By 2020 most urban cities will be water stressed due to lack of effective policy for water usage and reuse.Conventional methods of treatment and reuse have been ineffective due to the unpredictable increase in growth in these cities combined with the use of old technologies. The Urban Local Bodies have not been able to address this in an effective way mainly because most sewage treatment in cities is done through the centralized plants. The result is that in an urban area that is constantly increasing due to demands of urbanization, less than 30 percent of wastewater is reused and more than 70 percent of raw water is wasted. This imbalance is resulting in water stress that we are seeing in most cities today. Set up by Vijay Sampath and Sunil Ballal, AquaSphere Greentech Solutions Pvt Ltd is an organization, which is addressing this issue by building products using innovative technologies that will result in water saving by almost 70 percent for a community.

Currently, AquaSphere Greentech offers two products a CDI based water treatment solution for ground/surface water and an Intelligent SBR system called eSBR

for Sewage treatment. A CDI based water treatment solution is an innovative water treatment system that can treat ground or surface water containing highly dissolved salts and toxins such as fluorides, heavy metals, Arsenic, Nitrates, Bacteria and others to produce clean drinkable water meeting WHO standards. CDI is a high recovery system where water wastage is under 20 percent as against 70 percent from an RO system. It does not use any chemicals, consumes very low power and has the lowest operating cost for treating water when compared to any other system in the market today. “We are manufacturing our CDI based products through our joint venture company called InnoDI Water Technologies Pvt Ltd in Bengaluru. This joint venture is between AquaSphere, Idropan of Italy and IIT Madras and this company was set up to produce CDI modules and products at high volumes,” mentions Vijay Sampath, Co-Founder, AquaSphere Greentech Solutions.

On the other hand, SBR as a technology for sewage treatment has been in use for many years. Using this concept, AquaSphere Greentech has created an intelligent sewage treatment system called eSBR that can treat both grey and black water from a household or community to deliver water which can be reused 100 percent. “In this product we have introduced few unique design criteria, some innovative concept for automatic batch treatment and ensured that there is no electrical or moving parts placed inside the treatment tank. We have modularized this design in such a manner that it is easy to build products from as small as 1 KLD which is good enough for an

individual home to 250 KLD that can serve an entire community,” says Sunil Ballal, Co-Founder, AquaSphere Greentech Solutions. All the systems by AquaSphere Greentech are built around 3 key criteria No chemical use to ensure we don’t pollute our environment; Low energy use thereby reducing the carbon footprint substantially; and,Self sustaining through a high level of automation.

Sunil Ballal, Founder

For future, AquaSphere Greentech Solutions is constantly looking at innovative methods and techniques for water management. The firm has developed roadmaps for technological advancements in its product lines and is also continuously looking at improvements based on field data. “Some of the improvements that we are working on include a smart way to dealkalize the water so that we ensure pipes and fittings don’t scale. This also ensures good treatment outcomes and replaces the traditional concept of using softeners in our homes. The other innovation that we are working on is for an easy way to separate oil in water. This is very useful in service centre and industries to reuse water. We are doing trials on these products and we intend to launch these two products in next 3-4 months,” concludes Vijay.