Business leaders want to export solutions to the world's water problems.
The confluence of the Milwaukee and Menominee rivers, in the downtown core of Wisconsin’s largest city, is a prime vantage to assess the collection of assets that define the past and future of Great Lakes water use, and the array of technology development encompassing the region’s water.
Together and in complement, universities, research labs, tech incubators, water-focused businesses, and forward-thinking utilities here and in other cities are pushing for something greater than the sum of their parts. Drawing from a deep well of economic and industrial history, leaders envision the Great Lakes region as a world-changing hub for water technology, achieving for pipes, pumps, sensors, waste purification, and resource recovery what Silicon Valley did for semiconductor advances and personal computing.
But unlike Silicon Valley’s ascent, which was significantly bolstered by steady public research funding — federal investment, for instance, paid 25% of the cost of developing the transistor — Great Lakes blue economy development is taking shape in an era of resistance to U.S. government research outlays.
The collaborative’s five newsrooms — Bridge Michigan, Circle of Blue, Great Lakes Now, Michigan Public and The Narwhal — are funded by the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation.
Nevertheless, the water-related economy is emerging, especially in Milwaukee. The headquarters of The Water Council, an influential water tech incubator, reflects the future. The council’s research center hosts more than a dozen companies, including Badger Meter, a Wisconsin-based maker of water monitoring and measuring equipment. The firm’s $7 billion market cap has grown eight-fold in the last decade.
Downstream, where the Milwaukee and Kinnickinnic rivers meet, is the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee School of Freshwater Science, a center of scholarship on freshwater ecosystems and water equipment technology.
Then there’s the historic water economy. Milwaukee hosts the 155-year-old Pabst Brewery, a prodigious water user before it closed two decades ago and a city icon. Not far away, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District’s Jones Island Water Reclamation Facility, a century-old treatment plant, turns sewage into commercial fertilizer for lawns and golf courses.
And around the riverbend, just out of sight, is sparkling Lake Michigan, the fountainhead of the water-based economic cluster and the region’s blue economy.
This extensive roll call is not just a Milwaukee phenomenon. It is repeated in other Great Lakes cities. Chicago boasts Argonne National Laboratory, Northwestern University, the tech hub Current, and Sloan Valve Company, a toilet and faucet producer.
On Lake Erie’s shores, Cleveland has Case Western Reserve, the Cleveland Water Alliance, and, until it moves to Chicago next year, the faucet company Moen. Hundreds of other Ohio companies comprise a durable regional water sector.
This collection of innovators and water-focused businesses is the defining feature of the region’s blue economy, said Dean Amhaus, founding president and CEO of The Water Council.
“You need to have that innovation happening,” Amhaus said. “And that's not going to happen everywhere. It just can't. But there are going to be centers of concentration in a very organic way that come up over periods of time. And that becomes like Boston or Silicon Valley for different industries. It just becomes a feeder.”
A hundred and fifty years ago, it was the breweries and tanneries needing to treat water and dispose of waste products that drove water innovation. Today, amid wavering federal support in the United States for transformative scientific research, the need to deliver clean water and purify wastewater, in the Great Lakes and beyond, still commands the spirit of invention.
From the Great Lakes to the world
The water tech incubators in the region engage with businesses at all stages of development. Current is in the second year of a 10-year, $160-million National Science Foundation grant to develop “waste-to-wealth” technologies that recover critical minerals like lithium from wastewater and remove the hard-to-destroy, toxic chemicals known as PFAS.
“These are not simple, off-the-shelf technologies,” said Alaina Harkness, CEO of Current.
The early years of Great Lakes ReNew, as the NSF project is called, will be focused on the difficult work of laboratory research and engineering the scientific breakthroughs that can then be market tested.
That stage is where Cleveland Water Alliance, a project partner, enters. CWA, through its test-bed program, shepherds early-stage developments from a controlled lab environment through trial runs that are conducted under variable real-world conditions. Founded in 2014, CWA has turned parts of Lake Erie and tributary rivers into living laboratories by liberally seeding them with sensors, buoys, and data-collecting devices. Across 7,740 square miles of the watershed, the sensors relay data on nutrient concentrations, temperature, and water chemistry. CWA has partnerships with 31 utilities plus agricultural, industrial, and residential test beds for assessing unproven water technology in those contexts.
“We've got some really great research institutions and we've got some really progressive utilities,” said Bryan Stubbs, the organization’s executive director and president. “So we have the ingredients for a natural cluster.”
Other organizations like The Water Council and Aqua Action, based in Canada, take promising small businesses with few sales and help them vault into larger markets.
The goal for these groups is to provide solutions to water problems both at home and abroad, from PFAS treatment to water-efficient farming. Those ideals are reflected in Great Lakes ReNew’s tagline: “Built in the Great Lakes, Made for the World.”
Expanding the market
Great Lakes ReNew is not just a technology cultivator. Besides funding R&D and launching water companies, the project aims to strengthen job skills so that the region has a dependable water workforce, Harkness said. A wave of retirements — a “silver tsunami” — is expected in the coming years, and talented youngsters will need to take over.
Along with partners in six states, the project is also engaging with water-using companies located in the region to ensure that they are conscious of their water consumption and looking for ways to minimize their footprint.
“It's not like carbon where it's just cut, cut, cut,” said Paul Sambanis, vice president of sustainability at Sloan and an industrial partner with Great Lakes ReNew. “There comes a point where you have to use water for your process.”
Several data points illustrate the region’s reach as an aspiring global water-business powerhouse. Badger Meter earns 10% of its revenue from foreign markets. A.O. Smith, another Milwaukee-based company that makes commercial and residential water heaters, earns a third of its revenue abroad. For Ecolab, a Minnesota-based water management firm, the figure is closer to half.
Global firms are also finding their way to the region. Wilo, a German pump manufacturer, located its North American headquarters in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. Stubbs said the Cleveland Water Alliance has partnerships with water tech clusters in Singapore, South Korea, France, Spain, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The alliance recently welcomed TechWin, a Korean company, to test the on-site production of sodium hypochlorite, a vital water treatment chemical. Those tests are happening in collaboration with Avon Lake Regional Water, a utility.
Two Canadian provinces share the Great Lakes basin, but the country has not been as active in promoting water-related business and innovation, said Soula Chronopoulos, president of AquaAction, a Montreal-based organization that assists water tech startups.
AquaAction intends to change that. It lobbied for a CA$100 million water fund that the Liberal Party, winner of the recent national election, included in its policy platform. AquaAction sponsors trade missions. It runs the Aqua Hacking Challenge, a competitive program that helps entrepreneurs build their businesses and sell their products. More than 100 companies — from farm water conservation to pipe leak detection — are currently in AquaAction’s stable.
“We get them their client zero or their very first client and we get them pilot opportunities,” Chronopoulos said. “And for us, it's less about getting VC investment as much as it is about getting them into the market and establishing successful sustainable businesses.”
Those initial sales are crucial for a fledgling company to take flight.
“When one gets into one city, 50 cities want the solution. Because nobody wants to be the first, right? To take that risk.”
Federal headwinds
What might derail this virtuous circle of investment and innovation? In the U.S., a Trump administration that is hostile to scientific research generates major friction.
Stubbs said leaders at the state level in Ohio from both parties have endorsed his group’s work. But he is concerned that funding through universities could dry up, even though these collaborative projects are less than 5% of Cleveland Water Alliance’s budget.
For Current to be awarded the full $160 million pledged to Great Lakes ReNew, two things must happen, Harkness said. The project continues to deliver on its promises, and Congress decides to allocate the money.
“One is fully in our sphere of control and the other is up to the government,” she said.
The second part is what worries Harkness. Project funding is authorized through the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022, a bill that provides billions for semiconductor manufacturers as well as all manner of research. Earlier this year, President Donald Trump suggested repealing the law. But Republican leadership in Congress has so far rejected that idea.
Without federal investment into basic research not only will Current and Great Lakes ReNew fall short of their goals, Harkness said, the whole world-changing enterprise of U.S. scientific discovery and technological innovation will be endangered.
“Federal support for R & D is the risk capital that fuels our economy, right?” Harkness said. “This is funding into hard science, high-risk, challenging technologies, the breakthroughs to figure out how to do grand challenges like eliminate PFAS from our drinking water. These are deeply relevant to all Americans, and these are not things that are accomplished by the private sector alone. The risk capital that the federal government puts into solving hard science problems and creating a pipeline of investable technologies isn't something that we're going to easily replace. And so we're very concerned that it continues.”
