Luring Israeli Talent, Boston Now ‘A Powerhouse For Water Innovation'
By Sara Jerome,
@sarmje
The expanding water-tech industry in Massachusetts spurred Nadav Efraty, co-founder and CEO of Desalitech, to move his water treatment company from Israel to the Boston area.
“Efraty pointed to trade missions between Massachusetts and Israeli business leaders as a catalyst for Desalitech’s move to the Bay State, where hundreds of Israeli-founded companies generate billions of dollars for the economy each year,” The Times of Israel reported.
Massachusetts is home to a “very vivid” water community, according to Efraty. “Mostly clustered around Boston, water technology firms collaborate more freely with each other than in other scientific fields,” The Times of Israel reported, citing Efraty.
“We are making real partners here to create awareness about water sustainability, and Boston is becoming a powerhouse for water innovation,” he said. “We are all facing the same challenge of people not getting it about sustainable water resources. So we are not really competing.”
It helps that Massachusetts is home to some of the top research institutions in the country. Just last week, the Ben Gurion University of the Negev in Israel announced that a partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers has yielded ”a highly sensitive, cost-effective technology for rapid bacterial pathogen screening” in water.
How potent is the Bay State water industry?
“The state is already home to a small water tech cluster of 93 companies and 5,200 employees, according to a report from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, a quasi-public agency. Those numbers are growing fast, and the sector already has a multibillion-dollar impact on the state’s economy,” The Boston Globe reported.
Alicia Barton of the Clean Energy Center explained that the industry sometimes flies under the radar. “It’s not an industry that many people have a high awareness of,” she said, per the report. But three years ago, “we became convinced that this was a really smart investment for our state,” she said.
Efraty’s company recently made waves by setting out to make a new beer using water from Boston’s Charles River, the subject of the '60s song “Dirty Water.”
“On the heels of a generation of successful clean-up projects, these once feared waters were just converted into something not only swimmable, but imminently drinkable — Harpoon Brewery’s limited edition Charles River Pale Ale beer, made with cutting-edge Israeli water technology,” The Times of Israel reported.
Desalitech Executive Vice President Rick Stover contextualized the effort as part of a global effort to reclaim seemingly unusable water sources.
“Over 20,000 desalination plants are currently operating around the world, producing nearly 26 billion gallons of purified water per day,” Stover said, per Water Online’s Peter Chawaga. “At the same time, water reclamation is rapidly gaining public acceptance and new, larger facilities are opening every year. By treating the notorious water from the Charles River to the level of quality required by Harpoon, we are demonstrating that nearly any unconventional source of water supply can be made potable and we are having fun in the process.”
Image credit: "Israel 2009," © 2009 Alistair, used under a AttributionShareAlike 2.0 Generic license: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/bysa/2.0/