Going green

Gone are the days when going green means kissing goodbye to all your green. These days in many respects it means saving a lot of money in operational costs - if you can afford the green solution. So what's the next step in going green? Making sure that solutions are affordable. Once going green means improving costs rather than increasing costs to most people, won't that mean going green will be a no-brainer?

For many households and businesses, the big hurdle to going green is still capital outlay. So what if there was a way that someone else would buy, install, own, operate and maintain the "green system", and charge the household or business a tariff for providing the green service? What if the technologies themselves were able to create new products through the treatment process that could be sold to offset the cost of the technology and over time, start to generate a profit?

There are technologies out there which can treat wastewater - including raw sewage - back to drinking water quality (although there's still a major yuck factor to that idea), which can treat solid waste and produce only saleable products from their operation with no nasty emissions or pollutants, and can generate energy to boot.

Compare and contrast with traditional water treatment systems, for example: to desalinate brackish water, which is a major challenge in parts of Southern Africa, the traditional solution was to use reverse osmosis technology...but this is considered very expensive and also energy intensive, two factors which make it difficult for businesses to adopt it. What if there was a way to treat water with a high salt concentration without having to use a lot of electrical energy - what would that mean to communities where the groundwater is too salty to drink, or so salty it corrodes all the infrastructure? Wouldn't that improve the community's overall operating costs?

The gap here is still funding, but the finance world is starting to catch up to the attractiveness of these technological offerings. More on this in the months to come.

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