Peter Thum didn’t intend to become a social entrepreneur. In 2001 he was consulting for McKinsey & Company on a bottled water project in South Africa—a country with an ongoing water crisis. Every day, he would watch women and children load up with empty jugs and set out on what was often a four-hour journey to bring back enough water for their families to survive. One afternoon, while driving on an empty dirt road miles and miles from the closest town, Thum came across a solitary woman struggling to carry a forty-pound jug on her head. “This was the middle of nowhere,” he recounts. “It was pretty clear this woman had been walking for a long time and was going to have to keep walking for a long time. Even though I had seen evidence of the water crisis around South Africa, at that moment it became crystal clear: something had to be done about the problem.”
Thum decided the easiest way to facilitate change was to connect bottled water, then becoming one of the world’s hottest commodities, with the water shortage that was becoming one of the world’s biggest crises. He returned to the States, partnered with old friend Jonathan Greenblatt, and created Ethos Water: a superpremium brand of bottled water that would donate a portion of its proceeds to help children of the world get clean water and raise awareness around the issue. In 2005 Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, decided to acquire Ethos, putting its water in about 7,000 stores in America. With Starbucks’ help, by donating five cents per bottle sold to water-related projects, Ethos has since made grants in excess of $10 million and brought water and sanitation to half a million people.
That said, the global water crisis affects a billion people, so let’s be clear: $10 million isn’t going to get it done. But Ethos’s arrival marked something of a turning point. Historically, because of the huge amount of infrastructure required by most water projects, this space had been the domain of World Bank–style institutions. Ethos was one of the first companies to prove that social entrepreneurship could have a role in addressing water challenges. The company also helped raise awareness around the issue, and this created a snowball effect. Within a decade, water had become a top growth category for social entrepreneurs, and, as inventor Dean Kamen points out, there’s still plenty of room for growth:
When you talk to the experts about developing new technology to provide clean drinking water for the developing world, they’ll tell you that—with four billion people making less than two dollars a day—there’s no viable business model, no economic model, and no way to finance development costs. But the twenty-five poorest countries already spend twenty percent of their GDP on water. This twenty percent, about thirty cents, ain’t much, but do the math again: four billion people spending thirty cents a day is a $1.2 billion market every day. It’s $400 billion a year. I can’t think of too many companies in the world that have $400 billion in sales a year. And you don’t have to do a market study to find out whether there’s a need. It’s water. There’s a need!
Filling that need, however profitable, won’t be easy. The issue isn’t just the amount of water required for hydration and sanitation, it’s that water is thoroughly embedded in our lives, woven through most everything we manufacture or consume. The reason that 70 percent of the world’s water is used for agriculture is because one egg requires 120 gallons to produce. There are 100 gallons in a watermelon. Meat is among our thirstiest commodities, requiring 2,500 gallons per pound or, as Newsweek once explained, “the water that goes into a 1,000-pound steer would float a destroyer.”
And sustenance is just the beginning. In fact, everything in our abundance pyramid is affected by issues of hydrology. Beyond food, education takes a hit, as 443 million school days a year are lost to water-related disease. Thirty-five gallons of water are used to make one microchip—and a single Intel plant produces millions of chips each month—so information abundance suffers too. Then there’s energy, where every step in the power production chain makes the world a dryer place. In the United States, for example, energy requires 20 percent of our nonagricultural water. At the pyramid’s peak, threats to freedom have also been correlated to scarcity. In 2007 UC Berkeley professor of economics Edward Miguel found “strong evidence that better rainfall makes conflict less likely in Africa.” So far, these conflicts have remained civil wars played out within countries, but some two hundred rivers and three hundred lakes share international boundaries, and not all these neighbors are friendly. (Israel and Jordan, for example, share the Jordan River.) Finally, with 3.5 million people dying annually from water-related illnesses, nothing is clearer than the direct ties between health and hydration.
Beyond the humancentric requirements of our abundance pyramid, there are even more problematic environmental concerns. Let’s return to bottled water for a moment. Every year, we humans consume almost 50 billion liters of bottled water. Much of this water is what’s known as “fossil water,” meaning that it took tens of thousands of years to accumulate in aquifers and is not easily replenished. But fossil water also anchors the world’s most delicate ecosystems. The thirst of modern agricultural practices, industrial practices, and the bottled water industry have pushed those systems toward collapse. We cannot risk further degradation. Simply put: no ecosystems means no ecosystem services, and that’s a loss our species cannot survive.
Thus, addressing all of these concerns will require every tool in the toolbox. Our agricultural practices must be totally revamped, our industrial practices as well. We’ll need waterwise appliances, novel infrastructure solutions, and a lot of honesty about a planetary population pushing toward nine billion. What that figure really tells us is what’s really needed: a change measurable in orders of magnitude. With 97.3 percent of the water on the planet too salty for consumption, and another 2 percent locked up as polar ice, an orders-of-magnitude change does not come from bickering over the remaining .5 percent. This is not to say that we should ignore conservation and efficiency, but if our ultimate goal is abundance, then that requires an entirely new approach. Fresh water must go the route of aluminum, from one of the scarcest resources on Earth to one of the most ubiquitous. Pulling this off requires a significant amount of innovation: the type of significant innovation being unleashed by Moore’s law—which, as we shall soon see, is exactly what DIY innovators like Dean Kamen are bringing to the table.
Dean Kamen is a self-taught physicist, multimillionaire entrepreneur, and—with his 440 patents and National Medal of Technology—one of the greatest DIY innovators of our time. Like most DIY-ers, Kamen loves solving problems. Back in the 1970s, while he was still in college, Kamen’s brother (then a medical student and now a renowned pediatric oncologist) mentioned there was no reliable way to give babies small and steady doses of drugs. Without such technology, infants were stuck with extended hospital stays, and nurses were stuck with inflexible time schedules.
So Kamen got curious. He started tinkering. One thing led to another, and pretty soon he’d invented the first portable infusion pump capable of automatically delivering the exact same drug dosages that had once required round-the-clock hospital supervision. Afterward, the miniaturization of medical technology became something of a specialty. In 1982 Kamen founded DEKA Research and Development, which soon created a portable kidney dialysis machine the size of a VCR, rather than the previous dishwasher-esque model. Then came the iBot: a motorized wheelchair that climbs stairs; the Segway, Kamen’s attempt to reinvent local transportation; and the “Luke” Arm—a radical step forward in the development of prosthetic limbs.
Throughout all of this, Kamen never lost his interest in the challenges surrounding dialysis. “Every day,” he says, “dialysis patients flush five gallons of sterilized water through their system. Getting this much clean water is a hassle. Often it means backing up delivery trucks to patients’ homes once a week, and filling their garages with hundreds of bags of sterile water. I kept thinking there’s gotta be a better way.”
Kamen’s first idea was to recycle the sterile water, but after consulting with biologists, he realized that there was no way to filter out mechanically what the kidney takes out naturally. “There’s ammonia, urea, all these middle molecules. What the kidney takes out, you just can’t filter.” So if he couldn’t recycle the water, perhaps there was a way to make tap water clean enough for injection.
That adventure took a few more years. “Turns out going from potable water to sterile water using filters was impossible,” he explains. “Osmosis membranes don’t work. The gold standard was pure, distilled deionized water, but there were no miniature distillers that could meet that standard.” So Kamen decided to build one. Unfortunately, after doing the calculations, he realized that the amount of electrical power needed to run even a small unit would require rewiring most homes.
Next came a crazier idea: build a distiller capable of recycling its own energy. “A couple of years later, we finally got this little box that had 98 percent energy recovery and produced a reasonable amount of sterile water. We tested it with all these different tap waters, and it worked perfectly. It was so good that we didn’t need to use tap water: we could use gray water instead. Then it hit me: if I can make gray water sterile enough for injection with 98 percent energy recovery, why am I trying to optimize a device to produce five to ten gallons a day? That machine could help a few tens of thousands of dialysis patients. But if I made a different machine [with a greater output] it might help a few billion people. Instead of creating an alternative to a minimally difficult problem [water delivery], I can stop people from dying [from water-related illness].”
That different machine was finished in 2003. As this is the technology that Kamen wants to use to bring down the giant problem of waterborne illness, he named it the Slingshot, for the technology that David used to bring down Goliath. It’s the size of a dorm-room refrigerator, with a power cord, an intake hose, and an outflow hose. According to the inventor, “Stick the intake hose into anything wet—arsenic-laden water, salt water, the latrine, the holding tanks of a chemical waste treatment plant; really, anything wet—and the outflow is one hundred percent pure pharmaceutical-grade injectable water.”
The current version can purify 1,000 liters (250 gallons) of water a day using the same amount of energy it takes to run a hair dryer. The power source is an updated version of a Stirling engine, designed to burn almost anything. Over a six-month field trial in Bangladesh, the engine ran only on cow dung and provided villagers with enough electricity to charge their cell phones and power their lights. And because Kamen wants to deploy the system in some of the remotest villages in the world, it’s also designed to run maintenance free for at least five years.
“It better work that well,” says Greenblatt, “because the world is littered with water pumps and purifiers that were not sustainable. I was in a village in Ethiopia that had made a water pump out of bicycle parts, and it worked because, when it broke down, people could fix it; they could get bicycle parts. That’s the kind of supply chain you want.”
Greenblatt is not alone in this assertion. Many believe water is an issue of money and will be best solved locally, and without the aid of techie gizmos. It’s an opinion based on hindsight. The last century saw governments dithering while they searched for a high-tech, silver-bullet solution. Millions died in the interim, and the world is full of gadgets either unsuitable for the ruggedness of their deployment area or impossible to maintain because supply chains did not extend far enough. A great many of these bright ideas, because no one bothered to have an open discussion ahead of time, simply violated cultural barriers. Rob Kramer, chairman of the Global Water Trust, likes to tell an apocryphal story of a trunk line extension project in remote Africa, where pipe was run to within a quarter mile of a village in need—but the pipe kept getting vandalized. “Turns out,” he says, “the four hours every other day that the women spent hiking out to gather water was the only time they got away from their husbands. They cherished this privacy, so they kept sabotaging the pipe.”
All of these facts are correct, but they overlook others. As admirable as the bicycle-parts pump’s ingenuity, it’s not a long-term solution. The bicycle-parts pump is a transition technology, not unlike the early copper-wire phone systems that led to wireless 3G networks. For long-term sustainability, we still need massively disruptive Slingshot-like solutions.
Secondly, we can learn from our mistakes. Certainly we screwed up water (and not just in the developing world: America’s infrastructure is so old that wooden pipes still run beneath the city of Philadelphia), but issue awareness is at an all-time high. And thanks to the wireless revolution, we’re communicating best practices better than ever. Moreover, we now understand that community support is the most critical component for any water solution; without it, all of these efforts are sunk. We also know that parts must be readily available, that maintenance workers need to be incentivized, and, ideally, that these technologies are assembled and maintained locally. But we’ve learned this is true for all solutions, both high tech and low tech. Moreover, the idea that high-tech solutions won’t work in rural environments went away with the cell phone. What’s more high tech than a Nokia mobile phone? Yet there are nearly a billion of them working all over Africa.
Energy and infrastructure capitalization are the two main issues with most technological solutions to our water problems. With abundant energy, half of this problem is solved. How we’ll generate that energy is a topic saved for a later chapter, so let’s now turn to capitalization. April Rinne, the director of WaterCredit, says, “The average microfinance loan in the water space is between $200 and $800.” Currently the cost of producing a single Slingshot is $100,000. According to Kamen, building them commercially, at volume, brings it to $2,500 per unit, plus another $2,500 for the Stirling engine to power the device. If the system really works for five years, then the cost of producing one thousand liters of drinking water per day is $0.002 per liter. Even if you tripled that to cover interest and labor, the price of five liters is only four cents—compared to today’s thirty cents for the same supply.
Kamen, though, has decided there’s another way to settle the matter. He’s entered into negotiations with Coca-Cola to build, distribute, and, most importantly, use its enormous supply chain (the largest in Africa) to help maintain the Slingshot. “That’s not the end of the road,” he says. “I do think there needs to be a third party involved; someone making the whole process transparent, making it safe, educating people about it. But I also think Coca-Cola could do the major lifting, the major capitalization, the major distribution channel, development, support, education, and maintenance. It’s one-stop shopping. Most of what needs to be done, I think they could do it.”
And Coca-Cola has agreed to try. In May 2011 the world’s biggest soda manufacturer launched a series of Slingshot field trials. Success could provide salvation for rural communities everywhere, but there are limits. According to Kamen, the Slingshot is built to serve one hundred people. Multiple machines could provide water for much larger communities, but they’re not designed for large-scale urban deployment, nor can they satisfy our agricultural or industrial needs. But before we look at solutions to these problems, let’s examine how the Slingshot dents another fundamental issue that many have with abundance: our current population explosion.
Malthusians often use the word cornucopians to describe people lobbying for abundance. It’s not meant as a term of endearment. Central to their stance is the issue of population growth. Cornucopians feel that the rate of technological growth will outpace the rate of population growth, and that will solve all our problems. Malthusians believe that we’ve already exceeded the planet’s carrying capacity, and if population growth continues unchecked, nothing we invent will be powerful enough to reverse those effects. But Kamen’s technology provides a much-needed middle path.
Population is linked directly to fertility. Today the majority of developed countries have fertility rates at or below replacement levels—meaning that population is either stable or declining. The issue lies in the developing world, where the number of babies born is much higher. And the problem isn’t in cities. Urbanization actually lowers fertility rates. The issue is in the country, as the most fecund population on the planet is the rural poor. It takes lots of hands to do farm work, so farmers have large families. But they want boys—usually three at the minimum. Their logic is heartbreaking. Three boys are desirable because one will probably die, while the second will stay home to tend the farm, providing for parents as they age as well as making enough money to send the third child to school so that he can get a better job and end this cycle. Thus child mortality among the rural poor is one of the largest factors driving population growth, and dirty water is often the root of this problem.
Of the 1.1 billion people in the world without access to safe water, 85 percent of them live in the countryside. Of the 2.2 million children that die each year from drinking contaminated water, the vast majority are rural as well. So a machine capable of providing clean drinking water for these communities, by boosting health and child survival rates, actually reduces fertility in the one place where it matters most. Beyond being a water purifier, the Slingshot is an extremely well-targeted family planning device: a prophylactic disguised as a drinking fountain.
As great as the Slingshot sounds, the solution to water is not any one technology; rather it will be a combination of technologies built for a combination of needs. One of those needs is disaster readiness. Even in the developed world, our relief systems are no match for the devastation of earthquakes, tidal waves, and tropical storms. When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, it took five days to get water to refugees in the Superdome.
An English engineer named Michael Pritchard was stunned by Katrina, less than a year after he’d been stunned by the Asian tsunami. Pritchard was an expert in water treatment, an issue at the heart of both tragedies. Not only were survivors unable to get clean water immediately after the disaster, the solution to that problem only exacerbated others. “Traditionally,” Pritchard told a TED audience, “in a crisis, what do we do? We ship water. After a few weeks, we set up camps, and people are forced to come into these camps to get their safe drinking water. What happens when twenty thousand people congregate in a camp? Diseases spread, more resources are required, the problem just becomes self-perpetuating.”
So Pritchard decided to do something. A few years later, in 2009, he’d completed the Lifesaver bottle. With a hand pump on one end and a filter on the other, the bottle doesn’t look especially high tech, but that filter is unlike any other. Researchers in nanotechnology work at miniscule scales, where distances are measured in atoms. One billionth of a meter—a nanometer, in technical parlance—is their baseline. Before Pritchard came along, the best hand-pumped water filters on the market worked down to the level of 200 nanometers. That’s small enough to capture most bacteria, but viruses, which are considerably more microscopic, still slipped through. So Pritchard designed a membrane with pores 15 nanometers wide. In seconds, it removes everything there is to remove: bacteria, viruses, cysts, parasites, fungi, and other waterborne pathogens. One filter lasts long enough to produce six thousand liters of water, and the system automatically shuts off when the cartridge is expired, preventing the user from drinking contaminated water.
Lifesaver was designed for disaster relief, but why wait? A jerry can version of the system produces twenty-five thousand liters of water—enough for a family of four for three years. Even better, it costs half a cent a day to run. “For eight billion dollars,” says Prichard, “we can hit the Millennium Goals’ target of halving the number of people without access to safe drinking water … For twenty billion, everyone can have access to safe drinking water.”
And Lifesaver is just the beginning. The nanotechnology industry is exploding. Between 1997 and 2005, investment rose from $432 million to $4.1 billion, and the National Science Foundation predicts that it will hit $1 trillion by 2015. We are entering the era of molecular manufacturing, and when you work at this scale, rearranging atoms leads to entirely new physical properties.
To return to water, there are now nanomaterials with increased affinity, capacity, and selectivity for heavy metals, among other contaminants. This means that heavy metals are drawn to these particles, and these particles can better transform those metals into harmless compounds, thus helping to clean up polluted waterways, contaminated aquifers, and Superfund sites.
Meanwhile, researchers at IBM and the Tokyo-based company Central Glass have developed a nanofilter capable of removing both salt and arsenic—which was, until fairly recently, an all but impossible trick. On the sanitation front, plumbing fixtures are now being built with self-cleaning nanomaterials that remove clogs and eliminate corrosion; while further back in development are nano-based self-sealing pipes that repair leaks on their own accord. Out on the wild frontier, German scientist Helmut Schulze and researchers at DIME Hydrophobic Materials, a company based in the United Arab Emirates, have an idea straight out of Dune. They’ve developed a nano-based hydrophobic sand, a ten-centimeter layer of which, when placed beneath desert topsoil, decreases water loss by 75 percent. In the Middle East, where 85 percent of all water is used for irrigation, this could be used both to grow crops and combat desertification.
With 40 percent of the Earth’s population living within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of a coast, it’s the combination of nanotech and desalination that holds even greater promise. Currently the majority of the world’s seven thousand desalination plants rely on thermal desalination (often called “multistage flash”) or reverse osmosis. The former means to boil water and condense the vapor; the latter feeds water through semipermeable membranes. Neither is the solution we need.
Thermal desalination consumes too much energy for large-scale deployment (about 80 megawatt hours per megaliter) and the brine by-product fouls aquifers and is devastating to aquatic populations. Reverse osmosis, on the other hand, uses comparatively less energy, but toxins such as boron and arsenic can still sneak through, and membranes clog frequently, reducing the lifetime of the filter. But the Los Angeles–based company NanoH2O won a spot on the 2010 Cleantech 100 list for a novel filter that uses 20 percent less energy while producing 70 percent more water.
Of course, we could continue on like this for the rest of the book. There are dozens and dozens of nanotechnologies currently in development that will impact water. And for every amazing nanotech solution, there are mirroring developments in biotech. For every biotech solution, there’s a wastewater recycling solution equally as exciting. But many believe the most promising line of development isn’t even in the water space; it’s in the metatechnologies surrounding this space.
When IBM “Distinguished Scientist” and chief technology officer for Big Green Innovations Peter Williams says, “The biggest opportunity in water, isn’t in water: it’s in information,” what he’s talking about is waste. Right now, in America, 70 percent of our water is used for agriculture, yet 50 percent of the food produced gets thrown away. Five percent of our energy goes to pump water, but 20 percent of that water streams out holes in leaky pipes. “The examples are endless,” says Williams, “the bottom line is the same: Show me a water problem and I’ll show you an information problem.”
The solution to this information problem is to create intelligent networks for all of our waterworks, what’s being called the “Smart Grid for Water.” The plan is to embed all sorts of sensors, smart meters, and AI-driven automation into our pipes, sewers, rivers, lakes, reservoirs, harbors, and, eventually, our oceans. Mark Modzelewski, executive director of the Water Innovations Alliance, believes a smart grid could save the United States 30 percent to 50 percent of its total water use.
IBM believes that the smart grid for water will be worth over $20 billion in the next five years, and the company is determined to get in on the ground floor. In the Amazon basin, it has partnered with the Nature Conservancy to build a new computer-modeling framework that allows users to simulate the behaviors of river basins and make significantly better decisions about currently unsolvable problems, such as determining in advance whether or not clear-cutting an upstream forest would destroy fish stocks in downstream watersheds. In Ireland, Big Blue has teamed up with the Marine Institute for the Smart Bay project, monitoring wave conditions, pollution levels, and marine life in Galway Bay. There’s also a “smart levee” project in the Netherlands, a sewer system analytic upgrade in Washington, DC, and several dozen more efforts spattered around the globe.
Other companies are following suit. Working in Detroit, Hewlett-Packard has implemented a smart metering system that has already increased productivity by 15 percent. In the academic sector, researchers at Chicago’s Northwestern University have created a “Smart Pipe”—a multi-nanosensor array that measures everything from water quality to water flow. Internationally, efforts are also increasing. Spain just installed a nationwide computer-assisted irrigation system designed to save farmers 20 percent of the nine hundred billion gallons of water they annually use.
Computer-assisted irrigation is a subcategory of “precision agriculture,” which is a big part of the smart grid’s potential. The full complement blends computer-assisted irrigation with GPS tracking and remote sensing technologies to get, as the saying goes, more crop per drop. This combination allows farmers to know everything going on in their fields: temperature, transpiration, moisture content in the air and soil, the weather forecast, how much fertilizer has been applied to every plant, how much water each plant has received, and so forth. An unsustainable 70 percent of the water on Earth is now used for growing food. “With precision agriculture,” says Doug Miell, a water management consultant who advises the state of Georgia, “farmers can lower their water use by thirty-five percent to forty percent, and increase their yields by twenty-five percent.”
And the massive savings talked about in this section are the starting point of this discussion, not its closing arguments. Once our waterworks are turned into an intelligent network, water truly becomes an information science—thus strapping itself to the rising tide of exponential growth. What is now being discussed as the smart grid for water is really a beta-level deployment. This grid will beget the next and the next, and—as we humans are lousy at anticipating the results of exponential growth—there’s really no telling exactly where we’ll end up. One thing for certain, though, it’ll be a place with a whole lot more water.
It’s an open debate: Who invented the modern toilet? Apocrypha holds that it was Thomas Crapper, a nineteenth-century English plumber, but the real story actually begins much earlier. In the West, while his technology was never commercialized, credit is now given to Sir John Harington, who invented a water closet in 1596 for his godmother, Queen Elizabeth I. In the East, innovation stretches back much further. Archaeologists recently unearthed a Han dynasty latrine dating to 206 BC. Complete with a running water supply, stone bowl, and an armrest, this 2,400-year-old Chinese technology looks downright modern. And that’s the problem: when it comes to our indoor plumbing, not much has changed in a very long time.
But imagine the potential upgrades. Imagine toilets that require no infrastructure. No pipes under the floor, no leach field under the lawn, no sewer systems running down the block. These high-tech outhouses powder and burn the feces and flash evaporate the urine, rendering everything sterile along the way. Rather than wasting anything, these toilets give back: packets of urea (for fertilizer), table salt, volumes of freshwater, and enough power that you can charge your cell phone while taking a crap, should the need arise. Tie these toilets into the smart grid, and the electricity can be sold back to the utility company, marking the first time in history that anyone has been paid to poop. As a final component, do all this at a cost to the consumer of five cents a day. Now, that’s not just an upgrade, it’s a revolution.
It’s also the goal of a recently announced Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation program. Eight universities have received funding to help bring toilet technology into the twenty-first century, which is how Lowell Wood got involved in the effort. Wood is not your typical sanitation expert. He’s an astrophysicist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, with a background in thermonuclear fusion, computer engineering, X-ray lasers, and, most famously, President Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” missile defense program.
“The thrust of the Gates project,” says Wood, “is to upgrade a system that hasn’t really evolved in 130 years, since Victorian England. In the developing world, where sanitation issues cause tremendous death and disease, this will obviously save millions and millions of lives, but in the developed world, three-quarters of our water bill is the cost of hauling away waste and running sewage treatment plants. So the goal is to solve both problems: to find a way for people to go to the bathroom that doesn’t involve running water or sewage, while still rendering human waste completely harmless.”
This may sound like fantasy, but no magic is required. “You can burn the fecal portion of the waste and use that energy to completely clean up the urine, turning it back into water and solids,” explains Wood. “There’s over a megajoule per day of energy in human feces, which is enough to do everything the toilet needs to do, with plenty left over for cell phones and lights. And we have the technology already; we can literally do this with off-the-shelf parts. The biggest challenge is it has to be done at a cost of five cents a day because that’s the cost that’s affordable in the developing world.”
The upside of this toilet is almost incalculable. For starters, removing human feces from the equation solves an enormous portion of the global disease burden (which also slows population growth). Doing so in a way that is distributed (so that it doesn’t require massive upfront infrastructure investment) and net positive for water and power makes this technology radically disruptive. Moreover, the efficiencies provide a much-needed savings. Toilets account for 31 percent of all water use in America. The US Environmental Protective Agency (EPA) estimates 1.25 trillion gallons of water—the combined annual usage of LA, Miami, and Chicago—leaks from US homes each year, with toilets being the biggest waster. Lastly, in addition to feces and urine, this technotoilet processes all organic wastes, including table scraps, garden cuttings, and farm refuse, thus closing all the loops while providing a family with all the water they might require.
In 1990, in one of the most celebrated acts of an extremely illustrious career, astronomer Carl Sagan decided it might be interesting to have the Voyager 1 spacecraft, after completing its mission at Saturn, spin around and take a snapshot of the Earth. Viewed across this vast distance, the Earth is inconsequential, a nondescript speck among specks—or, as Sagan says, “a mote of dust suspended on a sunbeam.” But it’s a blue mote; thus the photograph’s famous name: “the pale blue dot.”
Our planet is a pale blue dot because it’s an aqueous world, two-thirds of its surface covered by oceans. Those oceans are our backbone and our lifeblood. There is no question that a billion people now lack access to safe drinking water, but our oceans hold the secret to a better future. To return to an earlier theme: abundance is not a cornucopian vision. While the innovations just explored share the potential to tap these oceans—recycle their contents and change their chemistry, providing us with all the water we need and then some—it will not happen automatically. We have much work ahead. Yet because these waterwise technologies are all on exponential growth curves, they represent the greatest leverage available. They are the easiest path from A to B, but—and it’s a critical “but”—we still must commit ourselves to the path.
Of his famous photograph, Sagan once said: “This distant image of our tiny world … underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.” And we couldn’t agree more. So today, right now, bring on the efficiencies, take shorter showers, eat less beef, do all that we can to preserve a currently limited resource. But for tomorrow, know that a world of watery plenty is a very real possibility, and putting our energy behind exponentials puts us on the fast track. The technologies explored in this chapter and the fields of research they represent are the very best way to preserve the only home we’ve ever known: this pale blue dot.