| grapes, lettuce, oceans and the olympics Plenty of businesses out there are sitting between a rock and a hard place simply because they can no longer take water for granted. |
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"It is desperation which has brought some of these people to us", admits Hydrosmart's Paul Pearce. "I guess we're an alternative technology, but that's more because we sit outside the solutions being sold by the big players." So what sort of businesses and organisations use Hydrosmart to handle their water treatment. "The vineyards and the market gardeners probably are not so surprising, but we're also working with the body responsible for cleaning water in preparation for the Beijing Olympics, and we're currently setting up a trial in Singapore for one of the world's largest shipping tanker lines, Neptune Orient Lines (NOL)." Let's start back with the Victorian vineyards which are |
Victorian vineyards which are being forced to use bore water with a sodium chloride saturation of 3,000 parts per million. "Based on the high volumes of water they need to process, they've been considering a million dollar reverse osmosis plant with a ongoing running cost of $300,000. This would be a major investment into a solution which has other hidden environmental costs: what to do with the reject stream of highly concentrated salt water, and the waste chemicals used in pre-treatments and system cleans." The Hydrosmart system is cheaper and doesn't produce toxic by-products. It uses resonance frequencies to break the bonds between the salt crystals (secondary school science) so that from a growing plant's perspective the water is no longer saline. It also runs on as much energy as a light globe. As for the market gardeners whose water is supplied by Melbourne's Sewage treatment facility at Werribee, while the water is class A and therefore acceptable for agricultural use, it is still high in salt. "We've set up a trial with a grower and are setting up a scientific study as |
well, but in the process I spoke with a market gardener in the same area who has had one of our systems in place for three years and where he couldn't grow lettuce prior, now he can." Like many places over the world, Beijing has issues with blue green algae and the trial that Hydrosmart is running will almost certainly be taken up with speed to tackle contaminated water in various sites prior to the Olympics. But perhaps the strangest application is the one at sea. "All tankers use sea water as ballast - when they unload they adjust their riding height to remain seaworthy. The problem lies in the picking up and dropping off of large amounts of water all over the world - the source of algal, bacterial and micro-organism cross-seas' pollution." One shipping company, NOL, is looking at onboard treatment solutions; one of their ships is currently being fitted with Hydrosmart technology. Don't you love it when there is a solution and it's simple and cheap?
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