Relating to water use, most of us consider the water we drink. However industrial makes use of for issues like manufacturing account for billions of gallons of water every day. As an example, making a single iPhone, by one estimate, requires greater than 3,000 gallons.
Gradiant is working to scale back the world’s industrial water footprint. Based by a crew from MIT, Gradiant presents water recycling, therapy, and purification options to a few of the largest corporations on Earth, together with Coca Cola, Tesla, and the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Firm. By serving as an end-to-end water firm, Gradiant says it helps corporations reuse 2 billion gallons of water every day and saves one other 2 billion gallons of contemporary water from being withdrawn.
The corporate’s mission is to protect water for generations to return within the face of rising world demand.
“We work on each ends of the water spectrum,” Gradiant co-founder and CEO Anurag Bajpayee SM ’08, PhD ’12 says. “We work with ultracontaminated water, and we are able to additionally present ultrapure water to be used in areas like chip fabrication. Our specialty is within the excessive water challenges that may’t be solved with conventional applied sciences.”
For every buyer, Gradiant builds tailor-made water therapy options that mix chemical remedies with membrane filtration and organic course of applied sciences, leveraging a portfolio of patents to drastically reduce water utilization and waste.
“Earlier than Gradiant, 40 million liters of water can be used within the chip-making course of. It could all be contaminated and handled, and possibly 30 % can be reused,” explains Gradiant co-founder and COO Prakash Govindan PhD ’12. “Now we have the know-how to recycle, in some circumstances, 99 % of the water. Now, as a substitute of consuming 40 million liters, chipmakers solely must devour 400,000 liters, which is a big shift within the water footprint of that trade. And this isn’t simply with semiconductors. We’ve finished this in meals and beverage, we’ve finished this in renewable power, we’ve finished this in pharmaceutical drug manufacturing, and several other different areas.”
Studying the worth of water
Govindan grew up in part of India that skilled a years-long drought starting when he was 10. With out faucet water, considered one of Govindan’s chores was to haul water up the steps of his house complicated every time a truck delivered it.
“Nevertheless a lot water my brother and I may carry was how a lot we had for the week,” Govindan remembers. “I discovered the worth of water the onerous manner.”
Govindan attended the Indian Institute of Expertise as an undergraduate, and when he got here to MIT for his PhD, he sought out the teams engaged on water challenges. He started engaged on a water therapy methodology referred to as service fuel extraction for his PhD below Gradiant co-founder and MIT Professor John Lienhard.
Bajpayee additionally labored on water therapy strategies at MIT, and after transient stints as postdocs at MIT, he and Govindan licensed their work and based Gradiant.
Service fuel extraction grew to become Gradiant’s first proprietary know-how when the corporate launched in 2013. The founders started by treating wastewater created by oil and fuel wells, touchdown their first accomplice in a Texas firm. However Gradiant step by step expanded to fixing water challenges in energy era, mining, textiles, and refineries. Then the founders seen alternatives in industries like electronics, semiconductors, meals and beverage, and prescription drugs. Right now, oil and fuel wastewater therapy makes up a small share of Gradiant’s work.
As the corporate expanded, it added applied sciences to its portfolio, patenting new water therapy strategies round reverse osmosis, selective contaminant extraction, and free radical oxidation. Gradiant has additionally created a digital system that makes use of AI to measure, predict, and management water therapy services.
“The benefit Gradiant has over each different water firm is that R&D is in our DNA,” Govindan says, noting Gradiant has a world-class analysis lab at its headquarters in Boston. “At MIT, we discovered the best way to do cutting-edge know-how improvement, and we by no means let go of that.”
The founders examine their suite of applied sciences to LEGO bricks they will combine and match relying on a buyer’s water wants. Gradiant has constructed greater than 2,500 of those end-to-end techniques for purchasers around the globe.
“Our clients aren’t water corporations; they’re industrial shoppers like semiconductor producers, drug corporations, and meals and beverage corporations,” Bajpayee says. “They aren’t about to begin working a water therapy plant. They take a look at us as their water accomplice who can maintain the entire water downside.”
Persevering with innovation
The founders say Gradiant has been roughly doubling its income annually during the last 5 years, and it’s persevering with so as to add applied sciences to its platform. As an example, Gradiant lately developed a essential minerals restoration answer to extract supplies like lithium and nickel from clients’ wastewater, which may broaden entry to essential supplies important to the manufacturing of batteries and different merchandise.
“If we are able to extract lithium from brine water in an environmentally and economically possible manner, the U.S. can meet all of its lithium wants from inside the U.S.,” Bajpayee says. “What’s stopping large-scale extraction of lithium from brine is know-how, and we imagine what we’ve now deployed will open the floodgates for direct lithium extraction and utterly revolutionized the trade.”
The corporate has additionally validated a technique for eliminating PFAS — so-called poisonous “perpetually chemical compounds” — in a pilot challenge with a number one U.S. semiconductor producer. Within the close to future, it hopes to convey that answer to municipal water therapy crops to guard cities.
On the coronary heart of Gradiant’s innovation is the founders’ perception that industrial exercise doesn’t should deplete one of many world’s most significant assets.
“Ever because the industrial revolution, we’ve been taking from nature,” Bajpayee says. “By treating and recycling water, by decreasing water consumption and making trade extremely water environment friendly, we’ve this distinctive alternative to show the clock again and provides nature water again. If that’s your driver, you possibly can’t select to not innovate.”
