Although it appears that evidently humans and animals use many of the world's water, heavy industry uses as much as half of it. As a result, industries are in search of latest ways to recycle water, especially within the face of accelerating drought.
Some of the world's most vital industries, comparable to pharmaceuticals, food and beverages, textiles, mining, renewable energy and power, all use huge amounts of water. Now, latest firms are finding ways to reclaim and recycle water as cost-effectively as possible.
According to Statista, the worldwide water and wastewater treatment market is anticipated to achieve half a trillion dollars by the tip of this decade. Much of it’s currently treated with harsh chemicals and uses numerous energy, but firms like Xylem, Veolia and Boston-based startup Gradiant are attempting to chop each costs and energy while eliminating chemicals.
“We take highly contaminated wastewater containing solvents, dissolved salt and organics and remove all the liquid waste,” said Prakash Govindan, co-founder and chief technical officer of Gradiant.
Anurag Bajpayee and Govindan founded Gradiant in 2013 as a spin-off of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).
Gradiant's technology mimics how nature creates rain. Wastewater is heated and pumped right into a humidifier and mixed with ambient air. As they interact, the 2 are heated and vaporize, leaving the pollutants behind. Using proprietary technology, the vapor is directed right into a column of cold, clean water. As the 2 mix, the air cools and fresh water drips like rain falling from a cloud. Gradiant says this process cuts traditional costs in half.
“Other technologies may recover 50 to 60 percent of the water, but we can recover 99 percent of the water,” Govindan said.
Gradiant is the primary unicorn within the water treatment sector. Its customer list is impressive and includes firms comparable to Coca ColaBMWs, Pfizer and Adnoc. The company claims to save lots of 1.7 billion gallons of water a day, comparable to the quantity utilized by 48 million people. In the primary half of this yr, the corporate said it won latest contracts price over $500 million, making its growth trajectory attractive to investors.
“Scaling these technologies is hard. It's easy to find a product, but it's much harder to find a complete end-to-end solution for customers, and that's exactly what Gradiant has done,” said Mark Danchak, co-founder of General Innovation Capital Partners, a Gradiant investor.
Gradiant can be backed by Warburg Pincus, M&G Investments, Formation 8, Clearvision Ventures and GRC. To date, it has raised $228 million.
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