Andrew Benedek

Andrew Benedek did not come to water as a businessman. He grew up in communist Hungary, fled to Canada in 1956 as a teenager during the revolution, and by his own account read his way through the classics of European literature before he was fourteen, the kind of idealistic books that made him want to fix the world's problems rather than just earn a living from them. He trained as a chemical engineer (McGill, then a doctorate at the University of Washington), and it was watching the industry he worked in pour pollution into rivers, with nobody serious about stopping it, that sent him back to academia and then, after a decade as a professor at McMaster, into starting a company. "I started Zenon wanting to find a solution to future water crises," he told me, and in 1980 that is exactly what he set out to do.

Andrew Benedek founded Zenon Environmental in 1980 by buying a small Ontario maker of primitive tubular membranes and pointing it at a problem almost nobody believed was a market yet: reusing wastewater. The bet was that water reuse would one day be mandatory, and he was roughly two decades early, which is a hard place to run a company from. No venture capitalist would back a professor chasing water reuse, so he funded the membranes by running an analytical-instruments business on the side as the profit center. The technology itself was not a straight line either, but Zenon's move from tubular to hollow-fiber membranes, sold under the ZeeWeed name, eventually created the modern membrane bioreactor (MBR) market, which is the now-standard way of combining biological treatment and membrane filtration in one step. China had no MBRs when Zenon arrived; by Benedek's telling, roughly half its wastewater plants use them today.

Andrew Benedek built Zenon into the number-one water-technology company, and that is precisely why he could not keep it. He was convinced GE would eventually realize it was buying the wrong water companies and come for his, and there is a story he says almost nobody knows: rather than sell to GE, he tried to merge Zenon with Suez's struggling Degremont business, taking the idea all the way to Suez's chief executive Jean-Louis Chaussade. Suez would not let go of Degremont, the merger died, and in 2006 GE acquired Zenon for about C$760 million (roughly US$650 million). Two years later, in 2008, Benedek became the inaugural winner of the Lee Kuan Yew Water Prize, Singapore's top water honour, for pioneering the low-pressure membranes that by then were producing clean water for millions of people.

Andrew Benedek had every reason to stop. He had sold the company, he had money, and he had a beautiful house on the California coast, and at sixty-three most people in that position make an investment or two and call it advising. Instead he got scared. Teaching and researching at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography pulled him into the data on climate change, and he found he could not just watch. He bought a German pioneer of anaerobic digestion (the process that uses bacteria to break down organic waste and capture the methane as renewable gas), discovered he had inherited a mess rather than a healthy company, and ended up fixing and rebuilding it into Anaergia, founded in 2007 to turn sewage sludge and food waste into energy, clean water and recovered nutrients. He ran it as chief executive into his eighties, and he describes the work not as a job he does for money but as "an art form."

Andrew Benedek says he built both companies the same way, four steps he hit on by trial and error: pick a problem that is big and will only grow, find a technology advantage that competitors cannot quickly copy, avoid the single mistake that can sink the whole company, and surround yourself with people who are there for the mission rather than the paycheck. His sharper opinion is about the industry he has spent fifty years in: the water sector, he argues, and the American one in particular, is bad at innovating, and without innovation it does not serve its communities well. He is candid that none of it came easily.

“I learned everything the hard way. I try, I fail, and I pick myself up and keep going.”

Andrew Benedek has been, as he puts it, a lonely prophet in the wilderness more than once: alone, early, a little crazy, and, on the questions that mattered, eventually right.