The desalination startup spinning brine into business

Water covers more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, but just 2.5% of the world’s water is fresh.

That’s made desalination — pulling salt and other minerals out of nonpotable water to create fresh water for drinking or industrial use — vital to communities in arid regions from the Middle East to California.

And thanks to factors like climate change, urbanization, and industrialization (shoutout data centers), more important than ever.

The trouble is…

… that conventional desalination is:

• An energy intensive process that only retains ~30%-40% of the water it processes.
• Harmful to the environment, given that many facilities are powered by fossil fuels and the leftover brine is usually dumped back into waterways, which can damage marine ecosystems.

Eden Tech — a Texas-based startup founded by Hunter Manz, whose interest in water conservation grew from his upbringing in Nevada — thinks its novel approach could solve both issues by making the process more efficient while turning waste into profit, per Fast Company.

How it works

• Whereas traditional desalination systems act as “high-pressure strainers,” using reverse osmosis to filter out salt by pushing water through a semipermeable membrane…
• … FC describes Manz’s reverse osmosis centrifuge system as functioning like “a salad spinner, using centrifugal force to help separate salt from water.”

Employing natural forces rather than pressure alone, Eden says its approach requires less energy — 2x-3x less compared to thermal systems — while retaining ~2x as much water.

Eden also plans to extract valuable minerals, like lithium and rubidium, from the remaining brine (possible depending on the water source) and sell them to create an additional revenue stream that could reduce costs for consumers while reducing the amount of waste that returns to the environment.

What’s next?

The company, which has raised $3.3m in funding since launching in 2020, hopes to scale its newly debuted Genesis machine over the next year for commercial use.

“We want to take water that is currently hurting the environment and make it something that will actually help the local community,” Manz told FC.

Making that vision a reality won't be easy — Eden still has to navigate hurdles like water rights, permitting, and public concerns over privatization — but as clean water grows scarcer around the world, it will inevitably become necessary.

Fortunately, Eden isn’t the only one working on making desalination cheaper, cleaner, and more efficient.