Green Tech

With Earth Day upon us again, News.com green reporters sat down and selected five leading companies in five different clean technology categories. Here are the ones to watch in the areas of food and drink:

Click here to see all of News.com's Earth Day 2008 stories, photo galleries, and more.

1. Purfresh: Formerly Novazone, the company's goal is to become the giant in organic pesticides. It makes a system that kills fungi and microbes in bottled water and food with ozone, and also offers a sunscreen for fruit. It cuts back on industrial chemicals, boosts the amount of food that makes it from the field to the table without spoiling, and saves water. Old science combined with Silicon Valley management style.

Look out for Ioteq (iodine-based food purification that also conserves water), Agraquest and Marrone Organic Innovations. The last two scour the world to find microbes that will kill other microbes.

2. Altela: People have been trying to make it rain for centuries. Albuquerque's Altela says it has a tractor-trailer-size device that can simulate rainstorm with industrial runoff or salt water. The droplets that come out at the end are distilled water.

Make it rain, says Altela.

(Credit: Altela)

A flood of investment is sweeping into the water purification market, in large part because several nations around the world are already grappling with severe water shortages. Unfortunately, traditional desalination and distillation cost quite a bit and can be energy intensive. Some other options out there include a low-energy desalination membrane from UCLA's NanoH20, Israel's Aqwise and a membrane-less system from secretive Quos.

3. Vidler Water: In the old days, water rights disputes were fairly straightforward. You'd shoot your neighbor and hope not to get caught. Nevada's Vidler Water is taking a more civilized approach. It is collecting agricultural water rights, converting them to municipal water rights and setting up mechanisms to lease or sell them to cities that need them. Municipal water has a higher value than agricultural water, in part because of decades-old allocation schemes that haven't kept up with demographic shifts.

4. TyraTech: A dairy product that kills...tapeworms! The company is working on a cheese with Kraft Foods for emerging nations that can provide nutrition while medicinal benefits. Nutraceuticals are expected, by many, to be a big business. At one end of the spectrum, you'll have companies like Attune selling probiotic energy bars to upscale parents (who will likely afterward clean their kids' hands with CleanWell, the organic hand cleaner.) At the other end, companies will devise products for wide populations. Another one to watch: The Marine Institute in Galway, Ireland, which wants to create food additives and supplements out of fish processing waste and marine plants.

An Attune probiotic energy bar. Fancy that.

(Credit: Michael Kanellos )

5. Archer Daniels Midland: Ok, everyone boo, but genetically modified crops are likely inevitable. They help reduce the need for pesticides, improve farming yields, and will likely play a key role in developing crops for biofuels. ADM is one of the few large companies--along with General Electric and Shell--that participate in a wide, seemingly disparate swath of clean markets. Some GMO start-ups to watch include Targeted Growth, which is working on biofuel feedstocks.

AqWise, which builds condominiums for bacteria, has raised an additional $3.6 million in funding. The founder, though, is toiling in a new venture.

The company, with which we spoke during a swing through Israel in 2006 (just in time for the outbreak of border hostilities), has created an intricate polymer cylinder that, when placed in wastewater treatment ponds, clusters microbes that consume contaminants. The water can then be safely discarded or used to irrigate fields.

The trick is that the honeycombed cylinder sports a huge amount of surface area for microbes to grow. The greater amount of surface area in the cylinders means that the corresponding size of the treatment pond can be reduced. You can either reduce real estate or increase the amount of water a pond can process. The microbes process contaminants.

It doesn't get as much attention as solar power or transportation fuel, but water-processing technology is a rapidly growing business. Several start-ups have emerged in recent years, and large conglomerates such as General Electric are moving deeper into water and buying some of these companies.

Elad Frenkel is the current CEO. Old CEO and founder Eytan Levy is now with Israel Cleantech Ventures, a venture capital firm. He is also behind Efemcy, a microbial fuel cell company.

In a microbial fuel cell, filthy water or other substances are placed in contact with particular species of microorganisms, which then metabolize the materials. Electrons or fuel can be the byproducts. Synthetic Genomics and a whole bunch of other companies are looking at the same idea.

If you'd like to get a feel for cutting-edge water technologies, go to Israel, a densely populated country that gets only four to six inches of rain a year.

Stanford Venture Capital Holdings on Monday said it has committed $10 million to Israel-based AquAgro Fund, a division of Gaon Agro Industries.

Israeli newspaper Globes reported Tuesday that the AquAgro Fund made its first move, a $4 million investment in Advanced Desalination Technologies.

The AquAgro fund plans to invest in different technologies, including filtering and water recycling, as well as computerized irrigation systems.

Water scarcity is often cited as a dangerous effect of climate change and remains a source of political tensions in different regions of the world like the Middle East. Israel shares water with its neighbors by treaty.

If Israel does not manage its water properly, it will only have enough water for domestic use and not enough for agriculture by 2025, said Shimon Tal, the former water commissioner of Israel and an investor in the area who spoke in Newton, Mass., last November. If all the effluents were treated and used for agriculture, by 2020 Israel will still need 50 percent more water, he said.

But despite the persistent need for clean water, it remains one of the quieter areas within the booming clean-tech sector, in part because municipalities are cash-strapped by basic infrastructure upgrades.

There are companies that have technologies for desalination, such as Nano H2O, or wastewater treatment, but the overall investment is far smaller than solar or biofuels.

Some companies, like GE, are trying to cut down on the amount of energy that's needed for desalination, which is significant portion of the cost. Disposal of the briny residue is also a concern.

Other technology trends include quality monitoring and high-tech membranes for purification.

Correction 10:35 a.m. PST: This blog initially misidentified the prime minister of Israel. He is Ehud Olmert. It also misidentified the person whose speech can be found on the Project Better Place Web site--it is by Shai Agassi--and as such an earlier version of this post also incorrectly attributed a quote from that speech.

Renault-Nissan, the government of Israel, and an electric charging station start-up founded by Shai Agassi are mounting an effort to make electric cars part of ordinary life in Israel in the next decade.

Project Better Place, Agassi's organization, will try to build 500,000 electric charging stations in the country, according to the organization. At some these stations, attendants will swap out depleted batteries and put in fully charged ones. This saves the several hours typically required to charge a lithium-ion battery pack made for cars. (You can also charge the batteries at home.) Renault-Nissan, meanwhile, will ship electric cars to the country in three years or so. Ultimately, the company hopes to ship 10,000 to 20,000 a year.

The announcement was made by Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Renault-Nissan CEO Carlos Ghosn, and Agassi in Israel on Monday. Agassi's speech can be found on the Project Better Place site.

Israel has been considered Project Better Place's likely starting point. Agassi is an Israeli and the bulk of the company's $200 million in funds comes from investors in Israel. The country also relies on imported oil yet it remains locked in conflict with several Arab oil-exporting nations. Agassi in an interview last year said the organization was concentrating on islands, but added that an island can be part of a continent and isolated in other ways.

Israel is also small, which makes it an easier market for electric cars as well as companies building electric charging stations. Electric cars can only go so far without a charge or a new battery. Ghosn said that the company's cars would go about 100 kilometers (45 miles) in the city and 160 kilometers (72 miles) on the highway on a charge, according to a Reuters story. Some surveys in the U.S. say buyers generally want to see a 200-mile range on an electric car. The relatively short range of electric cars has been one of the primary reasons they haven't moved into the mainstream, according to electric car execs, battery execs, and some academics. With all the major cities crammed pretty close to each other as in Israel, the range problem shrinks.

Among large car makers, Renault-Nissan is one of the more aggressive when it comes to fully electric cars. At Tokyo's Ceatec conference in October, Nissan execs told CNET News.com that the company wants to start to put out fully electric cars by 2011 or 2012.

The cars will run on batteries being developed under a deal between Renault-Nissan and NEC.