Water

Pennies down the drain

January 15, 2012

Imagine if you had to put a quarter in a slot every time you took a shower at home. Or 50 cents to run the dishwasher. Or $2 to water the grass.

You’d think about water differently, wouldn’t you?

A San Francisco startup called WaterSmart Software wants to remind people that wasting water is wasting money, and to show consumers how to conserve both.

“People don’t have a mental image of pennies going down the drain,” says Peter Yolles, a founder and CEO of WaterSmart Software, which is based in San Francisco.

But they should.

“We’re helping the consumer save money,” Yolles says. “And we’re helping the utility save money.”

WaterSmart is a small company–just six people–that wants to help tackle a very big problem: Fresh, clean water is a finite resource. As populations grow, incomes grow and the planet warms, water scarcity will create business opportunities.

If you’re like me (and I hope you’re not in this instance), you know very little about your water use. I just checked my quarterly bills for the past 12 months and found that I paid $994.21 for water, or $82.85 per month. That’s higher than I thought and, unfortunately, quite a bit higher than the average bill for US households of about $50 month, according to WaterSmart.

What’s more, Yolles tells me, the water bill is “the fastest growing bill in your home,” faster then the electricity or even the cable bill.

Here’s a chart showing typical household water use:

You may be surprised, as I was, to see how much usage comes from leaks and the toilet as opposed to say, the dishwasher, which doesn’t merit its own slice of the chart. (This is from a 1999 study.)

WatersSmart software aims to give people, first, more information about their water use and then, second, advice on how to use water more efficiently. Using billing information from water utilities, along with real estate, climate and geographic data, WaterSmart will compare a household’s water use with the neighbors in a friendly, easy-to-use format, on line and in print. It’s similar in concept to a fast-growing startup called OPower which promotes energy conservation. [See my 2010 blogpost, Opower, peer presssure and climate change.) [click to continue…]

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Daniel Yergin: Why shale gas is like Walmart

November 8, 2011

The breakthrough energy innovation of the 21st century is not thin-film solar, sophisticated wind turbines, advanced biofuels or small-scale nukes.

It’s shale gas.

So says Daniel Yergin, the energy guru and author of The Quest: Energy, Security and the Remaking of the Modern World (Penguin, $35), who was interviewed today (Nov. 8) by Walter Isaacson at the Aspen Institute in Washington. Yergin, the best-selling author, consultant and all-around energy guru, is right: The ability to extract natural gas from shale, using a controversial technique known as fracking, is reshaping America’s energy landscape.

“So far this century, this is the biggest innovation in energy, in terms of scale and impact,” Yergin said. He likened its impact on the energy business to the arrival of a new Walmart in town, which shakes up competitors, big and small.

The impact of cheap, abundant natural gas on energy usage has enormous implications for the climate crisis.

Cleaner-burning gas could replace dirty coal as a fuel to generate electricity. Then again, Yergin said: “It’s does create a more challenging marketplace for wind and solar and everything else.” [click to continue…]

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Biotech food for a warming planet

July 27, 2011

Climate change is here, folks, and I’m not saying so because it’s hot outside. This is a big worry, or at least it should be.

But big problems create big business opportunities: A California biotech company called Arcadia Biosciences has set out to help farmers do their part to slow down the process of global warming and adapt to a resource-constrained world–by developing crop varieties that require less water, tolerate salty conditions and use less nitrogen fertilizer.

This photo shows two varieties of rice. On the left is rice engineered for nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) by Arcadia, on the right conventional rice. In laboratory tests, using typical applications of nitrogen fertilizer, the NUE rice, as it’s known, is substantially more productive. When you can grow more food using the same inputs of land, water and fertilizer, everyone–farmers, consumers, hungry people and anyone who cares about CO2 concentrations in the earth’s atmosphere–is better off.

So, at least, says Eric Rey, the founder and CEO of Arcadia. Others will disagree because Arcadia deploys genetic-engineering technology that some (many?) environmentalists oppose. But when we met last week in Washington, Eric told me that he considers himself an environmentalists and, in fact, it was his concern about disappearing species, pollution and climate issues that led him to start the company back in 2002.

The company’s purpose, Eric said, is to “use the the tools of plant biotechnology, and point them at saving the environment.” When developing a new crop variety, he said, “if we can’t put our fingers on an environmental benefit or a human health benefit, we won’t do it.”
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In Kenya, saving lives with carbon credits

May 5, 2011

Mikkel Vestgaard Frandsen

The Skype connection to Kenya crackles. Mikkel Vestergaard Frandsen, the 38-year-old CEO of a Swiss company that bears his family name, tried to make himself heard. His excitement is palpable.

“Watching this unfold is crazy,” he tells me. “There are so many things we’re trying out here, things we’ve never done before, things that no one has ever done before.”

Vestargaard Frandsen is a Swiss for-profit company that’s in business to save lives in the global south. Its products include LifeStraw, a water filter and PermaNet, a long-lasting bednet to protect people from malaria.

Ordinarily, it sells these products to aid organizations and governments. Then they’re given to people in need. This time, Vestergaard is trying something different: It’s directly giving away about 1 million LifeStraws, at a cost of nearly $30 million, mobilizing thousands of local people to do so, tracking results carefully and expecting to be paid back in the form of carbon credits. Mikkel’s right–this has never been done before.

How this came to pass is interesting. Founded in 1957, family-owned Vestergaard Frandsen originally produced material for work clothes. About 20 years ago, it started a line of relief products like blankets and tents. By 1997, when Mikkel became CEO, the company had phased out conventional textiles to concentrate on relief aid products.
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How GE learned to think small (and serve the poor)

February 23, 2011

GE is good at big: It makes big wind turbines, big jet engines, big locomotives. These businesses require lots of technology, they have high barriers to entry, and they are capital intensive.

But to generate growth in emerging economies, which have fewer resources, GE is learning to think small.

Recently, the global manufacturing giant (2010 revenues: $149 billion) gave its imprimatur to the Sunspring, a small, solar-powered, water purification machine that serves the global poor, costs just $25,000 and was invented by a self-taught engineer who owns a small business in small-town Colorado.

Interestingly, it was not just the business of GE that made the connection to Jack Barker, the 48-year-0ld inventor of the Sunspring, but the GE Foundation, which last year asked him to help with disaster relief in Haiti. It’s an example of how the company’s charitable endeavors can have an unexpected payback.

Bob Corcoran, who runs GE Foundation, told me the other day that its work has exposed GE to “different thinking about how we can adapt our technology and our products for an increasingly important market,” namely places in the global south that lack clean water and reliable electric power. [click to continue…]

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What’s your “water footprint”?

September 8, 2010

What’s the best way to save water?

Hint: It’s not by taking a quick shower. Or using a dual-flush toilet. Or planting native grasses rather than a thirsty lawn.

Those are all good practices, but you’ll make more of a difference if you skip your next cheeseburger. Or — surprisingly — order a Coke instead of a glass of orange juice.

A smaller footprint

This, at least, is one conclusion to be drawn from a report issued today by The Coca-Cola Co. and the Nature Conservancy, with the decidedly unsexy name of Product Water Footprint Assessments: Practical Application in Corporate Water Stewardship [PDF, download].  The name may be uninspired but the 48-page report makes for interesting reading and not only if your business, like Coca-Cola’s, depends on access to clean water.

“We don’t have a business without water,” says Denise Knight, who is the water and sustainable agriculture director for Coca-Cola. As the world’s largest beverage company (2009 revenues: $31 billion), Coca-Cola has focused on water as an environmental issue for nearly a decade. Knight, who joined in 2005 to spearhead the company’s water and ag work, spoke to me by phone from Stockholm, where it’s World Water Week, an occasion for thousands to gather to discuss global water issues.

Coca-Cola has recognized for years that water is a risk factor in its business; the company got a wake-up call after it was accused of hogging too much water in India. About five years ago, it set a number of aggressive water conservation goals, mostly focused on the efficient use and treatment of water when making its products.

It made sense for the company and its bottlers to begin by focusing on their own operations, which they can control.  But a big reason why Coca Cola now sees value in measuring the water footprint of its products (as opposed to the efficiency of its bottling plants) is that product footprints place water in a wider context,  one that encompasses not just the direct use of water in a factory but its indirect use in the company’s supply chain–in the fields, if you will.

Agriculture, in other words, matters a lot  when it comes to using water wisely. One data point: It takes 1,000 times more water to grow food for an individual than to meet that person’s needs for drinking, according to the report.

So what’s a water footprint? The report says:

A product water footprint is the total volume of freshwater consumed, directly and indirectly, to produce a product.

That may sound simple, but it’s not. The Nature Conservancy and Coca-Cola report uses methodology developed by academics and others who are part of the Water Footprint Network, a Dutch nonprofit. It makes distinctions among three kinds of water–green water which is the rainwater stored in soil and used for growing crops, blue water which is the water from rivers, lakes and acquifers used for growing crops or in manufacturing or in the products themselves, and grey water which is the volume of freshwater needed to assimilate pollutants created in agriculture and manufacturing. (And you thought carbon footprints were complicated!) Further complexity arises from the fact that water, unlike carbon, is a local resource, and usage should therefore be considered in the context of the local watershed. [click to continue…]

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Steve Zwick: Paying for nature’s services

June 21, 2010

Steve_ZwickToday’s guest post is from Steve Zwick, who edits Ecosystem Marketplace, an online news service that reports on market-based solutions to environmental problems.  Based on the premise that the cost of production should include the cost of environmental degradation, EM is published by non-governmental organization Forest Trends and funded by a diverse array of NGOs, governmental agencies, and private companies.

A native of Chicago, Steve began contributing to EM in 2006, after more than a decade writing about sustainable business for publications such as Time and Fortune.  He also produces radio features for Germany’s Deutsche Welle Radio and National Public Radio in the United States. Steve’s background combines journalism, business and the environment—he studied journalism at Northwestern, worked as a runner at the Chicago Board of Trade, became a futures trader and then got involved in local environmental campaigns, which led to his writing career. Steve sent me this thoughtful post from Hanoi, where he was watching Ivory Coast play Brazil in the World Cup and preparing for the 17th Katoomba meeting this week, as he’ll explain:

BP’s Deepwater Horizon debacle reminds us once again that our economy depends on our ecology and that one man’s cheap solution is often another’s cost.  It’s as true in the United States as it is here in Vietnam, where subsistence farmers often must choose between feeding their families and preserving nature.

But the apparent conflict between commerce and nature is a false one, because in the long run everything we buy, sell, eat, and produce is derived from nature.  If we destroy nature, we destroy our own livelihoods.

mangrove0459smMangroves, for example, provide shelter for vulnerable fish and breeding ground for shrimp.  They also shield the coast from slow erosion and sudden storms; they extract impurities from water and pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, depositing it in the ocean floor – thus helping to reduce the greenhouse effect and slow climate change.

All of these are ecosystem services, delivered to us by nature, free of charge.  And because they’re free of charge, they are taken for granted – and destroyed to make things we can put a price on.

Over the last four decades, however, we’ve seen scores of efforts to measure the economic value of services provided by wetlands, forests, and other living ecosystems – as well as habitat supporting endangered species – and then attempts to entice those who either benefit from these services or contribute to their destruction to instead pay for their upkeep.

That’s what payments for ecosystem services (PES) are all about. Some of the more exciting emerging PES schemes involve water.  Indeed, water quality trading (WQT) schemes are proliferating in streams, rivers, and lakes across the world. WQT is a pillar of the Obama administration’s new scheme to clean up the Chesapeake Bay. [click to continue…]

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Sanjeev Chadha: Why is PepsiCo building dams?

April 24, 2010

Sanjeev2Today’s guest post comes from Sanjeev  Chadha, the chairman and CEO of PepsiCo India. Sanjeev, who is 50, joined the company in 1989, as part of the team that brought Pepsi products to India and while the brands are doing well, they have been controversial because of their impact on water in a country where water shortages are an issue. Here he writes about how PepsiCo has responded to the expectations of Indian citizens–by both reducing its own water use and helping communities do a better job of gathering and storing water, to the point where PepsiCo now says it has a “positive water balance” in India, a global first for the company.

Images from space illustrate an Earth plentiful with vast blue oceans, seemingly providing our world with an endless supply of this necessary resource. What the pictures don’t show are the millions of people with no access to a clean water supply. Water shortage is a global crisis.

In my home country of India, a lack of fresh water supply has long been an issue among all classes of society. Our consumers range from urban businesspeople to farmers in the countryside. All Indians are acutely aware of the fallout of long-standing issues – from heavy farming and pesticide use to poor sewage treatment and industrial pollution – that impact the nation’s lack of fresh water. As a nation steeped in agriculture, water is of particular concern to farmers, who understand that we need to immediately find better ways to conserve water.

The company I work for, PepsiCo, takes these issues very seriously and is actively making a difference. Not so long ago, environmental activists in India targeted PepsiCo and other beverage companies operating in India  for consuming excessive groundwater in local communities. As you can imagine, our executives were surprised by these accusations, as we work to employ safe water and bottling practices in PepsiCo facilities around the world. In response, we continued to improve efforts to reduce water use in our plants and took additional action to provide local communities with the clean water they need.

In 2003, we took this a step further.  We launched a country-wide effort to achieve a Positive Water Balance in India by 2009. Essentially, this means that for all water used in our manufacturing process, we would give the same amount of water back to local communities, through in-plant processes to reduce our water use, as well as programs and interventions to create greater freshwater access in local areas. You can learn more about Positive Water Balance from the World Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Check Dam Sept 2009We also recognized the need for on-the-ground action in these communities. Replenishing water supplies only partially solves the problem; villagers also need tools to better manage these expanded water resources. It’s an important part of our role to invest in and aid our neighbors. And at PepsiCo’s facilities in India, we saw an opportunity to better manage water resources in these areas by working directly with community members.

After assessing several areas near our beverage manufacturing locations,  we determined that the creation of check-dams would be the best way to manage and rejuvenate the water supply. [click to continue…]

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Selling water to the global poor

April 4, 2010

twi-1Entrepreneur and lawyer Kevin McGovern has founded 15 companies. Some are household names, like Sobe Beverages, which he sold to PepsiCo for a reported $370 million in 2000. Others are quieter money-makers, like Tristrata, which owns 150 patents related to alpha hydroxy acids, a key ingredient in skin care products.

None, he predicts, will have the impact of his newest venture, a startup called The Water Initiative that aims to help solve the world’s water crisis by treating contaminated water at the point of use. It’s a simple idea–sell  equipment that will purify water to local distributors in poor communities around the world.

McGovern and his company are  operating in a couple of cities in Mexico, selling water purifiers for about $150 each to distributors who then lease them to families for about $3 a week. “It’s franchise model, a multi-level marketing approach,” he says. The Mexican government recently asked him to expand the business nationally.

While the company is small, McGovern has lined up some big-name supporters. Producer-musician Quincy Jones is honorary chairman of The Water Initiative. Indian business mogul Ranan Tata is an investor and adviser. So is Cornell University professor Stuart Hart, a pioneering thinker about business and sustainability and co-author, with C.K. Prahalad, of the 2002 article “The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid,” which provided the first articulation of how business could profitably serve the needs of the four billion poor in the developing world. [click to continue…]

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The looming “water gap”

November 23, 2009

There’s good and bad news from a sweeping new report on the world’s water scarcity out today from McKinsey & Co., commissioned by such water-dependent companies as Coca-Cola, Nestle, SAB Miller and Syngenta, along with the World Bank/International Finance Corp.

1798824344_d4951982bbThe bad: Global demand for water already exceeds supply—about 1.1 billion people don’t have access to clean water—and the so-called water gap is increasing at an accelerating rate.

The good: Cost-effective, sustainable solutions are available to close the gap, particularly if governments and business focus on reducing demand rather than trying to generate additional supply.

The challenge: Getting beyond the nostrum that water is a “human right” so that water, which is obviously a scarce resource, can be priced in a way that drives conservation.

One more thing to know: Water issues are at least as complex as energy, and all water problems are local, so generalizing about water, while inevitable, is invariably misleading.

As Martin Stuchtey of McKinsey put it: “We are not saying there is one way to close the water gap, and we fully acknowledge the complexity of the water arena.”

The 185-page report, published by the 2030 Water Resources Group, was released this morning at a [click to continue…]

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