Yesterday, March 22, was World Water Day, in case you somehow missed it. I celebrated by attending two very different but complementary events that, together, paint a portrait of the problems and opportunities associated with keeping the planet’s denizens quenched with clean water.
The day began with a press conference in San Francisco put on by Global Green USA, the nonprofit started a few years ago by Mikhail Gorbachev to address global environmental and security issues. With the help of eco-luminary Leonardo DiCaprio, Global Green launched a campaign to press for a global Water Treaty that calls for an international law on the “Right to Water.” It also called on Congress and President Bush to support Sen. Bill Frist’s recent bill to make access to clean water a cornerstone of U.S. foreign policy. DiCaprio also has produced a Web-based movie on global water issues, which will be released on the ‘net some time around Earth Day.
But the main event of the day was the Cleantech Venture Forum a few blocks away. At Cleantech, where I sit as this is written, 400 or so investors have come together to hear presentations from 18 early-stage clean-technology companies -- and for copious amounts of schmoozing.
As is typical of such events, there are plenty of clean energy and advanced materials companies presenting, but also some water-technology companies. For example, there’s EnviroScrub, which boasts a technology capable of removing dangerous heavy metals -- arsenic, lead, mercury, and the whole witch’s brew of stuff that ends up in our water supply. (Data point: the market for arsenic removal alone is estimated at $400 million to $700 million in the U.s. alone.) And there’s Watertrax, an online service to help water utilities manage water quality.
Okay, maybe that kind of technology doesn’t float your boat. It’s certainly not as sexy as, say, a technology that generates hydrogen from water and sunlight. But this is the stuff with which the world’s water challenges will be addressed.
And the fact that water has the attention of the venture capital crowd -- the folks who brought us PCs, the Internet, and cell phones, among other things -- bodes well. If there’s money to be made from solving the world’s water challenges -- and there’s plenty -- it’s likely to come from the corps of entrepreneurs, investors, and bankers like the ones in this room.
I’ll have more from Cleantech in a couple of days.
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