But for Oppenheimer, storage tanks are just the beginning. A floating solar-powered impeller, for example, could improve surface water to be treated for drinking or even provide basic wastewater remediation in an off-grid environment. "We think that our technology has huge potential to help natural remediation of water bodies and all sorts of applications around the world," he says.
Conserving It
As a kid, Mark Sanders hated brushing his teeth with cold water. But watching all that clean, drinkable water run down the drain as it warmed up bugged him. So at the age of 9, he began thinking about ways to capture it and save it for some other purpose -- say, flushing the toilet. Three decades later, during a visit with his wife's family in drought-stricken Oklahoma in 2000, he took up the problem again with a newfound sense of urgency.
On the plane ride home to Louisville, he made a sketch of a water recycling system that would take used water from the bathroom sink, disinfect it, and reroute it to the toilet tank for flushing. Back home, he took the drawing to a friend who did home remodeling, and two weeks later -- with a hot glue gun, some PVC pipe, and a Tupperware container -- the friend had a prototype working in his own home. Sanders, a CPA by trade and at the time the CEO of a large medical practice, patented the system, built a basic website, and began touting the system to anyone he thought might be interested. The result: thousands of hits for the site and affirmation that the interest was out there.
In 2003, Sanders left the medical practice and founded WaterSaver Technologies; he picked up a partner, Tom Reynolds, along the way. After the two spent a couple of years raising money and testing prototypes, the system, dubbed AQUS, made its big-time debut at a water-industry trade show in 2006. Sanders describes the response as "incredible," especially from water companies in the increasingly parched South and Southwest, excited at the prospect of adding another water-saving device to the arsenal of products for which customers already receive rebates.
Indeed, utilities have found that offering customers rebates for things such as low-flow showerheads and toilets and efficient front-loading clothes washers has been a reliable and cost-effective way to curb water use -- and the related cost of energy to supply and treat water and wastewater. (In California in 2005, for example, about 19 percent of electricity use, 30 percent of natural gas consumption, and 88 million gallons of diesel fuel were used to move and treat water.) Thanks to such efforts, total U.S. per capita water use has declined from a high of 1,950 gallons per day in 1977 to 1,480 gallons per day in 2000, according to the Pacific Institute, a nonprofit research group.
The AQUS System -- named one of the 100 best innovations of 2007 by Popular Science magazine -- uses standard plumbing parts and can be installed by a professional plumber in about two hours. Priced at $395 (before rebates), it can save up to 6,000 gallons of water a year in a two-person household. Cutting-edge green architects use AQUS in their home designs, and Sloan Valve -- the world's leading manufacturer of water-efficient plumbing devices -- recently agreed to distribute the product. "People are just now beginning to be aware of the value of water and the dollar savings they can achieve," says Jim Allen, head of Sloan's water-efficiency division. Sanders and Reynolds -- who remain the company's only employees for now -- aim to sell 5,000 to 10,000 units in the first year of the Sloan deal, ramping up to as many as 300,000 after five years. Allen expects the market to swell as more states mandate water-efficient technologies.
That kind of regulation -- coupled with compelling economics -- has already helped Falcon Waterfree Technologies, another pioneer in restroom efficiency. If you are male, and you have recently heeded nature's call at Dodger Stadium, the Hollywood Bowl, the "Bird's Nest" at the Beijing Olympics, or the Taj Mahal, you may be familiar with its product. Falcon, founded in 2000, claims about 90 percent of the worldwide market for water-free urinals and revenue of more than $15 million a year.
Like WaterSaver, Falcon, headquartered in Los Angeles and Grand Rapids, Michigan, piggybacks on the existing sales and distribution networks of established partners in the sanitary equipment industry (it, too, has a partnership with Sloan in the U.S.). "In many respects -- on a significantly smaller scale -- we're really not unlike Intel," says James Krug, Falcon's CEO. "We are the technology that powers the urinals."
Here's how it works: Urinal manufacturers create the "bowl with a hole" -- a porcelain or metal unit designed with a smooth, easy-to-clean surface. A stainless-steel housing provides a perfect seal between the opening and a patented cartridge containing a biodegradable liquid with a specific gravity lighter than water. As soon as urine passes through the cartridge, this lighter liquid covers it and creates an airtight seal, blocking any escaping odor of urine and sewer gases. Unlike with conventional urinals, there is no "flush plume" to spread bacteria and no moving parts that require maintenance; cartridges just need to be replaced every 7,000 uses or so. "Pound for pound, our system is probably the most effective water-conservation device out there," Krug likes to brag. "It doesn't reduce water use by 10, 20, or 30 percent -- it's a 100 percent reduction. Each urinal saves about 40,000 gallons of water a year."
