News

Aug 04, 2023

Northeast Ohio's most abundant resource draws variety of water

One of the goals of the Cleveland Innovation Project, a collaboration among 150

One of the goals of the Cleveland Innovation Project, a collaboration among 150 business, is building the region as a center for the water industry as demands grow worldwide for clean water.

The demand comes amid concerns about growing populations, droughts and flooding across the world. Other water-related problems created by such incidents as the train derailment in East Palestine earlier this year and by periodic dangerous algae blooms on Lake Erie make clean water accessibility a concern. All the while, efforts continue to provide drinkable water to homes more efficiently and at less cost.

While the Cleveland Water Alliance's work is introducing water industry businesses around the world to Northeast Ohio, the 300 water-related companies already here can help grow the industry and attract new businesses. The clean water industry in Northeast Ohio is made up of a huge variety of companies pursuing a broad range of technologies and solutions from plumbing hardware to software that uses artificial intelligence to detect and find treatment solutions for pollutants and containments, and everything else needed to get water to the kitchen sink.

The largest business in the sector in Northeast Ohio is Moen Inc., one of the leading brands in the plumbing industry. Well-known for its line of kitchen and bathroom hardware, the North Olmsted company, a unit of Deerfield, Illinois, Fortune Brands Innovations Inc., has expanded its offerings to include a line of "smart home" products that includes showers, faucets, water detectors and valves.

All can be controlled by a Moen smart water app or by voice commands or physical controls. The product line includes devices that can detect leaks and shut off water automatically and provide feedback and manage devices by Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.

Another major Northeast Ohio player in the water economy is Kinetico Inc., which manufactures water filters, water softeners and water treatment products in Newbury. The company sells largely to homeowners, mostly in suburban and rural areas, according to Beth Allison, the company's director of marketing. But it also has a commercial side that works with fast food restaurants and coffee houses, which may have specific water filtration needs.

It also has created the Kinetico app to monitor its products, set up maintenance reminders or request service.

Moen Inc. has expanded its offerings to include a line of "smart home" products that includes showers, faucets, water detectors and valves.

"We look out three years, five years, to expanding our smart home world, including more innovative ways to detect contaminants in water quicker," Allison said. "That's going to be a real need for consumers with the fear factor of things happening."

While its products are largely unseen, Cleveland-based Oatey Co. is a major plumbing supply company. Its products run from epoxy putties used by plumbers on home water pipes to shower drains to large pneumatic plugs that water systems use to block off sections of large underground sewers to clean and test pipe sections.

Quasar Energy Group of Independence is a waste management and renewable energy firm that specializes in anaerobic digestion systems. Its products can break down organic solids from food processors or that come into a treatment plant and turn it into fertilizer that then goes back to farmland. Its processes can also turn the material into biogas that can be used to generate electricity.

In 2019 Quasar Energy installed its biogas equipment at a wastewater treatment plant in Bellaire.

"When you think about it, we get paid to take (the waste) and we get paid to process it," said company president Mel Kurtz. "Then the nutrients that come out of the back are a better alternative to chemical fertilizers."

Taking care of the water that enters treatment plants is also the business of Wateropolis Corp. in Newbury. The 8-year-old company makes granular ceramic materials.

A ceramic filtration system uses tiny pores on a ceramic surface to filter bacteria and sediment out of drinking water. It is a versatile water filtration system that can be installed in households or used as a portable filtration device.

"Everything I do is granular ceramics, some of them we call expanded clays, and we use those for back-washing filters," said company president Derek French, a former Kinetico employee. "We sell those to consumer products companies like the Kineticos of the world."

Jet Inc. was founded in 1955 with the idea to replace septic tanks with home wastewater treatment plants and it has expanded into small commercial systems. In a Jet system, wastewater enters a tank, solids are digested by aerobic bacteria, and air is injected to promote bacteria growth — speeding up the digestion process. A Jet home wastewater treatment plant is capable of treating as many as 1,500 gallons of wastewater daily.

After working with the Cleveland Water Alliance to design and place its sensor technology on buoys that test water on Lake Erie, LimnoTech, an Ann Arbor, Michigan, environmental science and engineering firm, created new company Freeboard Technology and based it in Midtown Cleveland in 2022.

The new company is focused on technologies that will develop sensing systems to monitor nutrient runoff, toxic algae and hypoxia, dangerous currents, and climate changes on the world's lakes, rivers and coasts.

"You know every water utility in Ohio wants to measure water at their intake, so we should be helping these utilities come out with better requirements for making technology that they want to see used on their systems," said Ed Verhamme, Freeboard's president and a principal of LimnoTech. "So Freeboard is helping to write those specs from scratch with these users, and then we'll go have that built, or find a suite of vendors or manufacturers that can help do that."

CLEANR was started by three Case Western Reserve University students who were looking for a way to remove microplastics entering the water system when clothing was washed in washing machines. Microplastics, bits of everything from plastic bottles, synthetic textiles and even city dust, have been found in the lungs and blood of humans; scientists are concerned they may limit the ability of red blood cells to transport oxygen.

Working at the Sears think[box] on the CWRU campus, the three, David Dillman, Chip Miller and Max Pennington, have come up with a technology, now patent pending, that they say can remove 90% of microplastic fibers greater than 50 microns from washing machine wastewater.

"Technology innovation is crucial in the race to eliminate microplastics from our oceans, food supplies and drinking water," Dillman, CLEANR's chief technology officer, said in a press release in early April.

At the end of April, CLEANR announced it was joining with GKD Group, a German maker of mesh filters, to manufacture microplastic filters for washing machines.

"Microplastic pollution is becoming an urgent environmental and public health concern," Stephan Kufferath, GKD Group's chief sales officer, said in a press release. "That is why we're so keen to help CLEANR achieve its market potential by leveraging our innovative microplastic stainless-steel mesh and our long-established network of global manufacturing and distribution centers."