Speaker 1:
From the library of the New York Stock Exchange at the corner of Wall and Broad Streets in New York City, you're inside the ICE House, our podcast from Intercontinental Exchange on markets, leadership, and vision in global business, the dream drivers that have made the NYSE an indispensable institution for global growth for more than 225 years. Each week, we feature stories of those who hatch plans, create jobs, and harness the engine of capitalism, right here, right now at the NYSE and at ICE's 12 exchanges and seven clearing houses around the world. Now, here's your host, Josh king, head of communications at Intercontinental Exchange.
Josh king:
After a week on the road with our show, we're back in the friendly confines of the library of the New York Stock Exchange. We are recording this episode on March 22nd. Now, why is that date important? Well, for those keeping track on the calendar, it's World Water Day. It's an outgrowth of the Clean Water and Sanitation Initiative of the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. That's a set of 17 interrelated goals focusing on advancing social and economic development. We take what comes out of the tap for granted. Currently, there are more than 2 billion people around the world who live without safe drinking water.
Josh king:
In the coming decades, the global water demand is projected to grow by 30%. Is it sustainable or headed for a breaking point? This year, 2018, is the 25th anniversary of the UN designating the very first World Water Day back in 1993. This year's focus, Nature for Water: Exploring Solutions Found in Nature for the Trouble at the Tap. Our guest today, Douglas Brown, the founder of AquaVenture Holdings, a company listed right here at the New York Stock Exchange. He has over two decades under his belt grappling successfully with the supply and management of water service. Some answers for the future of this precious resource in our conversation with Doug right after this.
Speaker 1:
Inside the ICE House is presented this week by ICE global index system or GIS. ICE's index families combine leading reference data, evaluated pricing and analytics, along with a track record in index provisioning, spanning 50 years to deliver unique, cross-asset, and best in class index solutions.
Josh king:
Doug Brown founded AquaVenture Holdings, that's NYSE ticker symbol WaaS, in 2006. For those familiar with the term S-A-A-S, SaaS, you think of it as software as a service. That ticker symbol really means something for AquaVenture Holdings, it's water as a service, W-A-A-S. 10 years after going into business, on October 6th 2016, Doug found himself ringing the first trade bell at the NYSE to celebrate the company's IPO. One of its subsidiaries is Seven Seas Water Corporation, which now provides 7 billion gallons of potable, high purity, industrial grade, and ultrapure water that is run through desalinization and a wastewater treatment process. The company operates in South America, the Caribbean, and now has its sites set at the at risk water basins in the Middle East and Africa. In fact, last month he closed a deal to acquire desalinization plants in Ghana in Africa. Welcome to the ICE House Doug.
Douglas Brown:
Thank you.
Josh king:
This isn't your first rodeo, is it? You were previously CEO of the water purification company, Ionics.
Douglas Brown:
That's correct. That was also listed on the NYSE.
Josh king:
And then GE bought it, I guess, in 2006.
Douglas Brown:
2005.
Josh king:
How has it worked for General Electric?
Douglas Brown:
Well, they sold it to Suez about a year ago, so I think it was okay. But they made a decision to get out of the water business.
Josh king:
What was going through your head from the time that GE made the purchase of Ionics to what you might do for your next idea? Whenever anyone moves on from the thing that they've nurtured and grown, you take a step back and take stock of what you've done in your career, what might come next, how did you spend that time?
Douglas Brown:
I originally got into the water business in the mid '70s as a chemical engineer, installing desalination plants in places like Libya and Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. I took a 17 year detour after getting an MBA to go into private equity. My step back to Ionics was a step back into the water business. I love the water business, it's a rarely gratifying business. You have opportunities to work with sound financial models, but it's also the social good that you create that creates a personal satisfaction.
Josh king:
You went to MIT, you got your degree in chemical engineering, then an MBA from Harvard. But back before that, Doug, how did your life intersect with water? How did this passion grow?
Douglas Brown:
It started when I graduated from MIT. I got into the water business at Ionics, ironically, just as a chemical engineer. And back then, there weren't a lot of people that could afford desalination, but in certain parts of the world they had no choice. And in the Middle East, they had the financial means to do it. And it was good to see the ability to help deliver water to people who had no water.
Josh king:
In that first job at Ionics out of MIT, what does a young engineer do in the water business?
Douglas Brown:
He goes out in the middle of the desert and brings in a new water plant, installs it, starts it up. It's a pretty hostile environment typically. I had the luxury of going to a place in Libya called Al-ʿAzīzīyah, which for a long time was noted as having the record for the highest temperature on earth and trying to provide water to the local population.
Josh king:
A lot of stamps on the passport.
Douglas Brown:
Yeah, a lot of stamps on the passport.
Josh king:
Obviously a lot of political activity throughout those years in all of the countries in which you were operating. The Gaddafi regime obviously needs to provide water to its people. We look at the history of people like Rex Tillerson as he was chairman and CEO of Exxon Corp and the work that he needed to do to actually do business in similar parts of the world. Your role as a diplomat trying to bring new businesses and opportunities to countries where doing business with Americans might not have been the first order of business.
Douglas Brown:
Correct. And water does have a tendency to be a political centerpiece. And you need the politicians to make a determined decision to solve water problems. One of the issues that Cape Town has right now is the politicians have not been able to make those decisions to fix the problem. Their problem is eminently fixable, and yet they choose not to make the decision to do it.
Josh king:
I want to get into South Africa in a few minutes. Still focusing on the early part of your career, were you intimidated landing in a place like Tripoli and trying to get business done in Libya?
Douglas Brown:
The first time I got off the plane in Tripoli, I had a suit and tie on.
Josh king:
Take that off pretty fast.
Douglas Brown:
That was the last time I showed up with a suit and tie. But it was intimidating going into countries. Here I was what, 23, 24 years old. I felt qualified as an engineer, I understood these water plants and how they worked. But I was going into a foreign land into a place where the way they conducted business was different. As you mentioned, it wasn't necessarily pro-American. There were many days I spent, and this was before the days of iPhones and things, you'd go have an appointment with a government official in Libya. And I could be sitting in a waiting room for 10 hours at never see them and have to come back the next day and the next day. And eventually we'd get there, but it was not efficient.
Josh king:
Did the Libyans and other buyers know what they were buying? Did they say we have to deal with Ionics and this is really what we need to bring into the country?
Douglas Brown:
Yeah. This was early days of desalination and we had a product that worked. They knew it, they knew they needed the water, and so we eventually would get there, but it just took a lot longer than it should have.
Josh king:
But the uninitiated, Doug bring us through the evolution of desalination technology from those first plants to where we are today.
Douglas Brown:
So desalination has been around for centuries. In fact, in the 1700s, ships used to have desalination plants built on them so that when they were at sea, they had a supply of fresh water. The old technology was distillation, where you'd basically boil the seawater, you'd condense the vapor. The condensate would have no salt in it or very little salt. The rest of the salt was left in what was called the brine, and you'd discharge the brine. So that technology has been around for a long, long time. Then in the late '40s and early '50s, there was an electrical process called electrodialysis which was developed, and that was pretty effective. But the real boost in desalination came in the '60s with some developments with technology called reverse osmosis. This is effectively where you're trying to push the water through a very tight membrane and the pores in the membrane are so tight that the water molecules can go through but the salt molecules can't. And that really started the development of reverse osmosis systems back in the 60s. Over the last 20 years, RO technology has continued to develop.
Josh king:
Reverse osmosis.
Douglas Brown:
Reverse osmosis has continued to develop where the costs have come down. So today, the amount of electricity a seawater RO plant will use is about 20% of the electricity that we used 20 years ago. The cost of producing water with seawater RO has come down dramatically to the point where it's a very cost competitive way to produce water. It's still more expensive than collecting rainwater. Collecting rainwater is the cheapest thing you can do.
Josh king:
We're collecting a lot of rainwater today.
Douglas Brown:
And that takes the form of collecting the rainwater or taking the water out rivers or taking the water out of lakes. But it's basically driven by water coming out of the atmosphere onto the earth. The problem with that, of course, is that you then get exposed to droughts, it doesn't rain all the time. And if you get into a prolonged period with a drought, your water supplies dry up. It's happened in California, it happened in Australia, it's happened in a lot of places around the world, and it's happened in Cape Town, South Africa. The benefit of seawater RO though is that it's a drought proof supply, the supply is virtually unlimited, and you don't have to worry if it rains or not.
Josh king:
You think back to the administrations of Arnold Schwarzenegger and now Jerry Brown in California, have Californians done a good job at addressing their long term water needs.
Douglas Brown:
I think not.
Josh king:
Tell me about it.
Douglas Brown:
Well, they've made it very difficult from a regulatory perspective to build a seawater RO plant in the state of California. There's been one big notable plant that's been built in Carlsbad. But generally speaking, the environmental regulations are so difficult that the cost of sea water RO plants is two to three times what would be in other states that don't have those regulations. So they've done a good job relying on conservation.
Josh king:
They've certainly changed the habits of consumers, people not watering their lawns, swimming in their pools.
Douglas Brown:
Right. But they still have farmers that are using a tremendous amount of water to grow avocados and almonds. Water consumption is crazy for everything. You know that it takes 250 gallons of water to make a cell phone?
Josh king:
How?
Douglas Brown:
It takes 500 gallons of water to make that cotton shirt you're wearing because you need water, in the case of a cell phone, you need water to rinse the chips. There's a lot of electronics in it, it has to be very high purity water. But you need water also to generate the electricity that's used to run the plant that builds the cell phones. And when you look at your shirt, you've got to grow the cotton, then you have to refine the cotton, then you have to have a factory where you make the shirt. And when you boil it all down, there's a tremendous amount of water that's used in all parts of our lives that people don't think about
Josh king:
In your experience, are there visionary leaders and places where they've said, "Look, if we can figure out how to harness desalination, we can do manufacturing a lot less expensively than we do where we rely on natural sources of water."
Douglas Brown:
Sure. Right now in the mining industry in South America, in Chile and Peru, they have recognized that they have to rely on desal to get the water to run their minds. Historically, places like Peru and Chile have relied on water coming out of the Andes to serve the population and in some cases to supply water to the mines. But between population growth, the growth in the mining industry, and a reduction in the amount of water coming out of the Andes, you now have situations where the industry and government and the population are all pitted against each other, competing for the same source of water.
Douglas Brown:
The mining industry in general has come to recognize that they have no alternative. Having a reliable source of quality water is incredibly important for being able to run your mine effectively. And a number of these mines now have taken initiatives where they're going to build a desal plant to supply water for the mine so they're not taking water away from the citizens anymore. And in fact, in some cases, I will build a desal plant that produces more water than I need for my mine so I can give some of that water to the local town and population.
Josh king:
As you mentioned at the top of the show, Doug Brown, today is World Water Day. How did AquaVenture and Seven Seas get involved with the UN on World Water Day?
Douglas Brown:
Well, by the time we got in the water business, we were established in 2006, World Water Day was already around. And we recognized the importance of World Water Day. World Water Day is all about trying to provide a reliable source of clean water to all of the population around the world. As you mentioned in the beginning, there's 2 billion people that really don't have access to high purity water, that's a big percentage of the world population.
Douglas Brown:
So we feel that we're doing our part to try and help develop new water sources, to bring water to people that don't have it, didn't have it before. We did it in Trinidad for instance. We built the plant in Point Fortin in Trinidad. Before we built the plant, the citizens of Point Fortin generally had water less than two days a week. After we built the plant, almost everybody has water 24/7. And those that don't have it at least five days a week. Can you imagine if you're at home and you turn on the water tap and 20 hours a week you get water and for the rest of the time you don't get anything?
Josh king:
Trinidad also has huge manufacturing, particularly in aluminum. Does that siphon off a lot of the available water for the local population?
Douglas Brown:
Yes, it does. In order to entice an aluminum company to build an aluminum plant, the government has to make certain commitments about water availability, and that can end up taking away water from the population.
Josh king:
We are sitting comfortably inside the ICE House, Doug Brown. But outside our walls, we're watching the fourth nor'easter in as many weeks dump. I think if forecast hold, we're going to get another foot of snow in Manhattan, plenty of water for the Northeast. What happens to all that runoff when it hits the city streets? Is this a boondoggle for the Northeast or is a lot of this just going to get wasted?
Douglas Brown:
It just goes into the ocean.
Josh king:
No way to salvage or move it to different places and store it for higher needs?
Douglas Brown:
Water is not a very transportable medium. It weighs seven and a half pounds a gallon, it's very expensive once you start trying to pump water more than a 100 miles. I can desal sea water cheaper than it will cost me to pump water a 100 miles.
Josh king:
You are no stranger to big storms, Doug. Your plants were in the path of two category five hurricanes last year. I lived in Antigua for a year, on Tortola for a year. The Island of Barbuda pretty much washed away during Hurricane Irma. To set the scene for what I think you saw when you landed in St. Martin and Tortola, let's hear a little bit from ABC's World News Tonight, Linzie Janis on the ground in the Caribbean.
Speaker 4:
She leads us off tonight.
Linzie Janis:
Tonight, Hurricane Irma tearing through the Caribbean, claiming at least three lives with ferocious 185 mile an hour winds. Irma pummeling the US Virgin Islands, home to more than 90,000 US citizens.
Speaker 6:
It is really ripping right now.
Linzie Janis:
In St. Martin, the government says 95% of the island is destroyed, buildings shredded, even the airport damaged.
Josh king:
After a weather event like that, what happens to your facilities? You went down to inspect them in person.
Douglas Brown:
We have been doing business in desalination in the Caribbean since the mid '90s, back in Ionics days. Our team at Seven Seas, most of the engineering and operating people used to be Ionics veterans who came to me when I started AquaVenture. So we have the experience of being down there, we've been through a lot of hurricanes. We obviously design our plants to survive events like this. We had two cat five hurricanes, and amazingly we had minimal damage, less than a million dollars of damage across five different plants that got hit. So they call them bunkers. And in fact, some cases that's exactly what they are. It's interesting, we had a number of employees and employee families staying in the desal plant because it was the only place where they could find good shelter.
Josh king:
How long were you offline? What do you have to do to get back online?
Douglas Brown:
In all cases, we were ready to get back online as soon as the local utility was able to provide power. In some cases, that was a matter of an hour, a few hours, or couple of days. In some cases, in Tortola, it was a little bit longer. But all of our plants came back online as soon as power was restored.
Josh king:
Our attention was so fixed on the storms and the aftermath in the days and weeks that followed President Trump visiting Puerto Rico, the stories of what was happening in the British Virgin Islands and the US Virgin Islands was right at the top of every newspaper. But the months pass, the year turns, our attention focuses again on things that are happening domestically, gun violence and the politics around it. But you continue to desalinate water minute after minute, hour after hour, day after day in these places. What are the reports on the ground since this has happened now, what three or four months later?
Douglas Brown:
I think the first is the local communities appreciated that we were able to restore their water supply as quickly as we did because they needed power and they needed water, and we were there to deliver for them. What's impressed me the most, frankly, is the rate at which the rebuilding process is going on. It's the resilience of these people in the islands. They've been through hurricanes before, nothing this bad in a lot of cases. But they understand hurricanes are part of their lives, they learn how to deal with it. They have to face the destruction that the hurricane brings, and as soon as possible, they start the rebuilding process. I would say personally, I think the rebuilding process is going on faster than what I expected. And many places on the islands that we service are ready to do business and are inviting tourists to come back.
Josh king:
A very different part of the globe is in Africa, we mentioned it earlier, what's happening in South Africa. I want to hear one audio clip and then have you react on the other side.
Speaker 7:
In Cape Town, South Africa, two words overshadow every facet of life, day zero. It's the day the city of 4 million people will run out of water, becoming the first major city in history to run dry. Barring a miracle, day zero will hit sometime this spring. Exactly when depends on conservation efforts, which already have residents going to extremes.
Josh king:
That's a reference to what's happening right now in Cape Town, south to Africa, where they have less than a 90 day supply of water left. What caused this situation, Doug? What can be done, not just to remedy the situation in the short term, but also to ensure there's a long term solution in South Africa?
Douglas Brown:
They've been facing a significant drought now for a long time and so that's been putting a strain. Water supplies, water levels in their reservoirs have been going down. That's in fact how they're predicting day zero, is by looking at the rate at which water level is declining in the reservoirs. There would be some that would argue too that they haven't done a good job regarding conservation. The Californians did a really good job with conservation, there would be some that would argue that the South Africans have not done such a good job about it. There have been some that don't believe that the threat is real. Obviously, a long term solution for them is to supplement their existing supplies with desalination as a truly drought proof supply of water.
Josh king:
Was South Africa a little less progressive in the area of creating desal plants as places in North Africa and the Middle East were?
Douglas Brown:
Absolutely. They've taken longer to make decisions. They have purchased some desal plants, a couple of small desal plants. But in my opinion, they haven't really taken a hard look at the problem and figured out the scope of the fix and how big a fix is needed and for what period of time. Desal isn't going to solve all your problems, but desal is a diversification move on your water supplies that can supplement other core sources of water so that at least when it doesn't rain, you still have some water.
Josh king:
Is Cape Town a unique situation as we sample the world's water challenges or is this problem about to emerge in other places as well?
Douglas Brown:
Well, it happened in California. They didn't turn to desal in a big way. Although that Carlsbad plant is a huge plant. They did have the same problem Australia, and they turned to desal in a big way. Perhaps too big a way because then it started to rain again. Then there's Cape Town. But we're seeing drought conditions occur in many locations around the world. So I don't think Cape Town's going to be the last one. The question will be the local politicians, what decision do they take? Do they make a good decision to try and fix the problem or do they try and just burry their heads in the sand?
Josh king:
How can you help the government or other interested parties in South Africa see where the answers lie?
Douglas Brown:
We have made proposals to the government. We have a perfect solution for them with our containerized systems. These are rapid deployment systems that we can have operating in as short a time as 60 days. And so we could fix the problem. We know we could fix the problem, we've made a proposal to fix the problem. But we have gotten no answer from the government. And I think it's because they haven't come to grips with the fact that they have a real problem.
Josh king:
The containerized systems are built ready to ship.
Douglas Brown:
Absolutely.
Josh king:
... ready to move. Where are they sitting now?
Douglas Brown:
Some of them are sitting in the Caribbean and some are in Miami.
Josh king:
And so what has to happen, they get loaded onto a ship?
Douglas Brown:
They load on a ship, they get sent to J Burg, or they get sent to Cape Town. And then they get taken off, put in place on basically just a level lot, and it can be running quite quickly. In St. Thomas several years ago, they had an old desal plant that the water and power authority owned in operated themselves. They had a catastrophic failure of that desal plant and they lost all of their water production in St. Thomas overnight. We brought in 2 million gallons a day in containers, and we had the first half up and running in less than 30 days and the whole thing running in 42 days.
Josh king:
You have a rapid deployment team that is ready to go anywhere in the world.
Douglas Brown:
Absolutely, yep.
Josh king:
How do you assemble them and how do you deploy them?
Douglas Brown:
They come from around our existing infrastructures. Some of these are outsourced contractors that we've used on other projects, some of them are our own engineers that are out deployed in the field, working in operating plants right now.
Josh king:
How many containers would it take to put the plant that you envision in South Africa into place?
Douglas Brown:
We'd probably suggest the 2 million gallons a day, which would be eight container sets.
Josh king:
Wow.
Douglas Brown:
That's 16 containers actually.
Josh king:
After the break, Doug will let us know how AquaVenture is working to meet the water needs through its water as a service and leveraging the newest breakthroughs in water technology.
Speaker 1:
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Josh king:
Back now with Doug Brown, the founder of AquaVenture Holdings. Doug, later today, you'll be going up to the podium and ringing the closing bell. It's a big day.
Douglas Brown:
It's a big day. Also reflects the fact that we've been a public company now for about a year and a half.
Josh king:
Yeah, 18 months. You were ringing the bell on the trading floor when you had your IPO. How has the listing on the NYSE changed AquaVenture Holdings in general?
Douglas Brown:
Recognition. I'd say when we're dealing with probably the biggest impact first on our employees, I think they're all very proud to be part of a company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Josh king:
How many employees do you have?
Douglas Brown:
About 500. But also with our customers and potential customers. When we tell somebody that were listed on the New York Stock Exchange, they take us much more seriously. So it's great from a business development and a customer perspective.
Josh king:
A pre-IPO acquisition that you made was Quench, it's a point of use water company. You did that acquisition I think in 2014. What is a point of use company? And have you seen a change in US from the plastic bottles and water cooler systems that we all think about when we have conversations literally around the water cooler to a more sustainable delivery system?
Douglas Brown:
So point of use water coolers are where we put filtration technology inside a cooler that we then connect to your standard water supply within a building. It eliminates the need to have the five gallon jug, the water no longer has to be delivered to your office. We come by once a year and change the filters that are in the cooler. But the cooler basically purifies water as you consume it at the point of use. And that's why it's called a point of use.
Josh king:
In one year, the manufacturing of plastic jugs, bottling and delivery of water eats up I think 140 million kilowatt hours of electricity. One Quench point of use water filters cooler can prevent up to 925 of those five gallon jugs from entering the landfill each year.
Douglas Brown:
That's correct.
Josh king:
How hard is your sale? So you must walk into these places and say, "925 of these bottles are not going to be foisted upon landfills."
Douglas Brown:
Interestingly, the environmental impact is huge. The other environmental impact is we're not driving around trucks all around the city of New York delivering these five gallon jugs. The carbon footprint of the five gallon jug business is huge compared to ours because we don't actually deliver your water like the other water companies do. So there's a huge environmental impact. But what tends to drive our business even more are two things. One, it's cheaper and number two, it's a heck of a lot more convenient. Because now you don't have to ask the receptionist to take that 42 gallon jug of water and flip it up onto the water cooler when the other bottles empty. Nobody likes to have the job of replacing the water bottles because it's messy, you tend to get wet, and it's 42 pounds.
Josh king:
How does this stuff taste?
Douglas Brown:
It's terrific. Once you go POU, you won't go back.
Josh king:
People don't understand sometimes living in New York City, what a great water source we have from the Catskills and the reservoirs that come through our aqueduct system. I'm not sure your thoughts about what actually comes through the tap and how a POU system would improve what the New York water experience is.
Douglas Brown:
New York does have high quality tap water. But you still have chlorine in the water, which adds to bad taste. And by the way, it does create a by-product of trihalomethanes, which is a known carcinogen, and it has organics. So a POU cooler has filtration technology, which will remove the chlorine and remove the organics, and that greatly improves the taste.
Josh king:
Is Quench going after single office locations or large corporate national accounts?
Douglas Brown:
Both.
Josh king:
And if you think about some of your largest accounts, are they actually doing the math that says how much plastic they're saving, adding it to their own carbon footprint savings?
Douglas Brown:
Absolutely. Some do look at carbon footprint savings, they also get financial savings, the hard currency type, they look at the convenience factor. And in fact, the quality of the water that comes out of a POU machine in general is better than the quality of water that comes out of a five gallon jug machine.
Josh king:
What's the pure cash difference between plastic jugs in an office location and using Quench through out the year?
Douglas Brown:
So we have an average price point on a cooler at about $45 a month per unit. And if you have an office of 25 people, that will be about half of what you would spend if you were doing five gallon jugs.
Josh king:
A big issue, going completely in a different direction from what happens in a white collar office, a big issue in the 2016 presidential election was what was happening in a city like Flint, Michigan, where the water crisis, I think, began in 2014 and became a major issue certainly in the Democratic primary. President Trump on the Republican side also made a visit to Flint. You're an engineer, what did you think when you were watching those reports?
Douglas Brown:
So we understand what happens when you change your source of water and you put it in this old piping network. If you think about it, the Seven Seas business is about filling the pipe and the Quench business is about taking water out of the pipe. Because while the water goes down that pipe, bad things can happen. Especially if your infrastructure is old and weak, you can pick up contaminants like zinc and lead that are poisonous, you have the issue of chlorine in the water, you have the issue of bad taste. But what's interesting, people talk about we should fix the infrastructure to avoid things like that happening, but we do have a different solution with point of use. 95% of the water that goes into that pipe is not consumed, it's used for flushing, washing, things like that. Only about 5% is actually consumed, and that's the part of the water that you have to be concerned about. So our solution with POU we think is an elegant solution because you purify the water at the point you consume it.
Josh king:
POU for individual houses, buildings, how do you deploy in a city like Flint?
Douglas Brown:
So you can do POU. Quench does not at this point do residential in a scale because we're so busy on the commercial side. But you can absolutely do POU on a residential basis. Of course, I personally have POU in my home.
Josh king:
Of course you do.
Douglas Brown:
Of course. And once you go there, you don't go back, especially with the sparkling machines now. But it's absolutely something that can be deployed in a household.
Josh king:
Have your teams gone to places like Flint and said, "Wake up, there's a different option?" What have been the results of those conversations?
Douglas Brown:
I'd say they've been mixed. In places where people have a sensitivity to what's in the water supply, there's a much greater awareness. The first solution for many families is the little one liter bottles of water, the second solution may be the five gallon jugs. POU is something that has been around shorter period of time, there's a market awareness issue. But I think as people understand that it's an option, it's becoming more interesting to them because it's a better solution.
Josh king:
Decades of experience in engineering and water, companies at the cutting edge of innovation and development such as yours. We talk about the 2 billion people who don't would have access to pure drinking water. 2018, when you think ahead to 2030, is it your natural inclination to be an optimist or a pessimist for how much water will be available to meet this Earth's needs?
Douglas Brown:
I'm an optimist. And there's two things that are going to drive that, and it's not just desalination. There's a two pronged attack that I think will, over that period, become more acceptable. And a big piece that's not out there very much today is wastewater reuse, toilet to tap, is people like to talk about it.
Josh king:
Yeah, tell me about that.
Douglas Brown:
Toilet to tap is something that conceptually you think, "Ah, I never want to drink water that came out of somebody's toilet." But the fact is I can take any source water, including sewage from the New York City Sewage Department, and I can make that water pure enough to make semiconductor chips with, I can make much purer than the water that's in that glass in front of you, and I can certainly make it pure enough so that you can drink it and it's healthy. It's more a psychological issue that the population has to overcome. But by 2030, I think you're going to see more acceptance of that.
Josh king:
We'll all wait and see when that happens. Doug brown, founder of AquaVenture Holdings, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, ticker symbol, WaaS, water as a service. Thanks, Doug, for joining us in the ICE House.
Douglas Brown:
Thank you very much.
Josh king:
That's our conversation for this week. Our guest was Douglas Brown, chairman and CEO of AquaVenture Holdings. If you like what you heard, please rate us on iTunes so other folks know where to find us. And if you've got a question or a comment you'd like one of our experts to tackle in a future show, email us at [email protected] or tweet at us @NYSE. Our show is produced by Pete Ash and Ian Wolf with production assistance from Ken Abel and Steven Port. I'm Josh king, your host signing off from the library of the New York Stock Exchange. Thanks for listening. See you next week.
Speaker 1:
Information contained in this podcast was obtained in part from publicly available sources and not independently verified. Neither ICE nor it's affiliates make it any representations or warranties express or implied as to the accuracy or completeness of this information and do not sponsor, approve, or endorse any of the content herein, all of which is presented solely for informational and educational purposes. Nothing herein constitutes an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security or recommendation of any security or trading practice.
