Striking the stone Israeli firms offer technology to slake the world’s thirst
MOSES parted the waters. Strauss aims merely
to separate the waters from their yucky impurities. On May 18th in
In 2006 the Israeli government launched a programme to support water companies, for instance by helping them to market their products abroad. It also created (and later privatised) Kinrot Ventures, the world’s only start-up incubator specialising in water technologies.
A new crop of water-tech firms is emerging, many of them started by computer-industry veterans. “I wanted to invent more than just a new ringtone,” says Elad Frenkel, the boss of Aqwise, a firm that provides gear and expertise to build wastewater treatment plants. Facilities based on the firm’s technologies feature what it calls “biomass carriers”, thimble-sized plastic structures with a large surface area. In wastewater pools they give bacteria more space to grow and thus allow biological contaminants to be consumed more quickly.
Emefcy, a start-up, is also in the wastewater business. It aims to reduce the energy required to clean water, which currently gobbles up 2% of the world’s power-generating capacity. One of its products uses special “electrogenic” bacteria to turn wastewater pools into batteries of sorts. If they work as planned, they could generate more electricity than is needed to treat the wastewater.
The
mission of TaKaDu, another start-up, is to discover leaks in a water-supply
network, sometimes before they happen. It does this by sifting through the data
generated by the network’s sensors to look for anomalies. Even a 1% change in
flow rate, if persistent, can point to a leak. TaKaDu’s detection engine is now
monitoring water-supply systems in a dozen places, including
The
Contact information | n/a |
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News type | Inbrief |
File link |
http://www.economist.com/node/18682280?story_id=18682280 |
Source of information | The Economist |
Keyword(s) | Water governance, waste water, water treatment, drought |
Subject(s) | ANALYSIS AND TESTS , CHARACTERISTICAL PARAMETERS OF WATERS AND SLUDGES , DRINKING WATER , DRINKING WATER AND SANITATION : COMMON PROCESSES OF PURIFICATION AND TREATMENT , HEALTH - HYGIENE - PATHOGENIC MICROORGANISM , HYDRAULICS - HYDROLOGY , INFORMATION - COMPUTER SCIENCES , POLICY-WATER POLICY AND WATER MANAGEMENT , WATER DEMAND , WATER QUALITY |
Geographical coverage | Israel,China, |
News date | 16/05/2011 |
Working language(s) | ENGLISH |