Aaron Tartakovsky

Aaron Tartakovsky did not come to water from water. Aaron started in policy and political advocacy, with a bachelor's from Tufts and a master's in political science from Tel Aviv University, and a few years working in that world before he ever thought about sewers. So when he tells you the hardest part of recycling water in a building is not the engineering but the permitting, he is speaking from the half of his brain the rest of the industry usually doesn't have, and that turns out to be most of why Epic Cleantec gets its systems approved in cities that have never allowed them before.

Epic Cleantec began, and I promise this is the real origin story, with a dog. Aaron's co-founder Oded was walking his pug through Tel Aviv, didn't clean up after it, got fined by a passing police officer, and being a stubborn entrepreneur decided to invent a 21st-century way to deal with the mess instead of just paying up. The device he built dosed the waste with a chemical that turned it dry and odorless and, as it happened, good for plants. That caught the eye of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who were running their Reinvent the Toilet Challenge for the roughly 3.5 billion people with no reliable sanitation, and asked the team to scale it to a single toilet. In the audience at one of those demos sat Aaron's father, Igor, a former-Soviet space engineer turned building designer, who asked the question the whole company now rests on: could you scale this up to a building?

Aaron Tartakovsky runs the answer to that question. Epic Cleantec installs what is essentially a small water-recycling plant in the basement of a large building, takes the wastewater that would normally flow out to the sewer, and cleans it back up to a quality good enough to flush toilets, run cooling towers, do the laundry and water the landscaping. The core of it is a membrane bioreactor, which is just a combination of fine filtration and helpful bacteria, finished off with ultraviolet light or other polishing steps. His father's line captures why this is less exotic than it sounds: what do you think the astronauts have been drinking for the last few decades? The technology is old, and putting it in a 9.5-foot basement under a luxury high-rise in downtown San Francisco is the new part.

The phrase Aaron keeps coming back to is that there is no waste in wastewater, and Epic gets three products out of one dirty stream. There is the recycled water itself, which can cover up to 95% of a building's needs. There are the solids, which Epic dries into a carbon-rich soil amendment instead of trucking them to a landfill where they would rot and give off emissions. And there is the heat, because we pour an astonishing amount of energy into hot showers and dishwashers and then send all that warmth straight down the drain, by Aaron's own calculation enough lost heat to power every electric vehicle on American roads today. The company even brewed a beer from recycled building water with a local brewery, which sounds like a stunt until you realise the point of it landed: it won a TIME Best Invention.

Aaron Tartakovsky is worth listening to as a builder rather than a pitch because of where he draws the line. Aaron does not think onsite reuse beats the big municipal utilities, and he is blunt that it shouldn't try to. The way he frames it, water needs to go the way energy went, with the giant centralised plants and the small distributed ones working together to make the whole system more resilient, the same lesson the grid learned the hard way through the Texas freeze and the California wildfires. He is equally clear-eyed about what actually moves a developer: no matter how green-minded they are, they will not do this unless it saves them money, because utilities are raising water and sewer rates 10 to 15% a year and onsite reuse is how a building stops paying that bill. What ties it back to the man is the optimism, which he chalks up to being a child of refugees and immigrants, and which he tested in a downtown San Francisco high-rise where Epic mined the residents' own toilet solids into soil and grew vegetables in a garden a block away. He braced for disgust. Instead, the residents asked for tours.

“There is no waste in wastewater.”

Aaron Tartakovsky is, in short, the policy operator the water-reuse story needed: someone who can hold the membrane chemistry, the developer's spreadsheet and the city regulator's checklist in the same conversation, which is most of why Epic Cleantec keeps being the first one approved in a new city. You can hear the full arc on the (don't) Waste Water episodes below, or read where the wider economics of the water-reuse revolution are heading.