Abundantly Clear

SUMMARY: Change:WATER develops transformative water innovations for India. Our Abundantly Clear water treatment technology means clean water anywhere, for anyone. It is a no-energy, no-waste solution to systemically and more equitably rebalances India’s water-cycle, so that large users profit from consuming less and poor communities have safer, affordable access to more.

PROBLEM SPACE: India’s water cycle isn’t a cycle it’s a drain. 90% of India’s available water is consumed by agriculture and industry, crowding out other uses. 100MM poor lack access to safe drinking water, 50MM are affected by arsenic and 0.6MM children/yr die of diarrhea. India’s water crisis is completely man-made: poor governance breeds over-use and rampant pollution. But inefficiency exacts real economic costs on large users. Inefficient industrial water treatment increases operational costs (energy, maintenance, disposal). Over-watering reduces agricultural productivity as India’s crop-per-drop is below global averages. With Punjab’s water-table dropping 3ft/yr, all surface-water sources microbially-contaminated, and groundwater sources increasingly contaminated, usable water becomes more expensive and energy-intensive to procure. Business-as-usual (incremental buildout, etc) will hardly keep up with burgeoning demand, set to double by 2030. Lack of government investment means water infrastructure is de facto privatized. Major water users need more efficient, higher-performance, lower-cost water management solutions. Under-resourced communities need low-complexity, low-cost, reliable drinking water solutions. While many technology solutions exist to address these needs, what doesn’t exist is an efficient way to get them into cost-constrained markets like India. New technologies face major barriers to deployment in these markets: namely cost, complexity, compatibility and customer access.

SOLUTION: Change:WATER is a water innovation accelerator adapting breakthrough technologies to the needs and constraints of developing countries. We target solutions with cross-sector applicability, to affect systemic rebalancing of water use and access in Indian technologies to produce low-cost, safe water for the poor and reduce agro-industrial water use.

Our first technology, the Abundantly Clear membrane, is a low-cost plastic film that produces nano-pure water, removing contaminants (microbes, salts, metals, etc) with almost no energy use and 95-100% water recovery. This material has broad potential applicability: irrigation, desalination, drinking water purification, wastewater treatment and waste-to-value capture.

When we find such high-potential technologies, we make them feasible, affordable and available in developing countries through 3 interventions:

ADAPTATION: Through user-centered design and frugal engineering (cutting costs 30-60%, “more with less”), we adapt these technologies to be affordable and appropriate to the users’ needs and resource-constraints. We aim for low-cost, low maintenance, low-complexity and use of locally-sourced inputs.

VALIDATE: Collaborating with target users, we pilot and iterate on our product designs to achieve reliability and end-user compatibility.

RAPID SCALE DEPLOYMENT: To achieve broad-scale impact, we rapidly scale and deploy our innovations through partnerships with local suppliers, manufacturers, and diverse distribution channels (companies, NGOs, etc).

CONTACT PERSON: [email protected]