Falcon is backed by some very heavy hitters. Its founder and lead investor is Marc Nathanson, a cable entrepreneur and chairman of Voice of America in the Clinton administration. In 2006, Capricorn Management, an investment group founded by Jeff Skoll, eBay's first president, bought 25 percent of Falcon. And its board of advisers includes Al Gore, Richard Gephardt, and former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan.
Acceptance of a waterless urinal was once the challenge. Now the challenge is competition, including new rivals such as Kohler and Zurn. Still, Krug believes that by continuing to invest heavily in R&D, he is keeping ahead of the curve. And competition has its advantages, too. "When everyone else joins in," he says, "you know you've gone from fringe to mainstream."
Here's a fact: According to the American Water Works Association, 58 percent of urban water goes to landscape irrigation. And as much as half of that is lost or wasted because of evaporation, wind, or improper irrigation design, installation, maintenance, and scheduling.
Chris Spain, co-founder and chairman of Petaluma, California-based HydroPoint Data Systems, saw an opportunity in those lost 3.5 billion gallons. After selling a software start-up in 2000, Spain and two partners began plotting their next move. Water was especially attractive. "One, it seemed to be a huge issue that a variety of macro trends were driving to a crisis point," says Spain. "And two, there seemed to be a huge absence of focus, investment, and innovation."
They came across a company in Petaluma that had patented a compelling technology -- a system that used live weather data, rather than preset timers, to tell sprinklers when and how much to water crops, lawns, and commercial landscapes. They acquired the company, raised funds from angel investors, and went to work upgrading the technology. Now known as WeatherTRAK, the system uses data retrieved from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration satellites that gather information from 40,000 weather stations across the country. WeatherTRAK's database and servers can accurately map weather conditions -- wind, humidity, and temperature -- for any given square kilometer in the U.S. Subscribers to the system (commercial users pay $225 per year) need only set a sprinkler controller with some information about the plants and topography of their site, and the system takes over, sending weather updates via satellite to automatically adjust watering needs to real conditions on the ground.
There are some 45 million irrigation controllers nationwide, and according to a survey by the American Water Works Association, most still have the same settings they had when they left the factory. The result: overwatering, often accompanied by runoff into neighboring surface waters. By watering landscapes just enough, the WeatherTRAK system cuts water use up to 59 percent.
Agriculture would seem to be an obvious market. But long-term contracts for purchasing water give farmers extremely low prices, so they generally have little incentive to invest in conservation. So HydroPoint has focused on commercial and institutional clients. Among its 15,000 subscribers: Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, Google, Lowe's, and the cities of Newport Beach, California, and Charleston, South Carolina. In 2007, those 15,000 customers saved a combined 6.7 billion gallons of water. Lockheed Martin estimates it saves $1 million a year using WeatherTRAK at its two Silicon Valley campuses.
Keeping It Clean
Though drought is one of the more obvious consequences of climate change, water experts are equally worried about the problems caused by extreme storms and flooding that many, if not most, scientists believe are another consequence of global warming. Long underregulated and undermanaged, storm-water runoff has become a concern for its effect on surface and ground water, as well as the additional burden that it puts on already creaky wastewater treatment facilities when it is treated.
Glenn Rink, founder and CEO of Scottsdale, Arizona-based AbTech Industries, first used his Smart Sponges -- made from a synthetic polymer -- in 1997 to clean up oil spills from tankers at sea. In 1999, when he turned his attention to storm water, most regulation was focused on runoff from new construction. "No one was really doing anything about dealing with the billions of gallons of rain that come down on the roads and go into our flood-control devices and are contaminated on the way through," he says. So Rink figured out how to mold the sponge material into different shapes that would fit into street-level storm drains and catch basins, soaking up oil and debris and letting clean water pass through. Later, he developed a way to coat the sponges with an antimicrobial agent so they would disinfect water as well. The next iteration will add the ability to capture heavy metals, herbicides, and pesticides.
Long Beach, California, installed 2,000 AbTech filters in June 2004. Tom Leary, the city's storm-water compliance officer, was primarily concerned with cutting bacterial pollution at beaches. Tests showed the Smart Sponges effectively eliminated bacteria. And in the unusually rainy year following the sponges' installation, they also caught almost 92,000 pounds of trash and debris and 3,600 gallons of waste oil. Leary likes the technology, because unlike UV treatment or mechanical debris catchers, "it's not outrageously expensive, and it's easy to move around. You don't smell them, hear them, or see them."
