Paul Van de Grift

Paul Van de Grift did not come to water through engineering. Paul studied international business and management in Amsterdam, spent roughly a decade in export and trade, married a Chilean wife, and ended up working the economic desk at the Dutch embassy in Santiago as a trade advisor for water and agrifood. That is where he met Bluecon, a small Dutch wastewater startup scouting the Chilean market, and he spent four days driving its founder around the country before joining the team back in the Netherlands.

At Bluecon International, Paul Van de Grift's title was Business Developer for Spain, Portugal and Latin America, and the product he carried was a wastewater treatment plant that fits inside a shipping container. Bluecon takes its name from "blue container," and its made-up verb, Blueconizing, describes a physical-chemical process (electrocoagulation, flocculation and flotation, which is a century-old industrial technique) that separates the dirt from domestic wastewater and turns it into reusable water in a matter of minutes. One container serves a few hundred up to 20,000 inhabitants.

Paul Van de Grift's real subject is the gap that big plants can never cover. The Netherlands runs huge centralized biological treatment because the country is flat and its towns sit right next to each other, so you can pool the wastewater of several towns into one plant. That stops working in the mountains. Already in the south of France, then in Spain, Portugal and most of Latin America, the distances are too great to connect towns together, which is why Italy and Spain have been fined by the European Union for under-treating their wastewater. The smaller the community, the worse traditional plants perform, and that is exactly the 0-to-20,000-inhabitant niche where a containerized physical-chemical system wins.

Paul Van de Grift learned that the obstacle was rarely the technology. Most local governments simply do not know that wastewater can be treated cheaply enough, to a high enough quality, to be reused rather than just discharged. So his job was evangelism, a roadshow with a 40-foot demo container, presentations and live demonstrations, because, as he put it, with any new technology people need to see it work before they will buy it. Every fact in this profile is anchored against my Leviathan database and his own words on the show.

Paul Van de Grift left Bluecon in 2023 and now does the same work for Solar Dew Clean Water, a Dutch startup whose solar membrane distillation turns seawater into drinking water in a single step. The thread is consistent across both companies: decentralized, low-cost, reuse-first water for the communities the big systems skip. What he says he cares about is not closing the sale but the twenty years after it, making sure the plant is still running and the customer is getting everything they can from it.

“Not a lot of local governments know that water can actually be treated at low costs up to a quality where it can be reused. So that thing is pretty new. This is where we need to go out and spread the message, we travel a lot and we bring our demo container with us.”