Blue is the New Green

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."

Today, AbTech has 13,000 installations in 36 states and seven countries, and its 2008 revenue is expected to be 2,000 percent higher than last year's. Seventy percent of its business is with municipal customers. But private developers and commercial entities are increasingly part of the mix. British grocery giant Tesco recently installed an AbTech system to treat runoff at a new 88-acre facility in Riverside, California. Smaller operators are employing the technology to solve niche problems -- in bus depots and fast-food drive-throughs, to cite two examples. Airports, too: The ones in Newark, New Jersey, and New York's Westchester County are among those that have installed AbTech sponges, which typically need to be replaced every two to four years; used sponges are sent to waste-energy plants and burned as fuel.

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