Green Tech

Attention, parents of school-age children. Are you worried about a growing Purell addiction? CleanWell has the hand sanitizer for you.

The San Francisco-based company has come out with an alcohol-free, all-natural hand sanitizer. I got some samples at the ThinkGreen conference last week and my hands have been free of epidemic-causing bacteria ever since.

Need a sanitizing spritz?

(Credit: Michael Kanellos/CNET News.com)

The company claims it kills Listeria monocytogenes, Candida (we can make it together) albicans, Streptococcus pygenes, and Salmonella enterica. You can't spray it on chicken, but the salmonella killing would be great for kitchen sanitizing. Spray CleanWell on your hands and it kills over 99 percent of these germs in 15 seconds, according to the company.

The active ingredient is called Ingenium. It's not from the Periodic Table of the Elements. Instead, it's a mix of essential oils that kill germs in concert. The product literature is great. It shows a kid hugging a deer. Most people would think: "cute." To moms, that deer is just a rat with horns.

The 1-ounce spray bottle pictured here costs $7.99 and is good for 225 sprays. (That's a lot of deer hugging.) The company also sells wipes and other products.

Purfresh, which used to go by the name Novazone, has tested and now will more actively market a sunscreen for things that come out of the ground.

Called Eclipse, it's a powder made from multicrystalline calcium carbonate. You spray it on onions and other crops to reduce solar stress. Farmers can lose 30 percent or more of their crops to overexposure to the sun, said Purfresh CEO David Cope. The remaining, salable crops can also get damaged and lose some of their value through overexposure. Spray on the powder--which is rated SPF 42--and you can eliminate losses due to in-field sunburn.

The product has mostly been tested in Chile, but the company will try to market it in a variety of regions. It's safe for humans, too.

"It's the same white power you see in chewing gum wrappers," said Cope.

Eclipse is part of the company's plans to become a full-service house for food and water technology. Currently, it mostly earns revenue through its systems that purify bottled water or produce with ozone. The company has 300 customers in 22 countries. While most of the customers are growers, the company is expanding sales to transportation outfits and retailers.

And speaking of ozone, the company has also released a software product, called Intellipure, that monitors food and drinks as they move from harvesting or production to the shelf. This way, if you get poisoned, it's easier to find out where the problem occurred.

Food and water purification is getting to be a big business. Remember all those stories about e coli and spinach? It was the result of improper purification. Australia's Ioteq is coming to this country with a system that purifies harvested produce with iodine. Meanwhile, TyraTech is developing a cheese that kills tapeworms.

HALF MOON BAY, Calif.--Chlorine is bad for you, and iodine isn't, points out Jared Franks, CEO of Ioteq, and that difference is the basis of the company's business.

The Australian company has come up with a water purification system that kills microbes with iodine rather than chlorine or ozone. Ioteq's Isan system basically immerses fruit and vegetables in iodine-soaked water, and monitors the iodine dosage.

After purification, the produce gets bagged and sent to grocery stores. The process leaves a minimal iodine residue that is not harmful to people--and it doesn't change the flavor, Franks said. Iodine is a nutrient used by the medical profession to clean germs. The residue can also be washed off.

Not only does the iodine kill microbes, it extends the shelf life of produce. Some Australian customers are able to keep cherries on store shelves for eight weeks--far longer than normal, Franks said during a presentation and a meeting at the AlwaysOn Venture Summit West here Friday.

The water in the Isan system can also be used several times, which cuts processing costs. The system sucks the iodine out of one purification cycle and sends the water back to the start of the process. With water in short supply in places like Australia and California, that's a big deal, Franks said.

While Ioteq currently sells its products to food growers, it hopes to branch into the municipal-water market, selling large-scale systems to water districts.

It has installed 150 systems so far.

Agriculture and water are often overlooked, but they are two of the growing wings of the clean-tech market. Organic produce is booming, and grocery markets and organic growers, of course, can't use chemicals to kill fungi or bacteria.

Farmers, meanwhile, have been stung by spinach recalls. Municipal-water districts are currently going through upgrades of their systems. And consumers complain about the chemical taste of tap water.

As a result, companies such as AgraQuest have devised biopesticides while others, such as Novazone, have come up with ways to disinfect harvested food with ozone.

Ioteq claims that it has an advantage over ozone systems in capital cost. Its purification systems cost only $5,000 to $15,000, less than the equipment required for ozone treatment, he said. (Novazone has said its systems cost closer to $100,000, but the throughput of the systems is different. I'll try to do a more detailed comparison later.)

Interestingly, Ioteq doesn't make much money on the hardware. Instead, the profits come from selling iodine to its installed base. The iodine market, Franks added, is fairly stable. It comes from Chile and Japan, and the price doesn't fluctuate much.

Chlorine as a chemical costs less, he admitted, but Ioteq's Isan system needs fewer chemicals to get the job done. The Isan system needs only about 30 parts per million of iodine to clean fruit. Chlorine needs about 200 parts per million.

As they say in the water business, it's a wash at that point.