but the government subsidizes that insurance so people live there, and that overall increases the risk. The insurance company doesn’t really give you credit for having flood risk reduction associated with it.

So if you start thinking in a new way, and it’s being done at a community scale or at a city scale, now we have to start thinking about where are we going to give permits to people to actually locate what should be located there. So that’s a zoning issue. In combination with that, if we are going to build infrastructure for flood control, where is it most effective and where are we going to put in a nature-based solution?

Rethinking water management and policies

And where are we? Where are we going to put in something that takes up land, which could be used for other things? So this combination of approaches has to bring together, Landscape architects. It has to bring together people who are going to develop real estate for a joint solution. One of the imperatives that will drive these kinds of things is that even where we already have our buildings and we have the infrastructure and things are exposed. That exposure is changing very rapidly with climate change, with sea level rise, and with very dramatic changes in flood potential in the urban setting. Floods are manifest through sewers, and floods are manifest through rivers overflowing, so those are two dynamics.

Last October in New York, eight people died from basements being flooded because the sewers could not contain the water from the storm. Part of this was because the storm was extraordinary. Not unprecedented. Part of it was because the sewers were blocked. So these sewers, even though they may have been overdesigned at some point, they have not been maintained.

So they’re choked. They have trash in there, and they had not cleared it. So as a result, we look at this situation and we say, okay, this was a one-off situation, but if you think about this in the long run, how should we be rethinking it? Clearly, in a place like Manhattan or Queens, there’s not that much opportunity for nature-based solutions.

Dynamic sewers will play an increased role in dense urban settings

You cannot create new parks. You can capture a certain amount of water on people’s roofs, but what do you do with it? Then maybe we can use that water, but still, there’s a limit to what you can do with that. So in this situation, are we going to tear up the streets and put in big pipes? Or are we going to put in a maintenance solution such as robots that regularly clean these?

Obviously, that’s one of the things we have to be considering. We don’t have storage in a place like Manhattan, but we have an extensive sewer network, which is large pipes. If you think about storms, the storms move from the south through the north, or the storms come in from the east and go to the west. So, If we were to start thinking about where is the water coming into the sewers and where is it going?

Montreal has already done some experiments where they have gates and pumps. The sewer system itself is using use for storage. So where at the moment we don’t really have that much rain coming in, water is pumped from other areas to those sewers. Mm-hmm. and around in other ways. So we have to start thinking about more active rather than passive solutions.

What is the current level of Water Risk in the US?

Antoine Walter: Part of the diagnosis is to measure how many people might be at risk. And if I recall right, you’ve been researching the number of Americans exposed to potentially bad infrastructure. If I’m right, you found out that 63 million Americans are exposed to these bad conditions, which makes up about 20% of the population.

Upmanu Lall: This is an interesting question. Depending on what you look at, the number of people exposed obviously will be quite different. Right now, I would say there are about one-fourth of the population is exposed to something to do with drought. During the pandemic, we had major supply chain issues that emerged because of the inability to go get people to work and to do things of that sort.

During the drought and flood combination with the pandemic, we have seen that much of the agricultural productivity has suffered, but the mobility of goods has suffered in the process. If I look at it from that perspective, the fact that cherries that come from California normally come in the summer, Cost around $3 a pound.

In New York this summer, it’s been seven or $8 a pound. If you get what I’m driving at, it’s not 63 million. The entire country’s population has been impacted by that particular event because financially, the affordability of the kind of things that they’re used to, and their quality of life has been impacted.

How do you roll-out the new Water normal?

Antoine Walter: When you’re making this scenario where we might be going more distributed, we might leverage nature-based solution when possible and when not possible, we might go for more gray engineering approaches with the pumping of the sewers. How much of that gets then executed in the facts, and how do you at the Columbia Water Center help those ideas become true?

Upmanu Lall: The amount of new ideas that get executed varies. Obviously, this is a very slowly evolving sector. I think that is true. On the other hand, as the needs grow, so does the speed of solutions. And we have reached a point where most of our infrastructure in the United States is now quite old. So something has to be done, and the climate trigger is accelerating that timeframe.

So I think things will change. What I will say is that we have worked around the world on every continent at this point, including Australia. And clearly, things change at very different rates in different places. Much of the water stories are in the public sector, so it really depends on how effective the public sector is in different places.

Can China become a Water role model?

The country that I’ll call out is China. The rate at which interesting solutions and innovative solutions are being implemented in China is really impressive, and I think. Just as the world looked to America in the 20th century for, you know, being the standard bearer for what should be done. If we don’t really move here, China will be the standard bearer.

Things are changing so rapidly in China that I would say, even up to five or ten years ago, they were looking at American companies to come in and do whatever it was that they needed services for. Just as is the case with electronics, you know, so we look at Apple products being made in China, and people talk about how the Chinese are very good at copying IP and other things from the US all that may be true, but at the same time, the indigenous innovations that are coming out of China, especially in the deployment of technology, are truly remarkable.

You know, if you look at the electric vehicle, we have the Tesla story, but in China there are 40 or 50 Tesla like stories, including vehicles that are very small to vehicles that are very large, and they’re on the ground, they’re being sold, and they’re being deployed at prices at $3,000 on up to a hundred thousand dollars.

Replicating what was proven to work

So the scale of innovation and deployment, you know, in that kind of a governance system is quite remarkable. The world will have no choice but to emulate that.

Antoine Walter: So have five years plan and having ambitious targets, which say COD might not be higher than 50 milligrams per liter. I do know it’s the strictest worldwide, but still, let’s do it.

Upmanu Lall: The way I’ve been approaching this when I give talks is, So, for example, I learned quite a lot from Professor Jeffrey Sachs when he was the head of the Earth Institute here.

One of the things he did was set the millennium development goals, and his point was that if you don’t set quantitative targets, you don’t know really what you’re trying to achieve; you’re just talking.

What do our main stakeholders expect from their water management?

I have taken that, and it’s very difficult to say what should be a quantitative target for what in different places. So I’ve translated that to the following, if you are a consumer, because ultimately that’s what this is about; it’s not about a government agency doing something for some reason. It’s about the ultimate user of the water and the person who wants to be protected from the flood.

What are your aspirations? You should say them out clearly. If you say that I should be drinking water, which has no contaminants at all, and I want to be able to measure it, you should state that as an aspiration and say, I want that for the same price as I pay for water now, which is not safe. That sets a target and if enough consumers say that there will be someone who’ll step up to do that.

And this is happening from the private sector today, and I think that some of it is great, some of it will have to change.

An example of customer engagement: the evolution of Amazon Water Filters

One example I’ll give you there is five years ago, if you went to Amazon and you wanted to buy a reverse osmosis filtration system for your kitchen, you were looking at spending $500 for the unit, and you would buy filters separately.

It would reject two-thirds of the water you put into it as waste, a relatively low-pressure system. Today, if you go to Amazon, there will be more vendors than you saw five years ago. And for between a hundred to $200, you’ll get a system exactly like that with one year of filters included. And for $500, you get something that rejects less than 25% of the water coming into it.

Actually, it will perform a lot better than any of the other systems and has all kinds of sensors and stuff like that, telling you what you’re actually consuming. So why did this happen? It’s because a lot of consumers who could afford it started going there and asking for this, and I think that’s the kind of thing that will start changing things more rapidly than anything else.

Will we enter the post-utility era?

Antoine Walter: So when we are further developing or trying to fix the global infrastructure, we are pushing a dead body because that’s not future-proof? I’m being extreme here, I know, but…

Upmanu Lall: I think you are right in some ways. The very first thing we talked about in this conversation was the centralized large infrastructure versus a decentralized one.

It’s not clear that an existing utility that operates that centralized infrastructure is very excited about changing. If we keep pushing on people who are doing that, it’s not clear that you’re going to go anywhere very easily.

If you start from the consumer end and the consumer says, what you’re giving me is crap and I’m paying a hundred dollars for it.

I can turn around, install a wastewater treatment system, and then a reverse osmosis system after that. So I. Water, which I know of a very high quality, and I can do that at a per unit cost, which is less than what you’re charging. Hmm. I’ll pay you for the incoming water because I can’t generate that under by.

I do some rainwater harvesting myself, which maybe someone will start doing and I’m changing the game!

Water utilities may have to reinvent themselves

Now, where is the revenue for this dead beast, the large infrastructure guy going to come from in that situation? They will not like it. They will not like you to enter into that game, whatever that game is.

But slowly, it will happen. Whether it is happening through people outsourcing the water supply or it’s happening through innovation? That’s the only question.

Antoine Walter: It’s even happening more than slowly. Because if you look at the curves for the investment in bottled water in the US compared to utility water… Next year bottled water will outperform utility water.

That means already today, in the US, you would be spending more on bottled water.

A country in the post-water utility era: India

Upmanu Lall: In India, at this point, there is no household, which is middle class and above, that does not have a reverse osmosis system in their kitchen. That’s how it has become. Okay. And the reason for that is, you know, when I was growing up as a kid, we had water metering.

I lived in a city that was at a very high standard. It was designed by Le Corbusier. And so, you know, it was modern India in, in effect, the quality of water supply was high Western standards. And the, uh, the bills were, you know, there today, that same city gets two hours of water in the morning and two hours of water in the evening.

There’s no way you can maintain the quality of the supply with intermittent supply. So everybody has these, those people tell me that one reason they are in this situation is when they propose to raise rates. People protest. So if they don’t have more money, they cannot improve the system. So there’s solution is we’ll just shut it down most of the time because then I do water.

So you ask, why are people not willing to raise rates because the rate you’re charging them is ridiculously low. Well, we don’t understand. People just don’t want to pay for water. So you go and do some informal sampling. The answer you get most often as well, this is really poor service. Why would I pay for something that is such poor?

So it’s a catch 22 take circle and that’s what I’m seeing is that as the service quality here deteriorates, people’s willingness to pay will go down because we have seen that in India and then they start relying on alternate solutions. I think this debt based that we are talking about will have to deal with this sooner or later.

Well,

Antoine Walter: Upmanu have so many more questions, but I have to be cautious with time. You’re the host here. You probably have to move on.

Upmanu Lall: Thanks! Thank you for the conversation.

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The post Are Amazon Water Filters the Best Way to Quench our Thirst? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

I got to meet with US’s largest consolidator – in less than a decade; they changed the fate of 800 distressed communities across ten states. Why, how, and for which results? What comes next? Let’s explore:

with Josiah Cox, founder and president of Central States Water Resources

Central States Water Resources transforms how water utilities work by acquiring small, often non-compliant systems and then using expertise, technology, and innovation to quickly assess and turn them into reliable infrastructure.

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

What Utility Consolidation actually is and how it can reshape the destiny of small communities

How the US Water and Wastewater scene is still highly fragmented and the consequences of this fragmentation, especially on the lower end of the infrastructure chain

3⃣ The regulatory, financial, and technical burdens of consolidating water systems and how to overcome them

How with 800 M&A moves and 80 in 2021 alone, Central States Water Resources is 1% through its consolidation mission

How CSWR aims to build the appropriate scale between radically decentralized systems and large-scale metropolitan water infrastructure in a distributed fashion

Increased regulations and their consequences, PFAS, Bottled Water, Funding, Solving complex issues with proven technology… and much more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Josiah on LinkedIn.

Check Central States Water Resource’s website 

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser 1 – There are many issues in Small Scale water utilities: solving them can be complex

Teaser 2 – The Story of Central States Water Resources, the Water Utility Consolidator

Teaser 3 – How we have all the technology needed to solve water issues!

Teaser 4 – How CSWR intends to become the US leading Water & Wastewater Utility through consolidation

Teaser 5 – Did the EPA do any good with its PFAS Health Advisory?

Teaser 6 – Decentralized Water and Wastewater Treatment will simply… never happen!

Full Video: My conversation with Josiah Cox

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, Josiah, welcome to the show!

Josiah Cox: Thank you. I’m glad to be here. I appreciate you having me.

Antoine Walter: I have tons of questions for you because, actually, you’ve been mentioned several times by the other people, which appeared on the microphone so far today. But I’d like to have your take first on that simple question:

What is it that we have to rethink in water?

Josiah Cox: I think we need to rethink the value of. Societal value, economic value. All of that is, I think, the overarching theme that I think is being processed through by everyone who’s in the water space right now.

Antoine Walter: Let me jump into it. We both heard this number shared by Seth Siegel about the 51 or 52’000 Water Utilities in the US.

The question which comes next is, what do we do to reduce that number? The obvious answer is that you won’t have people just without water. You need to consolidate and find a way to solve all of that. And actually, you are somehow doing exactly that. Am I right?

Josiah Cox: That’s correct! We’re a water consolidator, and I would even jump and say that I think that number’s wrong.

The US Water and Wastewater Utility Sector is highly fragmented

There are 51,000 water utilities, which I agree with that number cause those are public water supply sources. But in the United States, there are about 35,000 sewer utilities. And that’s both point source discharges and non-discharging spray fields, drip irrigation, and all that.

So the number of the fragmentation’s even higher. And that kind of thing is not often mentioned in the popular news.

Antoine Walter: So when you say you’re a consolidator, how do you do that?

Josiah Cox: We focus on small, typically distressed utilities. I started this firm; I’m the founder of Central States Water Resources, and I really founded it because I was dealing with situations just like we’ve seen in Jackson over and over again.

The Water Infrastructure Crisis is not looming – it’s already here!

So it’s interesting. We’re sitting here at a water conference which is great, but the water infrastructure crisis it’s not looming. It’s already here!

Over and over again, I’ve seen lead in the drinking water serving daycares. I’ve seen receiving water bodies that are biologically dead. I’ve seen places with intermittent water service or water service that they can’t even use their laundry because there’s so much iron in the system…

All that is happening right now. After being exposed to that multiple times, I realized there’s gotta be a private solution to this very public problem.

Consolidating the US Water and Wastewater Utility Market

So I drew my trusty dusty business plan and went to capital markets. And it was interesting because very few people believe consolidation could happen because there are regulatory barriers to entry. All water is local because you can only transport it so far, right? So the amount of on-the-ground education and cross-stakeholder engagement that it takes through an individual small system is high.

The regulatory burden for a small system, all in all, is the same as the regulatory burden for New York City.

It is unbelievable how you can’t bifurcate those things. So knowing that, we realized that there’s a market niche here that no one wants to do cause it’s just a bunch of blocking and tackling.

Consolidating small-size utility systems is hard work

It’s really hard work, and it takes a lot of boots on the ground. And so that’s where we started. And so we started buying utilities in Missouri. And then moved to Arkansas. We’re since in 10 states, soon to be 11 states, kinda across the country, we’re probably the largest water consolidator in the United States today.

Last year, there were 208 M&A water utility transactions. We were 80 of those. We’re really focused on rolling up these small systems and the states we’re in.

We’ve gone to states with the highest amount of fragmentation. The most amount of small systems and the highest amount of regulatory non-compliance. So we’re trying to solve a problem that obviously exists in every state we’re in.

Getting small-size water utility systems back on track

Antoine Walter: Does that mean that one of your criteria to consider the utility is that it has to be in a bad shape?

Josiah Cox: In bad shape is relative, right? So it can be compliance related in the sense that it’s failing drinking water standards or wastewater standards.

It can be aging infrastructure with no financial ability or could be operational non-compliance. You know, we talk about the industry, the silver tsunami that’s coming, and this retirement, the skilled workforce. And so oftentimes, we’re finding communities that maybe their pipes are fine, the plants marginally okay, but they can’t find anyone to run.

All of those factors are the kind of communities we go talk to.

The financial equation to consolidating the US Water and Wastewater Utility Sector

Antoine Walter: Isn’t that kind of a risky move in terms of M&A to go after targets, which obviously aren’t in the best possible shape?

Josiah Cox: You know, starting this company, it took me about two years to raise my first round of capital!

And that was because of the associated risk. Environmental risks, public health and safety risks, political headwinds, All of that.

The great thing about the water business is we have technical solutions to fix every problem. It’s not that technology doesn’t exist; it’s about implementing it across all these stakeholders, getting buy-in, and including the environmental health regulators.

The risk is actually clearly defined. If you’re willing to take this amorphous, nebulous system and get it to a rules-based one, here’s what’s gonna happen. Here’s what needs to happen and get an agreement.

How will Central States Water Resources change the shape of US Water Utilities?

Antoine Walter: So what’s your vision? You made 80 M&A moves last year alone. So that means there are 50,920 left on the water side and maybe another 35,000 left on the wastewater side.

So what’s the limit? Is it to have 80,000 in your portfolio?

Josiah Cox: Great question! I would say for us, we want to be a continuous solutions provider, but you know, all-in-all, at the end of this year, we’ll own 800 individual systems. So we think we’ll be the largest single owner and operator of individual wastewater plants in the United States.

Not large wastewater plants, like the American Waters in the world. They run much bigger stuff than we do from a total connection count. But for individual systems, we’ll be the single largest owner.

CSWR is 1% through its Water and Wastewater Utilities Consolidation Vision

When it comes to our goal, at 800, we’re 1% of the entire market size across the country. We just made a de minimis effect in terms of nationwide. There’s so much work to be done! I Really wanna be the number one water and wastewater provider for small communities in the US.

Antoine Walter: And what’s your horizon for that?

Josiah Cox: I’m gonna be in this business a long time, and it takes a long time to do these things. We’ve got consistent year-on-year growth. That’s way beyond the industry average. So sure, it’ll take us years to do this. But we’re a long-term utility provider. We’re not going anywhere!

Antoine Walter: Why do you have to own the utility? Can’t you just operate it?

Josiah Cox: We made that decision early on, especially with these distressed utilities. And you’ve got small governing entities that oftentimes are running these things. Waterboards, sewer boards, small towns, homeowners associations… We’ve seen the whole gamut!

The day of the mom-and-pop utility is over with increasing regulation and aging infrastructure. And so having a partner that’s part of the kind of mom and pop, if you will, of the industry is really detrimental for a community. So we’ve picked our path. I’m not saying it’s the only path, but we believe it’s one solution for the water industry for sure.

The state of the US Water Consolidation

Antoine Walter: If you’re the biggest consolidator, does that mean there are other ones?

Josiah Cox: Yeah! All the big major investor owners are consolidators to some extent, but they do much larger deals because they’re not focused on small distressed guys. Again, the American waters of the world, the essential utilities, the San Joses, they’re buying utilities.

It’s just that they typically do three deals, four deals a year, and one of those deals is 10,000 connections; where we’re doing 80 deals, and our total connection count in those 80 deals is 40 or 50,000 connections. So it’s about the speed of small transactions rather than chasing a fewer amount of larger transactions.

Could new regulations change the consolidation game?

Antoine Walter: Last summer, the EPA changed some of the rules on PFAS, and one of the consequences, which was studied as a consequence of those new rules, was that smaller utilities wouldn’t like to take the responsibility for even delivering water, which might be contaminated with PFAS at the new thresholds to their citizens.

And hence, they wanted to retreat from the business of being a utility, and that was expected to maybe drive some consolidation. I read that on some lawyers’ websites, and I was like, does that hold water? Not that I want to make a pun, but just to understand if that’s really happening and if it does, is it a driver or is it a risk for a company like yours?

The Influence of EPA’s new PFAS Health Guidance

Josiah Cox: First of all, EPA issued health guidance. They haven’t actually issued any formal rule-making yet, and I would also say from being inside the industry, their health guidance was not helpful!

They issued guidance for levels that are below minimum detection. If I can’t detect it in the water, how am I going to treat it?

Antoine Walter: You mean that you don’t have a sensor for parts per quadrillion? (joking)

Josiah Cox: Yeah, right! I think it caused an unnecessary scare for people. Like, “oh my gosh, this is such a huge health concern.”

And now the current administration’s talking about circle regulation for post-treated PFAS materials, which adds a whole nother layer of legal liability and complexity, which will really impact small municipalities across the entire country. I think once we get through irrational rule-making, that will change quite a bit.

And that’s a multi-year process. So in terms of this prompting a wave of consolidation, time will tell. And I think it’ll take some time for that to all work out, but I don’t see the initial push right now where people are jumping up and down: “I need to get out because of this potential pending PFOA PFAS new regulation coming down the pipe.”

Will the future of US Water Utilities be distributed?

Antoine Walter: How would you describe your company? I’ll explain where I’m coming from. Many of the people I had on that microphone mentioned that they see a future in which we go for more distributed treatments and that will fundamentally change the role of the utility. And somehow, if you now have 800 utility assets under your control and you are one company heading that it sounds like a distributed utility in a certain fashion!

So would you see yourself as a new type of utility with distributed small assets left and right? Or is distributed a risk for disruption for your business model? How do you see that?

Josiah Cox: First of all, I think all the people who talk about this distributed treatment in the water and wastewater business, that’s never gonna happen.

The single largest contributor to life expectancy increase over time is a centralized sewer! So the idea that we’re gonna do these decentralized options, and that they’re gonna solve infrastructure problems… It’s not even the realm of possibility.

Decentralized water and wastewater only works at a certain scale

Now, are there applications in certain rural areas that have a lack of density where those solutions make sense?

Absolutely. I totally get that. But in terms of overturning the conventional way we’re doing water and wastewater treatment… No way. I don’t think that’s even in the realm of possibility.

Maybe that’s controversial! You know, I would agree with you, though, that running a ton of small systems we are an aggregator distributed in the term of small systems across the country, so that is very much what we do every day.

Antoine Walter: Interesting. So you are really absolutely sure that distributed doesn’t hold water (again)?

Josiah Cox: No, it doesn’t at all. When you think of it right now, it’s actually turning in the other direction. Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of homes, probably millions across the country, that are on septic systems.

Radically decentralized water systems are being consolidated right now

These are septic systems that were built 20, 30, and 40 years ago. There’s almost no regulation of these septic systems and almost no maintenance by existing homeowners. So basically, you have partially treated water that is dumped out through some drip irrigation system. And we’re realizing, especially in, like, impaired water bodies across the country, that these failing septic systems are contributing way more than point source discharges to environmental degradation.

I actually think we’re gonna see a wave of centralization of these failing septic systems across the country because there’s not enough property associated with the homes, and nor is there a proven technology that you can fix that issue in such a small footprint with soils that are impermeable, that kind of thing.

I think we’re gonna go the other direction in this country.

Antoine Walter: That’s for the wastewater side of things. What about the water side?

Josiah Cox: Water is the same. You know, water actually lends itself to consolidation much easier than waste water does because it’s easier to distribute, it’s easier to transport.

So we’ll actually see more water consolidation rather than less. And I think you’ll see, especially with these small water districts getting taken out by larger water districts, especially as new regulatory mandates come down and the effects of superstorms and people realizing they can’t afford the resiliency investments that are required, they’ll eventually get outta the business.

Is the US Water Infrastructure sufficiently funded on the long run?

Antoine Walter: Are you concerned when you see that next year or this year – It depends on the statistics – the investment in bottled water in the US is gonna be higher than the investment in Utility water? It’s the first time that those two curves are crossing. They already crossed in Mexico a couple of years ago, and worldwide it is estimated they will by 2034.

Is it a concern that more capital gets invested in bottled water than in utility water? Does that mean that utility water is a dying branch?

Josiah Cox: No, it’s the opposite. It shows how much work there is to do on the water side! Do you think the average family of four thinks to spend 80 to hundred dollars a month on bottled water? Those impacts fall disproportionately on disadvantaged communities.

The problem is we’re not valuing water correctly.

When you think of it, water at your tap costs less than a penny a gallon, and there are people that are paying $5 a gallon for water out of a bottle… The economics don’t make sense.

Revamping US Water Infrastructures and Utilities through consolidation is rapidly becoming vital

But where that comes from is the distrust in the infrastructure that exists today. And I think that’s the gap we have to bridge in terms of fixing infrastructure, explaining to people the value there is inside, starting with the water they’re drinking. Those are the two bridges we gotta cross.

Antoine Walter: How do you overcome a distrust?

Josiah Cox: For the distrust part, you gotta deliver. We’re based in Missouri; side joke, we’re the “show-me state.” So we’re gonna come into a community, do the improvements necessary, and show that we’re gonna increase service. When you take brown water, and you turn it clear, that’s obviously a very clear picture of, “hey, this water’s been changed.”

Beyond, that’s educational. Often people don’t understand, especially on the wastewater side; they don’t get that when they flush a toilet, the waste is not in their house anymore, and they don’t think anything about it anymore. But how do you explain them?

“Oh, this is a human health risk.” “There’s potential pathogens in this water.” “It’s lowering your property value.” Never heard of those things. So it’s a lot of customer engagement, public engagement, and stakeholder engagement to bridge that distrust.

Antoine Walter: I would have a ton more questions. So if at some point you have some time to have a long-form, deep dive, I’d be really happy to have that with you! For today, as I have to be cautious of your time, I’ll just round it off with two rapid-fire questions.

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Rapid Fire Questions

The first is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Josiah Cox: We’re working on a tannin project. We’re removing biological tannins from the deep water well, something we’ve never seen before.

And so the filtration’s not new technology, it’s just the actual constituents, something we’ve never encountered, and we’re gonna be able to completely remove it, radically change this large community’s water quality in fairly short order. So that’s been a pretty fun project to work on!

Antoine Walter: And my last question, what is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Josiah Cox: The interesting one that I don’t know where it’s gonna go, is public-private partnership. You know, obviously, we’re a privatization play, so we’re a pure play water and wastewater utility investor on utility. We’ll see if that gets traction because these small municipalities don’t have the cash flows to do the improvements that are necessary. So can there be an reproachment engagement with the private sector? Whether the municipality still owns the assets that’s yet to be determined.

Antoine Walter: Josiah, it’s been a pleasure, and I really mean it. Whenever you have a bit of time, I’d love to do a deep dive on the matter with you. For now. I’ll leave you to the rest of the conference and thanks a lot!

Josiah Cox: Awesome. Thanks for having me.

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 800 M&A Moves in a Decade, Yet You’ve Never Heard of this Water Utility! appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

with Sean Davis, founder and managing director of Merton Capital Partners, adjunct professor at the Palm Beach Atlantic University, and Author of “Solving the Giving Pledge Bottleneck.”

Merton Capital Partners develops innovative investment strategies to unlock philanthropy’s potential by incentivizing corporations to generate large-scale good in their core businesses.

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

What philanthropic Capital Investment actually is, and what it can do to solve water challenges

How, as surprising as it is, giving philanthropic money away isn’t that straightforward in the absence of suited dealmakers

3⃣ How philanthropists can build a third path beyond traditional market money and grant funds

How the right approach is to blend sources to aim for the maximal impact

How it may take time for that new approach to get widely adopted, and how it is comparable with the 80’s Investment Funds status quo

Affordable Housing, Broken Water Utilities, Inadequate Wastewater Treatment, 21 million people betrayed by their tap, Increasing Awareness… and much more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Sean on LinkedIn.

Check Merton Capital Partner’s website 

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser 1 – How Philanthropy could jump in for the save of 5’000 US Water Utilities

Teaser 2 – How blending capital could enable to protect the Oceans from untreated sewage

Teaser 3 – How People may have heard of Water Tragedies yet aren’t aware of how systemic the Water Challenges are

Teaser 4 – How clever Philanthropic investment can be appealing to private equity billionaires

Bonus Teaser – How Philanthropic Capital can impressively impact Housing projects

Full Video: My conversation with Sean Davis

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi, Sean,. Welcome to the show.

Sean Davis: Hi, how are you? Thanks for having me.

What is Philanthropic Capital Investment?

Antoine Walter: You’re active in a field which I have to confess I didn’t know before. You’re in philanthropic capital investment, so what’s that special beast?

Sean Davis: Don’t feel bad. Most people have not heard of that. Essentially, it’s a new industry where we’re looking to institutionalize the investing of philanthropy.

Today, big philanthropists basically write checks to nonprofits, their school, and their church, but they don’t have ways to invest that philanthropy in larger amounts with managers like private equity got invested back in the 1980s.

Private equity firms didn’t have funds. They were just doing deals, and eventually, that industry was institutionalized.

It can help the Giving Pledge better invest their money

So there’s a lot of philanthropy, primarily the Giving Pledge, philanthropic billionaires who have said they’re gonna give half their money away.

Just the giving pledge is 230 people. It’s about a trillion dollars in capital that is unmanaged. It’s not being offered deals! Actually, it’s very hard to give away that money as a philanthropist.

So we’re basically creating deals where philanthropy can be invested with later-stage private companies that can take in a lot of capital that is inexpensive capital, and that allows ’em to do things with much greater impact. And they have the management teams to deploy the capital.

How can Philanthropy help solve the Water Challenges?

Antoine Walter: So what are the challenges in water that you can address with that vehicle?

Sean Davis: It’s very interesting because until I met Alex Loucopoulos from Sciens Water, I had no idea about the infrastructure problems. So there’s a huge section of solutions that cannot be done today because most of the capital is either market return capital or grant money.

Philanthropy is the third type of capital beyond market return and grant money

A lot of the deals that Sciens Water is doing – they’re buying companies, and they’re building companies, and it’s very exciting what they’re doing – but they have to do it on a market basis.

And then there’s sort of EPA other government money that is grant money, but it’s very, very limited. And so there’s a space where philanthropy can come in and help finance impact at a great level. Distressed water utilities are one, and ocean and land-based solutions for the ocean are another.

Philanthropic Capital can help solve the financial equation for 5’000 failing utilities

The water utilities are quite simple:

There are 5,000 water utilities that have been abandoned that are not doing well in generating polluted water for 21 million Americans.

Antoine Walter: What do you mean by abandoned?

Sean Davis: They ran outta money! There are 52,000 water utilities in the US. Many of them are little. And they don’t have a lot of capital, and they run out of money to continue to upgrade their little water utility.

So it starts running into violations and generating water that’s polluted, and that’s one of the big reasons 21 million Americans, I mean, 21 million… that number is just incredible. They have polluted water at home!

Philanthropic capital can blend with private funds (for the better)

The difficulty is that private water companies can’t go buy these distressed water utilities because the economics doesn’t make sense.

The cost to upgrade is too high for them to obtain their minimum return. So by blending large philanthropy into these deals, you can have the private water company afford purchasing and upgrading and running these water utilities, and we’re talking about a hundred billion of philanthropy that can finance the purchase and acquisition and upgrade of 5,000 little water utilities.

… In theory.

How to roll out philanthropic capital investment?

Antoine Walter: That’s a perfect transition to my question. You say «in theory,» but do you have a concrete example of how that’s rolled out?

Sean Davis: In fact, that’s what we’re working on now. Merton Capital Partners is a startup investment company, and we’re putting together these deals, and it’s essentially kind of what private equity was in the seventies and eighties, putting together deals.

So back then, a company like KKR would look for a company to buy and they would convince a bank and convince some investors that it was good and they should give them the capital to buy. This is kind of what we’re doing now!

Three philanthropic application fields: Affordable Housing, Water and Ocean Protection

We’re mostly focused on affordable housing right now because that’s another area where a hundred billion of philanthropy can easily be invested in affordable housing to really, really have a huge impact.

But water is another area, and oceans are something that we’re seeing more interest in from philanthropy. The ocean’s solution is very, very simple as well. Basically, coastal cities are releasing untreated sewage waste, which is illegal, but again, the governments don’t have the money to increase the capacity of wastewater treatment.

And so they don’t do it because the budget’s not there.

For commercial operators, it’s not economical to go do that. So philanthropy can come in, and with 300 or 400 million of philanthropy, you can probably increase the wastewater capacity in South Florida to bring back the reefs and have an explosion of seagrass that is incredible.

That would be one of the biggest ocean projects, but it’s simple! It’s to go to the wastewater treatment plants and municipalities and just figure out which needs to be increased. It’s kind of boring business. So, it’s just an innovative way that we’re trying to build pilots to prove that this is a good use of philanthropy and a way to partner with big private companies.

How much do people know about philanthropic capital investment today?

Antoine Walter: So when you’re building these investment vehicles and fitting them with the right projects, then explain the rationale as to why you need to invest in the ocean or in sewage treatment or in water treatment in these 5,000 abandoned utilities. What’s the level of awareness from the capital money you’re raising? From the people holding that capital?

Do they realize that the problems are thus big in the US and in the World?

Sean Davis: Yeah… The answer is almost zero. There’s almost zero awareness that there’s a systemic problem. People have heard of Flint and Jackson, Mississippi.

They see the headlines, but they don’t realize that it’s a systemic problem that is huge and, again, very simple.

Water infrastructure is underfunded today – philanthropists could be the decisive kick

It’s a problem in the sense that we need to invest X every year in infrastructure, and we’re investing whatever the number is, 1/100 of X. You do that enough for enough time, and you get into the situation where we’re in!

I think Seth Siegel mentioned it really well: we’re a land of cowboys and independent people, and we wanna do what we want to do.

And a lot of these issues are community solutions. And so we’re coming in, with this big pot of money and trying to attract philanthropy, but it’s tough to find philanthropists who want to give to water infrastructure because they don’t know about the problems, and they always see that, well, that’s a government issue.

The awareness of donors is better for Ocean protection

The oceans are a little easier because there’s a lot of personal interest in the oceans. And so we’re moving that project more along, and basically we’re looking for a couple of million of seed money to build a team, to put together a plan to say, okay, it would be 200 million or 300 million or 400 million, and this would be the partner, this would be the construction company or the wastewater private company that would go and interface with Miami Dade, Broward County and so on.

Then figure out what investments are needed, add ’em all up, and then go raise the philanthropy to finance that. At least again, in theory! But we’ve gotta do it.

Can Philanthropic Money generate returns on investment?

Antoine Walter: In their book –  the Worth of Water – Matt Damon and Gary White, the founders of Water dot org, explain how there are three buckets of money.

You have philanthropic money, you have venture capital money, and in between, they’re looking for another bucket, which would be looking at lower returns, but still would be making money.

And what they explain in the book is that they have a hard time financing their WaterCredit approach because people either go for philanthropy and then don’t expect any return; or go to Venture because they want to have like the highest possible return and then you rather invest in tobacco or oil rather than water, right?

Nevertheless, it is profitable to invest in water! Maybe at a low return, but it is profitable. So why do you target these philanthropic buckets and not the next ones? The one which would be slightly profitable but rather ESG oriented than pure venture?

Yes: this is how you can create evergreen investment funds

Sean Davis: That’s a great question. In fact, all of our investments, whether it’s affordable housing or waste water or solar – cuz we’re also looking at solar with the biggest power company in the US. All of those investments, because we’re investing philanthropy in private deals that are for profit, we actually get the philanthropy back plus a 2% or 4%, which is essentially the impact first capital that you’re referring to.

We’re using philanthropy that is willing to give us a seed. We invest it in these projects, get a return, and then reinvest the same philanthropy into the next project and create these evergreen donor-advised funds. That’s the goal!

It’s also a way to build bridges with a foundation’s investment thesis

But we have found that some of the philanthropists we talk to have a foundation that has very specific buckets of what they give to, and we don’t fit into that. But maybe they have an impact investment arm, and we can use 2% for profit money in the same deals.

So we’re agnostic to that, but we’re focusing more on the mega philanthropy because it’s such a clear pool of money. These individuals have said, we’re gonna give the money away, and the vehicles to do that are not there.

There isn’t a way to easily do that, and some of the people who are actively trying to give money away have told us it’s harder to give away the money than it was to make the money, which is hard to believe, but it’s true.

How to create the right deals for the right philanthropic investment?

Antoine Walter: I had Reinhard Huebner on that microphone explaining that right now, there’s too much stupid money chasing too few good projects.

I guess that’s where you fit in to try to find the opportunities for that money to come to good use. How much do you have to evangelize?

Sean Davis: What a great term. What a great term! That’s what I’m doing all day. Many times I go to foundations and say, «Hey, this is what we’re doing.» And they’re not finance people.

And so they see these acquisitions, and they see these investments with developers for affordable housing where we’re actually leading the deals, and it’s kind of a different world.

That’s not an easy conversation!

Getting philanthropists on board can be as simple as a conversation…

On the other hand, we might talk to a private equity billionaire, and he gets what we’re doing right away, but he’s never seen that you can invest philanthropy in private deals, which the IRS allows you to do. It’s just been done at the venture level with very small projects!

Changing somebody’s mind that has been giving large checks to Harvard University, and you’re saying: “we can invest in a private company!” And they’re like: “no, you don’t. You can’t!”

You know, a lot of it is that evangelization of finance and figuring out how to explain something. Our challenge is to sit with somebody for 15 minutes. That’s the biggest challenge. Once they hear it, it makes sense. And then you have to get them to the point where they would pull the trigger. And that’s the stage we’re at with several philanthropic groups.

… Yet it will take time for everybody to grasp this rather new investment concept

But when you’re doing something new, it usually takes ten years to establish it. This is kind of like a new sub-sector of private equity. It’s the active investing of philanthropy and really making direct investments that are very targeted.

And going back to your point, like all charity is good, all philanthropy is good. But what we’re building are vehicles where you can buy one water utility and upgrade it, then you can do 10, then you can do a hundred, then you do a thousand.

Because then the private company who you’re investing with is aligned, and their incentives are to make more money, and we’re able to finance that. It becomes a really nice win-win at scale!

Antoine Walter: Fascinating field; as I said, I’m a muggle to it, so I’m discovering it.

To round off these interviews, I have a set of rapid fire questions, so I have a couple of ones for you.

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Rapid Fire Questions

The first one would be: what’s the most interesting project you’ve been involved in and why?

Sean Davis: The affordable housing projects that we’re looking at now, a hundred million of philanthropy allows us to do a thousand units of housing. And if we take 30% of those units, which are subsidized by the regular affordable housing of police officers, we can house all the women who are victims of domestic violence in any city or all the 200 moms sleeping in their cars tonight in Washington.

That’s pretty exciting!

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out for?

Sean Davis: In the water sector? We can talk about the problem a lot and the question is where are the solutions at scale? And I think that’s the area to look at.

Antoine Walter: What is it that you’re doing today in your job that you will not be doing in 10 years?

Sean Davis: Explaining to people what our deals are and how this new set of like philanthropic private equity works.

Antoine Walter: Well, it’s been a pleasure. Thank you for introducing me to that word, and I hope that in 10 years you don’t have someone like me asking you what it is, thank you and enjoy the conference!

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 How to Actively Invest Philanthropy and Save the (Water) World? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

with Tom Rooney – Chairman and Operating Partner at Sciens Water

Sciens is a research-driven investment fund that identifies uncovered, under-researched, or misunderstood water sector opportunities that are undercapitalized.

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

3⃣ The three dimensions of the Water Problem: Broken Pipes, Broken Policy, and Broken Economics

How one dimension is the root cause of all the others 

How one can be 500 times cheaper, chemically identical, yet deemed too expensive

How it’s about time for the Water Sector to get its marketing right and better roll out its value proposition 

How Maslow’s psychological theory explains a lot of the Water Sector’s situation (especially the less-known second half of it)

How we shall work on the psychology of Water’s Value

How tragedies like Flint and Jacksonville can yield positive returns if we leverage them right

How Joe Biden’s predictions might be wrong (and why)

How blending Private and Public know-how will deliver the best results (and why)

How Water can and shall be a profitable field (and what that enables)

How tackling the water challenges we face and foresee won’t happen overnight

Limiting bottled water to a sub-niche, the private sector’s track record, the racecar analogy, … and much more!

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

Resources:

I couldn’t find Tom on LinkedIn, but you can reach out to him on…

… Sciens Water’s website!

Sciens Water, which I’m happy to thank once again for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser 1 – How Maslow explains the state of America’s Water

Teaser 2 – How Joe Biden is wrong about Flint and Jacksonville (and why that matters)

Teaser 3 – How America’s Water is a Racecar (and who’s the engine)

Teaser 4 – What’s 500 times cheaper than America’s favorite beverage, has the exact same composition, and is still deemed too expensive?

Full Video: My conversation with Tom Rooney

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Tom, welcome to the show!

Tom Rooney: Hi, thanks for having me.

Antoine Walter: I’m exploring a bit this word of Sciens Water to understand who does what! And how all of that leads to all of us being together here to rethink water. So that’s a bit of what I’d like to explore with you in a minute. Okay, but let’s start with that broad open question.

The three-dimensional problem with Water

What is it that we have to rethink about water?

Tom Rooney: That’s a great question. Many things! What I was speaking about earlier today was the crisis in one city that’s been in the news. That is to say, Jackson, Mississippi, where a lot of people become preoccupied with the pictures they see on television, right?

Broken pipes, people carrying bottled water, politicians finger-pointing and saying it’s his fault or her fault. The message that we brought to this conference, and that I talked about a lot with John Regus and Josiah Cox, is the idea that we have to rethink what the problem really is with water.

Yes, there are broken pipes, and yes, there are systems that don’t work particularly well, but that to resolve the challenges in water, it’s really three-dimensional.

Broken Pipes, Broken Policy and Broken Economics

And the three dimensions that we were talking about are infrastructure. So yes, broken pipes. The second dimension would be what I’ll call broken economics, right? Or the inability to see the water crisis from the true economics that exists behind it. And the third is policy, public policy, or broken policy.

And so what we talk about is the idea that to truly resolve the American water infrastructure crisis, you have to come at it in a three-dimensional frame of mind.

So it’s not simply asking how one fixes a pipe or a pump, or a membrane or a filtration, but how do we fix the misunderstanding that is the economics of water?

And how do we get the public policymakers to rethink how they frame water in the United States? And so, governors pointing fingers at mayors and mayors begging presidents for money is not helpful. And having the EPA, which is a wonderful organization, but an underfunded organization unable to impose the regulations that already exist.

Those are failures of public policy. So you asked a simple question, but our approach and the reason that we are here, we Sciens, and I am here, in particular, is to help the world and certainly American leadership understand that the only way that we’re gonna truly fix something as large as the American. Infrastructure crisis is by understanding it’s really three dimensional.

Broken Water Economics is the root cause of all subsequent problems

Antoine Walter: What is this misunderstanding about the economics of water?

Tom Rooney: That’s a great question! And I think that’s the single issue that creates all the other problems. And the answer to that is that most people perceive water to be free.

You’ll hear some people say, Well, it rained, and water fell out of the sky. God gave us, Well, you hear all kinds of things, right? But at the end of the day, people expect that water is free or close to free.

People don’t get the value of Water

Very few people actually understand the true value of water. And if you don’t understand the value of water, then you become irritated at being charged to get water.

Having said that, A person who has gone without water, like someone trying to cross a desert or someone who lives in an impoverished city like Jackson, Mississippi currently is, they have a profound understanding of the value of water.

But throughout the United States, and I would argue throughout the world, there isn’t a deep enough appreciation for the value of water.

What that does, what that causes is politicians are not willing to invest as heavily in the infrastructure to produce water because they know they would then have to charge for water. And I’ve had many mayors, and many world leaders tell me that they’re not aware of any politician in the history of mankind that ever got elected with votes for spending money on water.

Utility water is 500x cheaper than bottles – yet deemed expensive

So that’s this economic disconnect, right? It’s the human understanding of the value of water. It’s easy to point out things like the average cost of bottled water is about $5 a gallon. Sure, you can buy Evian for $5 for a tiny amount, but generally speaking, the average value for bottled water is $5 a gallon.

The average cost to produce tap water through American infrastructure is slightly less than one penny per gallon. So it’s a massive difference and yet people complain about the price that they have to pay for water! And yet they’ll buy bottled water. And so this all feeds back to the narrative that we humans don’t actually understand how to value water.

And so with that misunderstanding, you’ve got politicians that won’t regulate it correctly. You’ve got utility leaders who won’t invest in the infrastructure. It is the underpinning of all the problems in water. It is this inability to understand what water’s true value is until the day you become desperate for it.

 I’d rather talk about what the value is for water than have people have to go through the horrible experience that someone say in Jackson or Flint, Michigan, has got to go through.

The Water Sector should get its Marketing principles right

Antoine Walter: If you look back, in history, before Perrier came to the United States and before the famous advertising with Orson Wells.

Yep. Bottled water was looked at as something which is not that clever. And, like a relic from the past where really you had to bottle water and you had special beliefs in special types of water. Right. Next year or this year, depending on the statistics, there will be more money spent on bottled water in the United States than on utility water.

It’s the first time that those two lines are crossing. To me, it sounds like the bottled water industry has made a brilliant marketing move. Nothing wrong with that. I mean, it’s business after all. And they gained market share because they were good at marketing. So how can we as a sector get inspired by what they did right?

Tom Rooney: Marketing?

Antoine Walter: Yeah. And market utility water, The way it should, because I do get that for some places bottled water is a solution because they simply don’t have tap water. Right? But I don’t believe that 80% of California doesn’t have access to tap water from safe quality. And yet 80% of Californians don’t drink tap water.

What’s Water’s value proposition?

Tom Rooney: So what you have to look at is, what is the real definition of marketing? And to your point, bottled water companies have done a wonderful job of marketing. What they’ve done is they’ve stepped into the void of the incumbent industry, which is water utilities. So as an incumbent, water utilities produced water without doing any marketing whatsoever.

So what’s marketing? Is it a billboard? Is it a press release? No, it’s actually understanding a value proposition, right? There is a value proposition to fairly well anything that is sold, right? And so there is a value proposition for water that the incumbent, which is to say the water industry needs to address, like what is the value of water.

If the Water Industry gets its value proposition right, it has a killer product!

And that’s kind of back to what we were talking about. So it’s a marketing opportunity for the water industry. Now that’s an industry that’s not particularly well equipped for it because, generally speaking, it’s run by municipal leaders and regulators, and so on and so forth. But if the incumbent, which is to say, utilities, want to gain back the market share, they’ll have to compete in the same way that Coke has to compete against Pepsi, which is: tell me what you’re offering to me? What’s the value of the water coming outta my tap?

And if you convince me, and by the way, what that value is, it needs to be clean, reliable, healthy on demand. And it has a profound price differential, less than one penny a gallon versus $5 a gallon. So if the American water utility industry can make the marketing value proposition pitch that you can trust your tap, that it’s going to be reliable. It’s always going to be healthy and of high quality. It will win the battle!

… and bottled water will be limited to a small sub-segment

There will always be one small segment that will be fit by bottled water. That tap water can’t, and that is convenience, right? There’s a value proposition that bottled water has. So if I go out to play tennis on a tennis court, I can’t bring my tap with me.

I can’t bring my shower head, but I can bring a bottle. Well, that’s a tiny niche. If I go camping in the mountains, a tiny niche. We have to remember there is a good role for bottled. But it shouldn’t be anywhere close to the utilities’ one.

So the American water utility industry and all of our players, we need to start putting our marketing hats on and talk value propositions and then rise to the challenge and produce that value.

The psychology of Water’s Value

Antoine Walter: Isn’t there also a psychological bias element to it? Because there is this body of work produced by Richard Shotton, about the behaviors we have in certain circumstances. And he was bringing forward a study on a craft beer, in the UK, I think, where the slogan was Reassuringly expensive.

Like if you really pay your water below 1 cent per gallon, how good can it be?

Tom Rooney: Right. That’s a branding thing, right? So if I was to give away jewelry for pennies, you would, even if it was solid gold, somehow your mind would say, It’s not valuable because if I sold it to you for so little… So a lot of luxury brands sort of artificially increase their price so as to signal value.

I get all of that. I do think the better study to think about would be Abraham Maslow and Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation. Right. This is interesting because Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the first rung. You’ve got the food and water, and security and what have you. What’s interesting is there’s a rung below that, which is oxygen, but no one thinks about it…

Antoine Walter: …I thought of wifi, but, Okay.

Tom Rooney: Uh, and so, Maslow, in the early 1940s, posited this, and, and I actually, I literally just read his seminal paper over the weekend. What’s interesting about it, and it’s highly relevant to water, is he says, Yeah, okay. So there’s this ladder that the hierarchy of needs above, the basic needs.

You get security and love and on up through realization of yourself and so on. But we’re, we’re really talking the bottom wrong. And like I say, there isn’t a rung beneath it, which is oxygen, but there should be, right? Because absent oxygen. But here’s what Maslow says in the second half of his paper.

Maslow’s hierarchy of needs incredibly explains the broken water economics

That hierarchy needs actually changes situationally. If you take a person who’s spent their entire lives struggling for food, for calories, and desperate situation for 20 years, ultra poor person, that person’s hierarchy of needs actually will cap if you can just give them food security. So in other words, after enough time, Fighting for something you can’t get.

Just getting that and knowing that you’ll securely get that for a long time actually satisfies that person’s eating. They actually don’t need to go any higher.

The converse of that is if a person has lived in an environment where either the food or the water or air is universally available, Too easy to be had for decades on end, the person becomes complacent as to the value of that.

Okay, so here’s where it’s relevant to water. That’s what has happened in the developed world. Certainly with Americans, we’ve had generations 50 years of knowing that we could always go to our taps. There was always water, and so Maslow’s hierarchy of needs was sort of granted.

As we took water for granted we forgot its value

As as relates to water, we lost the perception of the value of the water because it was always there. We never had to struggle for it. We could always get water at the tap. It was always clean, it was always good.

So Maslow actually in the 1940s predicted what is happening now by saying that we all have been so accustomed to water being so easy here in the United States that once the frailties of infrastructure started to break down and we suddenly had occasions where the water wasn’t of quality and whatnot, all of a sudden because we don’t have the value for water because of this complacency that we’ve had, we don’t how to react to it.

And that’s what’s happening in the United States, right.

Is there a positive impact of disasters like Flint or Jacksonville?

Antoine Walter: So somehow take it really from a French perspective. Okay. But there would be positive things in a Flint event or in a Jackson event because all of a sudden something which was taken for granted. Right. I’m not saying it’s positive that people lost their lives.

Not at all. That’s not my point. It’s rather, at some point we needed an awakening. And maybe that was a very costly awakening. But still, it can serve like that if we allow it to be used like that.

Tom Rooney: So to your point, it’s a tragedy that happened in Flint. It’s a tragedy that’s happened and happening in Jackson, Mississippi.

The only way to make that tragedy worse is to not learn from it.

Joe Biden’s prediction might be wrong

We can’t go back and fix Flint before it happened. We can’t fix Jacksonville before it happened, but we can learn from those two events and try as hard as we can to have fewer events in the future.

Joe Biden is doing a wonderful job of running the United States right now, but he was quoted a few weeks ago as saying what happened in Flint, Michigan and what happened in Jackson, Mississippi can never happen again.

Joe Biden is smarter than I am. But regrettably, I don’t think that will turn out to be an accurate statement because there is a tsunami of problems moving forward.

… unless it triggers the right reaction!

A better way to think about what President Biden said would be, we must learn from Jackson. We must learn from Flint and eliminate as much of the possibility of those things.

They’re going to happen, but we need to dig in and ensure that we’ve done every single thing possible so that when the next Jackson or the next Flint happens, and inevitably they will, at least we will be able to say, we learn from Jackson, we learn from Flint, and we did the very best we could to mitigate going forward.

The Blend of Private and Public strengths probably is the best approach

Antoine Walter: I had a bit before you on that microphone, a student, which is here at the conference as a volunteer, and she said that when she entered the conference, she was like, I’m fully for the public. I don’t want private people to touch my water.

Tom Rooney: Right, Right.

Antoine Walter: I recognize that line of thought because I’ve been studying water engineering, and I’m a second-generation water engineer.

I’ve heard that all my life. And what she said is that listening to the people here at the conference, she got convinced that there’s a better approach combining private and public!

If you won one with the conference, is the conference already a success, or how many people do you need to convince about this private-public partnership?

Private Sector involvement has a proven positive track record

Tom Rooney: One of the panel members with me was the CEO of our company called CSWR, and that’s an example where private sector dollars, we completely own and operate water utilities, including half a dozen or so in Mississippi that were as badly broken or worse.

What’s interesting is when we show up in a state as, private money, private equity money, and we say that we want to buy badly broken water utilities in a particular state. We want the worst actors you have, and we want to show what the private sector can do in terms of management.

I think we’ve bought 800 water utility plant operations. And of the 800, they’ve all been way outta compliance. They’ve all been bad actors and whatnot.

We put to work in a blended sense. In other words, state regulators don’t simply say it’s yours, do whatever you want. They have a tremendous say so in how the rate structures are set. There are all kinds of rules about the quality and the outputs and whatnot.

We’re now 800 in a row, proving that using the commercial skills and talent of the private sector, I’ve been able to fix more utilities than the incumbent utility operations.

Public and Private Sectors: the Racecar Analogy

Here’s the analogy that I would give you. American industrial skills and abilities are an amazing force to be brought to bear, but they need to be guided.

So the analogy or the metaphor would be a race car. If you’re trying to develop the fastest race car, you wanna put an engine in it that is of immense horsepower.

That’s American industry. That’s the private sector. The government’s role is the steering wheel, the tires, and that which sits around it.

I wouldn’t give the whole race car to the private sector, and I definitely don’t think the government should be the whole race car. I think American industry should be the engine that propels the car with immense speed, but government, economic regulators, and quality, you know, health and human concerns.

Establishing the right blend

That’s the best of both worlds. You used the word blend. That’s the blend that I would think about. The one thing that government is not particularly strong at is optimizing systems in terms of the spending of the dollars and things like that. That’s where private sector is best, but citizens expect the government to sort of protect it, if you will.

My metaphor is get the most horsepower that you can, but steer it with the government. That’s the blend!

Water can be a profitable field (and it’s good news!)

Antoine Walter: To round our discussion because I have to be cautious of your time at some point. Is it a swear word to say that investing in water can be profitable?

Tom Rooney: No, absolutely not.

Antoine Walter: How do you bring that message across?

Tom Rooney: I graduated from the University of Chicago School of Economics, and I’m a firm believer in free market forces and whatnot, and so the way to bring the interest of industry and commerce is to have a profit.

But it can’t be an unlimited ungoverned profit motive. Greed is not good in this case, but if you try to set a situation up where the private sector has to simply follow the rule book that the government sector did, and just with all of the bureaucracy involved, they won’t optimize anything, right?

Private money optimizes for the Public good

So the private sector optimizing will actually create enough value such that the end customers perceive much greater value.

After the private sector’s there, but not so much that there’s this guilt sense in terms of profit taking, but if you don’t have a profit motive, you really don’t have a commercial motive. The key is to maintain the balance and be able to bring a lot of capital to bear and a lot of efficient capital, and to have a lot of tenacious entrepreneurs trying to find a better way.

Candidly, you look at NASA. NASA is literally historically, one of the greatest engineering accomplishments in the last 100 years. But there are private sector players now that are showing that, you know what, they can actually do it more efficiently than the government.

So there are plenty of examples where the private sector harnessed in the public interests is better than the public interest by itself or the private sector by itself. It’s that blend. Best of both worlds.

From NASA to the Wright Brothers, it’s happening for centuries

Antoine Walter: It’s the story of the Wright Brothers, which made a plane to fly with literally no means, right when there was a government project with a lot of funding, which failed.

So not saying that it’s a universal truth that one is much better than the other. Just saying that… best of both worlds. Yeah.

I have a crystal ball question. If you look forward to the next five or 10 years, what is your metric to say that you had a positive impact?

Tom Rooney: Oh, that’s a great question. So I’ve been in the water industry for 20 years and it feels like Sisyphus pushing the rock up the hill.

Changes will not happen overnight: it’s a long-ball game

To be candid with you, I’m not entirely sure that in five years you’ll see a massive shift. It’ll be mostly a mind shift.

It’ll be a mind shift around the value of water, the utilization of the private sector, the engagement of the EPA and other agencies creating what I’ll call accountability. To me, it really doesn’t matter who’s owning and operating and managing the water utilities as long as somebody is accountable.

If in five years that accountability could be brought to bear in the water sector, I think you’d see a whole lot of the problems we have today. So maybe it’s a piece of that and a greater awareness of the value of water. Subtle but important!

Antoine Walter: To round off these interviews, I have a series of Rapid Fire questions.

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Rapid Fire Questions

Here, we’re aiming for short answers, but I’m not cutting the microphone. The first one is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on? And why?

Tom Rooney: Four years ago, we launched Central States Water Resources, and it’s just been a spectacular success. It’s gone from a tiny water utility to the fastest-growing water utility in the United States.

12th largest investor-owned. It’s the White Knight Great success story, and I act as chairman of the Board of Central States Water Resources. Sciens owns it. I couldn’t be more proud! We have three other companies now that are in the water space, and hopefully, those will be as successful.

Antoine Walter: What is the one thing that you’re doing today in your job that you won’t be doing

Tom Rooney: in 10 years? I may or may not even be working! How about that?

Antoine Walter: That’s a good answer. Well, Tom, thanks a lot. It was a fascinating deep dive with you and I think your Maslow analogy is one of the most brilliant things I’ve heard in a while. Thanks a lot!

Tom Rooney: Thanks. My pleasure.

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 How does Maslow explain a lot of America’s Broken Water Economics? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

with Mirka Wilderer – CEO at De Nora Water Technologies

De Nora is a leading provider of equipment, systems, disinfection, and filtration solutions for water and wastewater treatment.

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

How De Nora entered the water sector and how fast and transformational its track to IPO was

What De Nora’s core is, and how it will evolve and develop in the next years

How to go far you don’t walk alone – and how Mirka wants her company to team up for success

The secret to successful M&A moves and company integration

The risk of becoming too attractive, the best success metric, company culture and employee mindset, digital transformation… and much more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Mirka on LinkedIn.

Check De Nora’s website 

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser 1 – How (unlike the Big Guys) De Nora stays agile and entrepreneurial

Teaser 2 – How De Nora is not an EPC and aims to team up to win

Teaser 3 – Mirka Wilderer’s surprising KPI for De Nora’s success

Full Video: My conversation with Mirka Wilderer (CEO of De Nora Water Technologies)

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Mirka, welcome to the show.

Mirka Wilderer: Thank you.

Antoine Walter: I’m curious: what shall we rethink about water?

Mirka Wilderer: So I think the water space is a very exciting space and a very, a space exciting to be in right now. I think we’re rethinking as we’re going, as we face some of these challenges that were discussed, but also in terms of what our answers are.

Antoine Walter: Rethinking is something that comes to my mind if I hear of De Nora.

Mirka Wilderer: Yeah!

The decade that shaped De Nora

Antoine Walter: Might be right or wrong, you’ll tell me. But it sounds to me like your company has been rethought quite a lot over the past decade, is that right?

Mirka Wilderer: That is correct. We are celebrating our 100-year anniversary next year, which is a big milestone and certainly something that gives us resilience and stability, but at the same time, we added the water business only in 2015 to the group.

We’ve had a number of changes of ownership since then. Last but not least, an IPO this year in June. And so, with each of these changes, certainly also always a transformational progression in our company journey.

Entering the Water Business

Antoine Walter: Adding water in 2015; was it a response to something you’ve noticed in the market, which was a challenge you wanted to take on as a company?

Mirka Wilderer: De Nora is an electrochemical technology company, and they have actually surfed the water space since the seventies. And then, early in 2001, they created a joint venture with Severn Trent purification as one of the key markets they were addressing.

And so it became a natural evolution to say, Wait a minute, if this is such a core market that we’re serving, why don’t we bring it in-house? We always joke as the second like to stand on besides the traditional family business. So we’re a group of two businesses.

De Nora’s core is to be a Technology Provider

Antoine Walter: So what are the challenges out there which you like to address as the Nora in the water words? I mean, there are so many things you could be addressing. It could be water quality, water scarcity, or advanced treatments of some kind of pollutants.

Mirka Wilderer: We are a technology provider, and our heart goes towards disinfecting and filtration water, but we’re a manufacturer. We’re not systems integrators or operators. So our heart and passion go to providing the best possible technology to solve these water challenges, whether it’s emerging contaminants, whether it is PFAS and other residuals in the water.

And I think the opportunity goes in combining technologies to come towards advanced solutions that then solve these different problems around the world.

Bringing the right technology in the right place

Antoine Walter: You just mentioned very interesting topics for a deep dive – if we had more time. PFAS, right now, as we’re in the US is probably the hottest of the press with the EPA changing its rules in June, again in August, saying that you should look at that GenX thing and that you should look at parts quadrillion. How important is it for a technology company like De Nora to align your offering to these changes in policy and changes in priorities guided by policies?

Mirka Wilderer: We have a whole portfolio of technologies, and we are serving multiple countries around the world, and so we have different changes in regulation, which allows us to provide stability to our shareholders that, you know, different technologies have different trends.

On the other hand, of course, there are new trends that are starting in one part of the world. Like PFAS that we can already anticipate will likely also become an issue somewhere else. So I would say it’s a balancing act of making sure that we are maintaining or offering our portfolio around the world to get economies of scale and make sure that we have the best possible offering there while also, of course, always being on the lookout to new regulations, new trends, new technological needs that we can pilot in a certain area, and then take from there.

How De Nora’s IPO impacted the company

Antoine Walter: What does it change as a company to go through an IPO?

Mirka Wilderer: Certainly, coming from a privately held background with a family that has a hundred-year perspective and a vision and pride that goes much beyond any type of time horizon to then becoming public, is the other end of the spectrum where you have to make sure that you reliably deliver on every single quarter.

And so that balance of having that long-term vision while now also learning how to be really reliable on delivering to the promises of our shareholders. Luckily we had a little bit of pre-run time to set all that up in preparation. But that’s certainly one of the big changes in terms of just time horizons and expectations of our shareholders.

Keeping a curious eye on market evolutions

Antoine Walter: So when you come to a conference like this one where there’s a lot of finance involved, does it kind of change your goggles as the way you look at the room?

Mirka Wilderer: I come to these conferences because I’m just super excited to talk about my favorite topic: Water. I mean, it’s hearing about the thoughts from stakeholders, but we have to make sure we stay on our course. I think the water space is really bigger than us just optimizing on one single topic and instead, we really need to take that bigger lens of this is my path, and someone else chooses a different business model. It’s super interesting to see, and someone might choose the same.

Which is also fantastic because I rather have strong competition than continue to struggle with some of the water challenges we’re seeing.

Teaming up as a technology company rather than stepping on someone’s toes

Antoine Walter: You’re a technology company. Do you aim to stay like that, or do you want to go maybe into the EPC part of the business or maybe to do a kind of service out of your technology?

Mirka Wilderer: So I think it’s really important to stay true to the core. It’s very tempting to go after the multimillion projects, but we’re not an EPC, and EPCs require different skill sets than my team has.

My team is really, really good at the technology side of it, and so we wanna keep that focus and leverage that, and then work with partners that are really good at systems integration and really good at construction. They have those capabilities. We have our capabilities, and together we can win.

What’s next for De Nora?

Antoine Walter: De Nora has been built over the last years through several M&A. Is there a secret you can share here? I have an idea about the answer, but do you have more in the pipe?

Mirka Wilderer: We are definitely in a growth mode, and we will continue to focus on building out our portfolio with advanced disinfection filtration technologies and others.

Antoine Walter: So that’s a yes which is not allowed to be a yes. Interesting!

Mirka Wilderer: Yes.

De Nora’s secret to successful M&A moves

Antoine Walter: And what’s the secret about M&A to successfully integrate those new companies into the group? Are there some things which you have, to take care of and to be very careful of?

Mirka Wilderer: I think integration really comes down to the people and taking a people-first perspective.

We’re buying capabilities, and so I find that in every acquisition, there’s maybe that threat or fear of the acquired company, that they’re gonna lose their identity. But instead, I just invested money in acquiring that capability and so making sure that we keep that forefront and make people feel appreciated and valued for what they bring to the table.

I think the integration then is a balancing act of integrating these new capabilities with the old capabilities. And creating stronger together. And so I think the topic of integration is oftentimes underestimated of how much effort that really takes to integrate systems and procedures and policies, but also making sure that we leverage each other’s capabilities and that talent view.

That just takes some time, but I think that’s where we can then really create enterprise value by taking technology or competencies and shifting them out globally.

Antoine Walter: We’ve heard this morning in the keynote from Seth Siegel how consolidation is something that shall be at the center of the talks in the next years.

If you want to strive in the water sector, there are not that many companies the size of De Nora in that sector

Mirka Wilderer: Absolutely.

Could De Nora become prey?

Antoine Walter: There are the very big guys and the small guys. Correct. Do you feel like a vehicle for growth, to meet those very big guys, or do you feel like a prey?

Mirka Wilderer: No, not a prey!

Not at all. No. I think it’s a huge opportunity, and that’s what gets me excited to shape a company. We have all these small companies that have come. A certain focus, but then they get stuck somewhere, and as we bring ’em together a diamond like that and put them into our crown, how do we again, make sure that we fully leverage the value of this acquired unit while also giving them some more scale to the business, Whether it’s the systems we use or the.

Processes. I love working with playbooks, and the playbooks aren’t academic playbooks, but they’re from the team around the world that we have in-house. How do they each solve their problem? And what can we learn from each other, peer to peer? And so we are elevating these individual companies that got stuck at some level and providing them that next level of scale.

The sales channels, the management processes, how we do business, financial savviness, and HR processes, right? All the good things across the entire value chain of the business. And that helps us to lift and enhance their growth. I think, you know,

Mirka Wilderer’s success metric for De Nora

Antoine Walter: I love your analogy of the diamond in the crown and this agility element, for sure, is an asset. So maybe, a crystal question for you. If not, you look at the five or 10-year horizon; what is that single metric which tells you that you’ve succeeded?

Mirka Wilderer: My mind is going to employee engagement, which is interesting because it’s very qualitative. But if I can keep my team hungry and driven, we will serve our customers to the best ability. That will ultimately translate into all kinds of financial KPIs. That would be fun to see but that’s not the driver.

The driver is to tap into this passion of the employees to get some global scale. And I think in the water space, I’m sure anyone you are having on your podcast shares that passion that what we do actually has a huge impact on our blue planet.

Antoine Walter: True!

Mirka Wilderer: And so, you know, if we can tap into that and leverage that, how do you quantify that?

That’s why I was pausing. Employee engagement sounds a little soft, but I think truly right. If we can unlock that potential, we’re gonna create amazing things.

Antoine Walter: Well, Mirka, to round off these interviews, I have a short set of rapid-fire questions.

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Rapid Fire Questions

Short questions aiming for short answers, but I’m not cutting the microphone. My first question is, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Mirka Wilderer: Digital transformation and why? I think it’s fascinating to see what these new capabilities can bring to the water space.

Antoine Walter: What is this the one thing you’re doing in your job today that you will not be doing in 10 years?

Mirka Wilderer: I love my job! What will I not be doing?

Antoine Walter: If you love everything, you probably keep doing everything.

Mirka Wilderer: I love my job, so it’s good.

Antoine Walter: What is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Mirka Wilderer: Digital transformation. I think it will shake up and wake up that industry and innovate us in ways that we haven’t thought possible.

What’s De Nora’s special take on digital transformation?

Antoine Walter: Do you have a special take on digital transformation at De Nora?

Mirka Wilderer: I think it’s across every step on the value chain, and it’s using the data to better serve our customers. Every customer might face their water challenge for the first time. It might be unique to them, but we for sure have seen it somewhere else around the globe.

And so if we can tap into that knowledge of how we have solved it for other customers to make sure that we’re faster, better, more reliable, using data for that purpose.

Antoine Walter: You’re coming from that entrepreneurial side of the water sector. So for that last question, you’ll have to project yourself. You get elected as a global water leader, so worldwide.

An unlimited power, but you can take only one measure. You have one single move. What is it?

Mirka Wilderer: I wanna see the industry unite and have an industry voice in sustainability. That sustainability is not just reduced or decarbonization, but there’s a water theme that we drive as an industry beyond our industry.

Antoine Walter: Well, Mirka, it’s been a pleasure. I would have many more questions, but I have to be cautious of your time. Thanks for stopping by, and talk to you soon.

Mirka Wilderer: Thank you so much!

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 How De Nora Grew from 0 to IPO in 7 Years (with Cheat Codes!) appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Patrick was kind enough to spend some time with me to review some of the hot topics in our sector, yet he was awaited on stage for a speech, so we had to be fast. Yet it was such as pleasant experience (as you’ll discover) that I’ll make sure to bother him a bit to back for a deeper dive!

with Patrick Decker – CEO at Xylem

Xylem is one of the largest water and wastewater technology companies globally and follows the simple motto: “Let’s solve water.”

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

3⃣ The 3 obstacles to Water Technologies’ Adoption…

… and the 3 secrets to overcoming them

The multifaceted perks of Private-Public Partnerships that lead to win-win-win-win-wins

The one-billion eyeballs campaign that placed Water Challenges on the map for hundreds of millions of people

Patrick’s KPI, Water Infrastructure, Allocation of Funding, Youth Engagement… and much more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Patrick on LinkedIn.

Check Xylem’s website 

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Infographic: Patrick Decker’s Interview in a nutshell

Teaser 1 – How Patrick Decker intends to Empower Youth to Take Action

Teaser 2 – Water is an Industrial Risk we don’t mention enough

Teaser 3 – Sustainability is the opportunity of a Lifetime, not only for Xylem

Teaser 4 – How Xylem evolved from a pump company to a solution provider under Patrick Decker’s lead

Full Video: My conversation with Patrick Decker

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

Download my Latest Book - for Free!

Antoine Walter: Hi Patrick, welcome to the show.

Patrick Decker: Hi, good morning.

Antoine Walter: I’m honored to speak with you. You have been on my “guests bucket list” for a while, so I’m happy that this day finally happened!

Patrick Decker: Well, thank you!

Antoine Walter: I’m wondering, what’s Xylem’s take on that challenging question of how do we have to rethink water?

Our Water Infrastructure is not Expensive

Patrick Decker: The biggest rethink in water is around the affordability of addressing our water infrastructure challenges around the World.

I think that there’s still an impression that it’s really expensive. Where’s the money gonna come from? How do we address access to water while also addressing the equity around the cost of water? Both at a macroeconomic level, at a community level, and also at a household level. These are real challenges, no doubt, that are not easy to address.

But the technologies and solutions do exist today to be able to address our water challenges at an affordable level!

Water Challenges exist: and so do solutions!

I also think the new rethink is that we’ve always talked about the importance of creating awareness of the big water challenges around the world.

Due to unfortunate climate change related events and other disasters, aging infrastructure, you know, that intersection of aging infrastructure and climate is creating a level of unprecedented awareness around the world.

But we need to move people beyond fear because fear paralyzes them. It causes political division, and we do not need that at this point in time, but we need more education around affordability.

The 3 obstacles to water technologies’ adoption

Antoine Walter: So if technologies exist, what are we waiting to implement those?

Patrick Decker: Again, I think one is awareness. I think two is utilities around the world or city works departments, depending upon who owns certain aspects of that water, distribution network, or the treatment plants. These are highly dedicated civil servants. They wake up every morning thinking about how are they gonna provide safe, clean drinking water at an affordable level?

How are they gonna manage the impact of stormwater overflow in our communities? They’re thinking about this all the time. These are hard jobs they have.

By definition, many of them are risk averse. Because there’s not always a lot of upside in taking chances with the water supply. And so part of this, it takes time for them to be able to do pilots, to prove out the pilots or to see other utilities that have been successful that look more like them, that have taken on some of these different alternatives of investments.

The untold third one: the role of Businesses

I think the other piece of this is we don’t talk as much about the impact of water scarcity on businesses. And the cost of water to a business is not the water bill per gallon or liter.

More times than not, it’s the cost of not having access to it. So more and more businesses are operating in water-stressed areas where almost like brownouts on the energy side, they’re actually having water shortages.

So the cost of water to them is the value of lost production and lost economic profits. Therefore, they have to do job reduction or dislocate along the way. This is a part of the sector that has not been talked about a lot in terms of where they can be more active in funding some of this infrastructure.

Not only their own operations but how they get more involved in their own communities and make sure there is equitable access to citizens in and around their community.

Antoine Walter: So you see the role of the industrials as well to be part of the community, and to irradiate around their facilities to also help the community?

Patrick Decker: That’s correct. And to educate!

On Patrick Decker’s call, Xylem walks the talk!

Antoine Walter: What’s the role of Xylem in all of that?

Patrick Decker: Well, we are a business. So what I’m saying others should be doing, we’re doing ourselves in terms of our own sustainability commitments and goals. We take great pride in the very aggressive goals that we put out there, both in terms of impact within our own four walls of our operations but also in our handprint.

How do we help customers and communities do a better job at managing their own? Whether it be race-to-zero and carbon neutrality, whether it be businesses that want to be neutral water, from a branding standpoint? We have a role to play in educating and making sure they’re aware that the technologies and solutions exist.

Two more secrets: sharing best practices and engaging new generations

Secondly, our obligation as a technology provider is to always be learning from different applications around the world, sharing those best practices, putting our own capital to work, going out and acquiring new technologies, or investing in those technologies.

But our role also is, you know, we spend a lot of time on youth engagement, creating education and awareness of youth around the World.

Yes, here are the challenges, and yes, here are the opportunities. And we wanna create a movement of young people around the world to say;

Trust and Communication are the keys to Water Technology Adoption

Antoine Walter: So in light of these challenges, which are increasing with climate change, water scarcity, water equality, everything which was addressed in the conference so far. Do you have a special trick to bring the adoption of these technologies to the fast lane? To go faster?

Patrick Decker: I wish I did! Well, I have tried to do it, and we will continue to try to do it.

I think it is getting the word out. It is recognizing that part of the role of a business leader and a business leadership team and an organization is not to remain quiet and on the sideline and focus only on our own economic profits and making our numbers every day.

We have the responsibility to become a platform and to become a voice that we join others around us to be a part of that conversation.

As a CEO, Patrick Decker’s role is to get the Water Word out

And that’s why a meaningful part of my time as a CEO is spent in these kinds of conversations. To just get the word out! But then, at the same time, there’s a lot we have to do to make sure that we continue to build that trust.

Patrick’s not just saying this because it’s gonna lead to higher economic profits for Xylem.

This is the opportunity of a lifetime for us as a society to make a difference. It’s far more than just economic value. It is about creating social value as well.

Under Patrick Decker’s lead, Xylem has been on a transformational journey

Antoine Walter: You mentioned hand print and footprint and how you start by walking your own talk. Is it right to say that Xylem is on a transformational journey?

Maybe 10 years ago, you still were a pump company. You were far more than that, but you were seen by the market like a pump company.

Patrick Decker: Yes.

Antoine Walter: And more and more, you’re a solution provider, and you’re kind of bridging different parts of the industry. Is the journey over?

Patrick Decker: That is correct, but the journey is not over.

We have been on a transformation. We will continue to be on a transformation. And a transformation, not just in terms of what we bring into our portfolio of solutions from a product and technology standpoint. But also how we work in different ways based on our core. We’re never gonna walk away from our core!

Xylem opens up to new business models

It’s really important that we maintain our credibility, reputation, and trust on our core. But there are other business models. There are other ways for us to engage other companies, other partnerships, NGOs, venture capital, governments…

Again, building a platform that people can rally around to say,

No one company or organization can do it on its own. We certainly can’t. But yes, we’re gonna continue to put our capital, both financial and human to work, to build out an even more impactful platform for Xylem.

Private Public Partnerships bring the conversation far beyond just investment

Antoine Walter: One of the red threads of the conversation I’m having today so far is this link between private, public, and also money or finance. So really, the three levels. How do you see that evolving in the next five or ten years? What is the martingale for impact?

Patrick Decker: We are big believers and proponents of that public-private partnership because it’s more than just the financial capital. It’s aligning objectives and measurements of success for a community beyond purely the financial metric.

Multifaceted partners have skin in the game together to drive success. I think that it also reduces oftentimes the noise, the conflict that is based upon legacy or the past rather than fact. And I think it can galvanize! It’s not the solution for everywhere on the planet.

But as you well know, I mean, you are an incredibly seasoned global citizen here in the water discussion.

There are many, many, many examples of success of this around the world. Far more successes by a factor of exponentially than any failures along the way. It doesn’t mean it’s always perfect, but it has proven itself to be a significant alternative. It’s not the only alternative for funding, but it is one.

More of the global infrastructure investment packages should be allocated to water

The second, in my view, is much more federal money, whether it be in the US, whether it be in Europe, whether it be in China, where there are large infrastructure funding discussions happening.

Obviously, I may not be objective, but when I look at the return on investment, both economically and socially, of redirecting more of those dollars to water infrastructure, as a basic human right to have access to it, and the impact it has on the economic value of businesses when they’re facing water stress; I don’t believe that we’re putting enough money that’s already been approved and the overall infrastructure packages. Not enough of that money is being directed toward water.

The KPI that will tell Patrick Decker he succeeded as Xylem’s leader

Antoine Walter: To round off that conversation, because I have to be cautious of your time, what is the key performance indicator that will tell you in five or 10 years that you’ve succeeded, maybe at all? Or simply in doing your part as one of the companies in the water sector?

Patrick Decker: That’s a really good question and a really tough question because it’s hard to narrow it down to just one thing. But I do believe that some measurements around engagement around the world…

1 billion engagements through Xylem’s partnership with the City Football Group

You know, one of the measures that we’re getting right now is the following. We have this partnership with the City Football Group, Manchester City, New York City Football Club, Mumbai, and others.

We now have roughly 1 billion social media impressions over the last four years. And when we did a survey this past year, more than a third of those social media impressions, which are predominantly younger in age, indicated that they have a strong affinity about water challenges and issues and that they’ve taken some action over the last year to do something about it.

That’s a powerful indicator. That is engagement.

Antoine Walter: Incredible!

Patrick Decker: And that’s one that we will continue to measure, but that’s simply one example. I think substantially larger spending in the US on water, especially at the most basic societal level, would be another indicator of success that we’ve gotten the word out.

Antoine Walter: So, as I said, I have to be cautious of the time. I think the conference won’t get going if I don’t free you at some point because you’re the next one on stage.

Well, thank you. I take the last 30 seconds just for one rapid-fire question.

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Rapid Fire Question

Antoine Walter: What is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Patrick Decker: Youth engagement. Creating the ability beyond just Xylem, but those that want to be a part of something larger here on creating the awareness and the empowerment and belief of this next generation of young people that have the enthusiasm, the passion, the knowledge. And we can show them they can have the resources to go make a big difference.

And how we engage other organizations to be a part of that journey with us because it’s the power of the collective. None of us need to be competing for mind share when it comes to water in the mind of our youth.

Antoine Walter: That makes for an. Awesome conclusion. So thanks a lot, and I hope we’ll have more time in the future to go more in-depth!

Patrick Dekker: Thank you!

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FREDsense: Revolutionizing Water Quality Monitoring with Biosensor Innovation

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Swirltex: Revolutionizing Wastewater Treatment with Bubbly Innovation

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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

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1001 Fontaines: Engineering Sustainable Water Access Through Social Entrepreneurship

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

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The post What’s Patrick Decker’s Call To Action? Let Us Solve Water! appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

with Paul Gallay – Lecturer & Co-Director at the Columbia Climate School

Columbia University is a global leader in climate and sustainability education, aiming to bring an interdisciplinary knowledge base for future climate leaders to work with businesses, communities, governments, and civil society to address the climate crisis.

This episode is part of my Series on the Water Crisis in America

What we covered:

Why we failed at bringing people into the Water Equation and how we can act on it today

How there’s an intricate relationship between water quality and our health, and how the recent US EPA PFAS announcements moved the needle

How New York has been leading the battle against emerging contaminants since the 2018 Water Protection Act

How the best approach to protect quality is not to treat Water, but to protect it at the Source

How New York secured its water future by entering into a Watershed agreement in the 1990s and what it involved

How nature-based solutions in the Catskill Mountains and in the Croton Watershed represented an eight-time better solution than grey-engineered alternatives

How protecting New York’s watershed has a bunch of welcome side-effects for the local communities

Communities, Households, their link to water, societal involvement, the Army Corp of Engineers, the Hudson river… and much more!

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

Resources:

Send your warm regards to Paul on LinkedIn.

Check Columbia University’s website 

A big THANK YOU to Sciens Water for enabling this episode!

is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Teaser 1: How Communities agreed with New York to better protect the Watershed

Teaser 2: How the Emerging Contaminants Water Protection Act supports New York’s efforts to mitigate water quality risks

Teaser 3: Source mitigation of water pollution has many welcome side effects

Teaser 4: The Billion Oyster Reef project that could help New York to mitigate Climate Change

Teaser 5: How New York City faces Climate Change and Rising Waters

Full Video: My conversation with Paul Gallay

Full Transcript:

These are computer-generated, so expect some typos

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Antoine Walter: Hi Paul. Welcome to the show,

Paul Gallay: Hi Antoine, Thank you!

Antoine Walter: So if I’m right, you are the host here. You know the building; you know everything. So I have to be cautious…

Paul Gallay: Well, Columbia has tens of thousands of people all working in the same direction, which is to actually figure out what sustainability looks like and then help build it.

What’s to rethink in Water?

Antoine Walter: So if the aim is to heads towards sustainability, how do we have to rethink water?

Paul Gallay: Well, we’ve taken it for granted. We’ve done a. Damage both in terms of supply and water quality, but we also have neglected to bring people into the equation as we work to provide for sustainable water supply as we work to provide for safe drinking water, and as we work to make sure that our communities understand the challenges ahead and can plan ahead.

We failed at bring People into the Water Equation

Antoine Walter: So what makes you think that we’ve failed in those tasks?

Paul Gallay: We have images of many of our aquifers and our reservoirs that show significant draw down well above a reasonable carrying capacity. And we haven’t been working on a water budget, but I have this hat. It’s cap and it has water printed on the front of it, and it’s my water cap because when I was working for the state of New York, we put caps on the consumption in a very heavily populated part of New York called Nassau County on Long Island.

And those limits, those poage limits are why Nassau has adequate supply now. But how many communities really got out ahead of a water budget? And so we haven’t been focusing on. What capacity we have and what our consumption rates do to our capacity, and we haven’t been focusing on how the contaminants that we put into our water can be so dangerous that it can make whatever water that we still do have unpotable.

We should focus our efforts on the Households

Antoine Walter: When you mention these elements of quantity and quality is it on the households that we should focus on first or is it the industry or is, is it the agriculture, which is the part of. Water cake, which is the first portion to look at.

Paul Gallay: They’re all essential. And I would say that we have to start with our residential systems.

Because while the industry is essential, the industry does not produce products where the water goes into someone’s body as it does in a household, or where it goes into a product at a farm, or, where you’re growing food or raising cattle. Public health depends on safe, abundant, affordable drinking water, especially in the pandemic.

We found that to be the case, and so we really do have to focus first and foremost on understanding the threats to residential and agricultural water.

Water is closely linked to our health

Antoine Walter: So that means that the number one challenge is really linked to health. We have to, to highlight this link between water and health, if I get you right?

Paul Gallay: Absolutely. There is this expression, you don’t miss your water till your well runs dry, and at least you know when your well runs dry, you have to deepen it or connect to some other system or, or go buy big pallets of water from the store, but you don’t know when your water quality. Has declined either because of excess nitrogen or because of these PFAS chemicals or any of the other emerging contaminants, the remnants from pharmaceuticals that can be in water supply, so better testing.

You know, New York has the emerging contaminants protection Acts 2018. It’s at limits on 1.4 Dioxane and it’s set limits on several of the pfas chemicals. Numerous other states are starting to do the same. But so many chemicals are poorly understood as to A, how much there is in our drinking water supply, and B, what we need to do to make that drinking water supply safe.

Is the US EPA regulating PFAS a game-changer?

Antoine Walter: To that extent, how does it change the picture with the recent directives the EPA has enforced over this last tune in August about Gen X and pfas? Did it change, move the needle, change the picture?

Paul Gallay: It’s been a long time. It’s a great start. It has to be built upon because you can manipulate those chemicals ever so slightly, and then you’re no longer under regulation.

So it’s sort of chasing a bit of a moving target. There’s a significant degree of private litigation that is forcing communities and businesses to come to grips with the risks associated with these PFAS chemicals. EPA is getting. They’ve been promising to get there for quite a long time, and they knew for even.

Back in the battle days with DuPont and 3M, EPA knew the results of a lot of the studies that were being done and did not act, but we have to play catch up. We have to do everything faster now than we would’ve had we addressed these issues sooner.

New York leads the way with the Emerging Contaminants Water Protection Act

Antoine Walter: You, you mentioned this emerging Con contaminant Act in New York, which is active things two, 2018, right?

Yes. How. And forced. How do you measure this 1.4 dioxin? These emerging contaminants is, it’s at the end of a building. Is it at the top of selected people? Is it at the outlets of this infection factory in, in New York? How is it done?

Paul Gallay: I think it’s at the outlet from the water supply or the outlet from the treatment facility.

You can’t expect the water supplier to guarantee. Pipes going up into somebody’s tap are safe. That’s a whole different system. But one of the other things about that Emerging Contaminants Protection Act is it’s got to come with, uh, support for small municipal systems to actually do what’s necessary to restore water quality and remove contamination.

The best way to remove pollutants from Water is to prevent them to mix up in the first place

Some of these filtration processes for these PFAS chemicals are hugely expensive. And it’s why prevention is so important. It’s why one of the things that the state of New York is doing that my, uh, former employer, Hudson River Keeper helped pioneer is to develop a track down system to keep the contaminants out of people’s supply in the first place.

Mm-hmm. , which is ever so much less expensive than actually stripping contaminants out of water supplies once they get in there.

Antoine Walter: And what’s your role? Columbia in all of that, are you the one which is saying, Hey, there’s a problem showing where the problem is? Are you helping to be part of the solution? What’s your involvement?

Paul Gallay: I have two jobs at Columbia. I’m an educator and a researcher and I teach, uh, two classes, one on us, water and energy policy generally. I want my students to come out of that course with a sense of how to actually make a change. And build solutions and do prevention.

The New York Watershed Agreement, a staple of modern Water Management

And the other course I teach is about the New York City Watershed Agreement in the 1990s in which the communities that host New York’s drinking water reservoirs came together with a city to try to provide for economic opportunity as a way of making it worthwhile for them to help support clean drinking water for the nine or 10 million New Yorkers downstate consume it.

So that’s the education side and my. To help students understand the challenges of actually making change and restoring water quality and rebuilding capacity. My research is more focused on the other end of the spectrum, which is storm water management, storm and flood protection and sustainability of communities that otherwise are at risk from sea level rise, storm surge and large stationary, uh, rain systems, and it all comes under the.

Of the university’s new effort, the fourth purpose as they call it, to go beyond just research, to go beyond just education and to bring that research and education together with practice and make change today because we don’t have time to make change tomorrow if we can make that change today.

How to leverage Nature-Based Solutions in the Catskill Mountains

Antoine Walter: So when, you know, gets to end back in what you just said, let me come back to, to this 1990 approach, which is often mentioned as a perfect example of nature-based solutions.

I’m gonna take my muggle hat on. I’m not the specialist here. New York City had the choice between going into advanced water treatments and say, regardless of the water quality which enters the system, we will be able to treat it or to better protect the Catskill Mountains, the Croton watershed. And they took that decision, which at the time, if I’m right, was even cheaper

Paul Gallay: in a significantly, yeah, 8 billion for filtration and roughly a billion. For source based protection.

And so they have this multi barrier approach where they try to keep contamination out of the water supply through conservation easements and stream side restoration projects to keep contaminants out of the feeder streams and working with farms to reduce the. Of nitrogen pollution that otherwise would go into the drinking water supply.

A multi-barrier approach to protect Water at the Source

So this multi barrier approach to protecting water at its source, it has many benefits as opposed to a filtration plant, which is simply designed to deal with a problem after it’s been created. If you keep the contamination out of the water supply, not only do you have healthy water, you have healthier farms, you have more vibrant communities surrounding the reservoirs, you have better opportunities for.

You have a higher quality of life in those communities. It is a big deal in the upstate communities for New York City to be able to help control their land use. They resent it. But since New York is investing in these communities so aggressively, they resent it less.

Antoine Walter: Don’t take me wrong, I have to play the devil advocate here, and it’s gonna sound terrible what I’m gonna say, but New York City is the second richest city in the.

Behind Vaduz, which is the capital of Liechtenstein, which is arguably not a city, so let’s say the richest city at all in the world. We have all that science and technology available. Why would we bother dealing with nature to do the job when we could be absolutely safe? And sure by putting whatever filters in in the system.

Shouldn’t New York afford a “better” Water Management?

And even worse, if no, I’m the man in the street who doesn’t know really about nature based solutions versus treatment technology, wouldn’t I feel safer if you told me? We’ve put the state of the art technology in. Treatment facility downtown, which is very close to my home and delivers me perfect Drinking water

Paul Gallay: filtration only takes out certain sorts of pollution, mainly bacteria and turbidity and the like.

It doesn’t take out other types of pollution that you’re better off trying to prevent from getting into the drinking water supply in the first place. That’s. Number two, New York City may be a very rich city, but it has overburdened school system. It has a public health system that is also underinvested in.

It can actually be cheaper AND better

It has public housing that is underinvested in. So the difference between an $8 billion filtration system and a $1 billion pollution prevention system provides resources. Spread the benefits to other important investment opportunities for New York City.

Antoine Walter: You mentioned the research area, which is linked to flood prevention or stormwater management.

Yeah, if I’m right there as well. New York has quite an interesting approach with bringing some more green in the city. Outside of Central Park on a small scale and distributed across the city,

Paul Gallay: New York is facing the challenges that any coastal city is facing. By 2050, the water levels will be nearly two feet higher than they were in the year 2000.

And that’s if we’re lucky. If we’re unlucky, it will be higher still. Coupled with storm surge from large wind driven storms, stationary storms like Hurricane Ida and on re last fall in 2021, the risks to community life, limb and property are growing and so you’re going to need to have, again, a multi barrier approach.

There are lots of Welcome Side-Effects to letting Nature do the Heavy Lifting

a layered solution because one community may be able to make. Of, uh, barriers, hard, concrete barriers to protect them, but other communities may not have the opportunity to build those barriers. They may not be feasible. Will that community benefit from efforts to have water retained in wetlands or will that.

Community benefit from the opportunity to have a system where, uh, parks have perme permeable surfaces and so the water will percolate in and not go into the storm. Sewers. Will they bring build storage tanks to contain some of that storm water runoff? Mm-hmm. so that it doesn’t end up in people’s basements.

We need to take advantage of every technique we can. One of the most interest. Is to try to rebuild the oyster reefs along the shoreline of New York City that used to exist. That would break the wave energy and reduce the storm intensity before it got onto land. There’s a project in New York City called A Billion Oyster Project.

The Billion Oyster project: How Nature-Based Solutions could help (again) New York in mitigating Climate Change

Whoa. That is about 250 million oysters into their billion. Oyster target and they’re rebuilding these reefs and building living shorelines. So you, you restore wetlands, you build some stationary structures when necessary, when the other nature based solutions won’t work. You build ways to retain the storm water, and if you do all of these things thoughtfully and with the community, Partner working side by side with the government.

We have a shot at actual sustainability and protection from these storm risks. Is that part of your research? Absolutely, and I focus as much on the community side, combining the engineering and scientific expertise of the government agencies with the wisdom in the communi. As to where the problems are most intense and where the potential solutions lie, where can we concentrate our investment and actually get the most storm prevention bang for the buck?

So my job is to bring the community wisdom and expertise together with the agency wisdom and expertise from the academic standpoint again. University’s fourth purpose making a difference in the world today. It’s one of the things that I’m proudest and one of the reasons that drew me to Columbia

Community involvement is the Special Sauce

Antoine Walter: and what is your single special, So special treat to get the communities on board for this kind of approaches, this kind of research

Paul Gallay: to tell the communities they deserve better and tell the communities that the university will support them in seeking to achieve better. And then working with the agencies to say you’re going to deliver better.

And as I mentioned during my talk earlier, the Army Corps of Engineers, which is responsible for creating these shoreline protections has. To do better and to create an environment and climate justice working group for their harbor and tributaries shoreline protection study. And when we went to visit with the Army Corps in May to, uh, to see if we could create some sort of a better process and deliver on the promise to the community that you deserve better and you’re going to get better.

We were hoping that the Army Corps would agree to continue the dialogue. And before we had a chance to suggest that, they said, Well, what if we had an ongoing dialogue in this working? And it’s always better when it’s the idea of the agencies that are responsible. Mm-hmm. rather than having it foisted upon them. Right.

Antoine Walter: It’s a fascinating field. I could. Go on for for a while, but I have to be cautious of your time You came to a conference. You probably want to attend the conference to round that discussion off. I just have a couple of rapid fire questions.

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Rapid Fire Questions

Antoine Walter: What is the most exciting project you’ve been involved in and why?

Paul Gallay: At Columbia, the most exciting project. Is the Army Corps of Engineers agreeing to sit side by side with communities, to enfranchise communities, to empower communities so that we can co-create the knowledge necessary to protect the communities from storm surge and sea level rise. In the past when I was with Hudson River, Keep so many exciting things, but I would never say that anything was better than New York deciding to re.

In its water supply and wastewater treatment infrastructure, that $4.4 billion that they have appropriated in grants for communities since 2015. That is single handedly restoring water quality to communities across New York state.

Antoine Walter: And finally, what is the trend to watch out for in the water sector?

Paul Gallay: How the. That the federal government and the states are now investing through the, uh, Inflation Reduction Act and the American Rescue Act and the Infrastructure Act, how it’s actually put into practice, how the checks are cut and to whom and based on what sort of inclusive practice to. The solutions that are being funded in a way that truly benefits everybody in a community and does resilience and sustainability for those who need it the most.

Antoine Walter: Well, Paul, it’s been an incredible time for me to get a piece of your wisdom. So thanks a lot for sharing, and I wish you a good rest of the conference.

Paul Gallay: Oh, thank you, Antoine, and thank you for covering these issues. I appreciate that very much. Thanks a lot.

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 Can Nature Protect New York From Water Catastrophes? Yes! appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.