Water is the most precious resource on Earth. But with more and more storms, floods, and droughts, it’s not always where we need it.
The UN says 4 billion people—half the world’s population—face severe water shortages at least one month a year.
Now a breakthrough technology can make a huge impact.
Botanical Water Technologies (BWT) from Australia found a way to recover the water usually wasted making alcohol, juice, ketchup, and sugar.
BWT estimates 3 trillion liters of water are wasted this way every year. If that water were recovered, it could be reused, commercially sold or gifted to people who need it most.
The company had a working process. But to scale up and handle this enormous amount of volume, BWT needed to find a way to connect water buyers and sellers on a global scale.
They asked Fujitsu to develop a world-first: Botanical Water Exchange (BWX) that securely tracks every drop of water from producer to end consumer. That exchange is powered by the leading open-source framework for enterprise blockchains, Hyperledger Fabric.
A chemical engineer working in the wine industry in Australia noticed how much water was wasted. So, he set to work to recapture the water normally lost in processing fruit and vegetables. By 2012 he had a working prototype of a novel system.
Australian entrepreneur and impact investor Terry Paule was intrigued. By 2017, he had started a company called Botanical Water Technologies (BWT) to commercialize and corporatize the process.
“Juice concentrators, sugar mills, ketchup makers, and distilleries all extract water from plants,” says Paule. “And that water is often thrown away, to environmental detriment.”
Botanical Water estimates 3 trillion liters of water is wasted this way every year— enough to fill more than a million Olympic-sized swimming pools!
The BWT technology is housed in shipping containers and connected up to existing systems that process fruit, vegetables, or sugar cane.
“A 40-foot shipping container can recover close to half a million liters of clean water a day,” says Paule. “We capture it, purify it, and create the world’s most sustainable drinking water.”