Water filters: a key to world peace?

Far from being a ‘dry’ technical subject, filtration will ensure that life as we know it continues, says the CEO of Israeli water filtration company Amiad

“With more demand comes more competition, and we have already seen wars breaking out over water,” Dayan added. In other words, advanced water filtration of the type offered by Amiad is important not just for the food economy – it is likely to be a key element in preventing war in the future.

The results speak for themselves. “I recently visited India together with Economic Minister Naftali Bennett, where we met with some of Amiad’s customers. They told us that with our systems, they are able to recycle enough water to grow ten kilos of cucumbers in an area where they previously had been able to grow just one kilo,” said Dayan, who has heard versions of that story from around the world. “Ensuring that there is enough clean water to grow the food burgeoning populations need is a concern for farmers and governments everywhere, and in many areas governments are beginning to legislate use of recycled water,” with Amiad supplying the technology to filter out pollutants.

While Amiad, established in 1962, was one of the first companies in the world to produce advanced water filtration systems, today there are many competitors in the field. Amiad keeps its edge, said Dayan, by producing new technologies that it incorporates into products. For example, Amiad recently got into the water ballast business, and a “growth area” that is yielding not only new customers, but also new and improved technologies used in the core filtration business.

Under a new agreement that will take effect in 2015, nations belonging to the UN’s International Maritime Union (IMU) will have to purify ballast water they take on before discharging it. In order to ensure stability on the high seas, ships generally take on ballast water, which ensures that they do not tip over (heel) when hitting rough seas. But ballast water has, especially in recent years (as more giant ships than ever ply the oceans) become a major environmental hazard.

Bacteria, creatures, plants, and other features of one area are scooped up as part of ballast water when ships leave a port, and are discharged when a ship arrives at its destination – transferring not just the water, but invasive species or diseases that local aquatic life is unable to tolerate. In 1998, for example, a freighter from Europe dumped zebra mussels, native to the Caspian and Black Seas, into Lake St. Clair, and within a decade it became a dominant species there and in all of the neighboring Great Lakes, crowding out native species and costing the US billions of dollars a year. More tragically, an Asian ship in the mid-1990s discharged ballast water off the coast of Peru. The water contained a strain of cholera that infected local shellfish, which led to the deaths of 12,000 people.

Under a 2004 agreement – implementation of which has been postponed numerous times – ships, beginning in 2015, are going to have to filter the ballast water they dump at foreign ports. “This is a huge market,” said Dayan. “Many companies are trying to get a piece of it, but we have a big advantage because of our previous work with water officials in many countries.” The filtration technology Amiad has had to develop for its ship filtering product has helped the company upgrade its filters for municipal water systems, he added, allowing the company to produce better and more effective products for all of its markets.

Israel is recognized the world over for its innovation in water technology, said Dayan, and Amiad was proud to be a part of that. “We feel that we are very good ambassadors for Israel,” Dayan said. “We work in many places where Israel is not loved, to say the least, but we are proud of our roots, and we do not take any steps to hide it. All around the world, Israeli water technology is seen with great admiration, and we are proud to be a part of this.”