Lab Business Magazine | "When Water Runs Out"


Ontario laboratories focus on finding new ways ofpreserving Earth’s most precious resource—fresh water.


By: Jason Hagerman









Water is a precious resource. After oxygen, it is the most important substance our bodies require. Without water, or the hydrogen and oxygen atoms that make water, life could not exist on Earth. But our relationship with water is dysfunctional and public understanding of the fresh water resource is lacking.

Water is everywhere, but the presence of water doesn’t mean abundance. Only .007 per cent of all water on the planet is readily accessible for direct human use, says the nonprofit organization Water.org. According to the Government of Ontario, global demand for water will outstrip supply by 40 per cent by 2030. And Peter Brabeck, Chairman of The Nestle Company, believes we’ll run out of water before we run out of oil.

Owing to Ontario’s five Great Lakes and a quarter of a million lakes, rivers and streams, the province is a hub for fresh water expertise. Brabeck’ grim prediction hinges on Ontario’s water scientists and their ability to reach the global community.

Storm water contaminates fresh water
Good Harbour Labs resides on a side street in Mississauga. The eggshell colored walls and standard cubicles in the quiet office flanking the lab are deceptive—the technology developed by Imbrium Systems and refined in this lab is exciting. Imbrium develops technology to combat the harmful effects of storm water on fresh water ecosystems.

As snow melts or rain washes across parking lots, down driveways, through lawns, into soil and along paved roads, toxic chemicals and garbage are ushered along by the flow. According to the Natural Resources Defense Council, a U.S. environmental action group, storm water rivals sewage plants and factories as a source of damaging pollutants.

“Storm water absolutely must be treated,” says Reagan Davidson, Regional Manager at Imbrium.

An inconspicuous door in the back of Good Harbour’s office opens into a sprawling lab circulating cool, moist air where Imbrium tests technologies designed to clean storm water runoff and protect fresh water resources from contamination. Storm drains carry oil, sediment and debris from urban centers to the natural environment, littering beaches with plastic, clogging creeks and corrupting ecosystems.



“Pollution like storm water accounts for 80 per cent of water pollution in North America,” says Davidson.

Imbrium’s Stormceptor, designed and developed in Toronto in the early 1990s, separates debris by slowing water to create a non-turbulent treatment environment. The system consists of a large two-tiered cylinder. The cylinder contains an in-flow drain, leading to the bottom tier, and an out-flow drain leading back up to the top tier. Storm water flows in the top tier and travels through the drain to the bottom tier by a naturally occurring whirlpool. Oil particles travel through the whirlpool and, once exposed to the non-turbulent bottom tier, rise to the ceiling of this partition. Oil particles and debris that rise cannot rejoin the out-flow. The out-flow drain sits halfway down the length of the bottom tier, too deep for the floating oil particles and debris. Heavy sediment settles on the bottom tier, too deep to travel up the out-flow.

Sludge and drinking water
The sound of flowing water fills the lab and the rush and crash of water grows as Justin Arnott, Product Manager at Imbrium, powers up a pump feeding water through the Stormceptor.

In the back of the lab, Arnott climbs a ladder to stand above the 12 foot tall unit. He drops handfuls of sediment and plastic beads into the reservoir intake and the system does its job. No moving parts, no space-aged materials, nothing but the application of physics and thoughtful engineering. The system, originally designed as a spill capture and municipal inspection device for the edge of industrial properties, operates in more than 40,000 locations worldwide, separating debris, oil and sediment from major waterways.

Scott Monteith, President and CEO of Imbrium, holds up a mason jar filled with a black, gritty tar. “This is what we take out of these units when we clean them,” he says. Similar sludge washes from the spaghetti-like “ZeeWeed” filters every 45 minutes at the Peel Region Lakeview Water Treatment plant, operated by General Electric with technology from Zenon. GE acquired Zenon in 2006.

“This is the largest application of membrane filtration technology,” says Scott Carter of the Ontario Clean Water Agency.  On the shore of Lake Ontario, the Lakeview plant has a smaller footprint than traditional water treatment facilities. A facility that struggled to provide water to 300,000 residents now generates enough, according to Carter, for 600,000 residents using a fraction of the old plant’s footprint.

Billions of microscopic pores comprise the membrane of the filters, replacing gravel, sand and anthrafilt as filters. “The pores are so small that they reject bacteria,” says Carter. Today, 190 communities use Zenon’s membrane filtration technology, a technology developed in Ontario.

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 







What’s in your water?
Phosphorous is essential to plant life. But too much phosphorous damages fresh water sources. Toxic blue-green algae thrive on excess phosphorous. It causes death in wildlife and illness in humans. Fresh water contaminated by too much phosphorous, commonly associated with fertilizer, manure, organic and industrial waste, requires chemical treatment not accessible to developing countries.

“Manmade waste and byproducts introduce phosphorous to the environment in excess,” says Davidson. Golf courses use enormous amounts of phosphorous. The element travels with rainwater into the infrastructure of the golf course and through the gravel surrounding intricate networks of drainage pipes.

“Anywhere gravel or sand filters are used for groundwater, we can use the SorbitiveMedia to stop phosphorous entering the environment,” says Arnott. Imbrium developed a sand-like substance with an appetite for phosphorous. The SorbitiveMedia replaces stone, gravel or sand as a filter for debris with the added bonus of phosphorous magnetism. But water technology isn’t all about cleaning contaminated fresh water.

Echologics, a developer of acoustic-based leak detection technology, can detect leaks in infrastructure pipes with precision. In 2008, Thames Water, the United Kingdom utility, commissioned Echologics UK to pinpoint an 8-year-old leak near the parliament buildings. Minutes later, the leak was found and eventually repaired.

The technology uses sound to locate leaks in buried pipes. Sound travels from the first unit, attached to a fire hydrant, to the second unit attached to an adjacent hydrant. A computer generates a visual representation, a line graph, of an acoustic path of travel. If the graph shows a jump in the line, like a seismometer during an earthquake, sound and water are escaping the pipe. The location on the graph corresponds to the location in the ground.

A variation on its core technology allows the company to determine the condition of buried pipes, potentially saving municipalities millions of dollars in unnecessary repairs to functioning infrastructure.

“New Orleans loses 70 per cent of the water it pumps through its pipes to leakage,” says Marc Bracken, General Manager and Vice President of Echologics.

Echologics is working with the City of New Orleans to assess its entire network of water pipes.









Ontario’s Role
In March 2010, Ontario’s provincial government announced a water strategy to improve domestic water infrastructure and entrench the province in the global water market. The Water Opportunities and Water Conservation Act passed into legislation November 23, 2010. The government is in overdrive today, promoting its water strategy by hosting events like the Global Water Leadership Summit in May 2011 and placing companies like Imbrium, GE and Echologics in the spotlight.

“We’re not in the business of selling water, it’s not our intention to sell water,” Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty said in May 2010, at the Canadian Water Summit in Toronto. “What we will sell is our know-how, our technologies and our services.”

Technology developed in Ontario will compete in a $400 billion global water market that is expected to grow to $1 trillion by 2020, according to LUX Research. In 2004, the most recent statistics available, Ontario’s private sector water companies generated about $2 billion in revenue.

Ontario houses 19 water-related institutes. The University of Guelph operates the Water Reclamation and Reuse Information Centre; the University of Toronto hosts the more-than decade-old Drinking Water Research Group, a consortium of researchers from Canada and the U.S; Trent University, on the Trent-Severn waterway, has the Worsfold Water Quality Centre and the Institute for Watershed Science; the University of Waterloo has the Waterloo Institute for Groundwater Research as well as an NSERC Chair in Water Treatment. The Walkerton Clean Water Centre demonstrates new water technologies.