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The U.S. water market is $95 billion ($425 billion globally). Of that $95 billion, $24 billion is spent on industrial wastewater purification and recovery.

Innovative water technology startup Crystal Clear Technologies has developed a novel approach to separate out toxic contaminants such as arsenic, copper, uranium and selenium. The technology is specifically relevant to industrial smelters, power plants and mining operations.

“We’re the first company doing this kind of approach,” says James Harris, CEO of Crystal Clear Technologies.

The company uses a low-cost biopolymer with absorbents called Chitosan to separate out contaminants. It works as a sponge that binds to specific toxic elements. At the core of the Menlo Park, Calif.-based company’s technology is bifunctional ligands, which bind to toxic metals on the order of eight times more effectively than existing reverse-osmosis systems.

Alberta has over 1.0 trillion barrels of oil reserves, only recoverable with massive amounts of water. (Photo: NASA)

The original technology was developed at the University of Oregon. Crystal Clear has used a variety of Small Business Innovation Research Grants funds over the past several years to refine and perfect the technology.

Today two methods are used to filter out unwanted contaminants: flocculation and reverse osmosis. The predominant approach today is RO. But it typically has greater energy costs and there’s a disposal problem, with residue left over. Crystal Clear’s technology has a much smaller byproduct of sludge by comparison to flocculation and RO.

In terms of cost, here’s how the technologies stack up. Flocculation costs about $.80 per 1,000 gallons of water and reverse osmosis costs $.58 per 1,000 gallons, according to data from Crystal Clear. The company’s approach with Chitosan costs $.03 to $0.15 per 1,000 gallons.

Some mining operations using RO run at $150 per 1,000 liters. Crystal Clear claims it can deliver the same purification at $25 per 1,000 liters. Over the next six to nine months, Harris says the company is going to be focusing on scaling its system and experimenting with other elements like lead and selenium.

In terms of how the filtration system can be paired with renewable energy sources like solar or wind, Harris says any of those systems could be used to drive the pumps and filtration process. The company is in the process of a fundraising round for the next phase of its operations. By Lee Bruno

Not a direct part of the economic stimulus package, and only extended by Congress (as of March 20th) for another 60 days, a significant source of funding for primary research by startup greentech companies has been from the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Research which manages the funding of the SBIR – Small Business Innovation Research program, and STTR – Small Business Technology Transfer program. Both SBIR and STTR monies are channeled through as many as 12 other federal agencies. Click here to discover the GreenTech funding opportunities within these agencies and sub-agencies.

Anyone in the GreenTech business universe ought to recognize the following R&D categories being funded by various federal agencies, i.e. the EPA, DOE, DOD and NSF to name a few. Some of these free money R&D categories may be the exact same areas of research you are about to commit to, or have been thinking – or dreaming – about doing.

Clean air – innovations to ensure healthy air are just beginning. (Photo: US EPA)

The 2010 EPA-SBIR Broad Area Topics are:

• Green Building Materials and Systems
• Innovation in Manufacturing
• Nanotechnology
• Greenhouse Gases
• Drinking Water and Water Monitoring
• Water Infrastructure
• Air Pollution
• Biofuels and Vehicle Emissions Reduction
• Waste Management and Monitoring
• Homeland Security

The 2010 NSF Broad Area Topics are:

• Biotech and Chemical Technologies (BC)
• Education Applications (EA)
• Information and Communication Technologies (IC)
• Nanotechnology
• Advanced Materials and Manufacturing (NM)

There are specific sub-categories for each of these broad area topics.
To see if your companies R&D interests and that of our governments are aligned click into these links:

• EPA-SBIR Program Solicitation: http://es.epa.gov/ncer/rfa/2009/2009_sbir_phase1.html
• More information is available on the EPA-SBIR web site at: http://es.epa.gov/ncer/sbir/
• NSF/SBIR Program Solicitation: http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2009/nsf09541/nsf09541.htm#pgm_desc_txt
• More information is available on the NSF-SBIR web site at: http://http://www.nsf.gov/eng/iip/sbir/stop.jsp

The closing dates for the EPA-SBIR are May 20th. This means for this funding year, applicants only have 45 days left to get that EPA-SBIR proposal in. For NSF-SBIR the close date is June 9th. Companies are eligible to apply to both of these and others, like STTR.

The NSF Phase I limits have gone up to $150,000 because of a surge of “reinvestment” monies from the Obama administration. Also, NSF allows for a maximum of 4 proposals from any one private company. As with most business endeavors, there are many “optimizing strategies” that can be applied and the federal grant money-making environment for small businesses is no exception.

Federal research “grants” are just that, grants. They are not loans, i.e., you don’t have to pay anything back. You will to do some periodic reporting and invoice the government to get your money, but that is well worth the time and effort expended to perform these grant maintenance tasks if you win an award. In many cases, if you win the money then the maintenance efforts which can be an administrative burden for small or even mid-size companies, can be paid for from grant monies you’ve won. For example, the EPA/SBIR allows for up to $4,000 of the Phase I grant winnings (won through a separate but conjoined proposal) for what is referred to as “Technical Assistance.”

Don’t be intimidated by the grant writing task. Most all SBIR type grants are written by the chief scientist or the engineer as CEO/President of small, private companies. You will not be competing with professional grant writers. That said, it is important to know there is a “style” to grant writing, and there is certain marketing or “pitching” in the grant writing space. You have to have a certain marketing sensibility in writing to the agency and program you are writing to. In this sense I suggest you check out last years winners and get a sense of who won and read their abstracts, or better yet, give the “chief investigator” at the company a phone call and ask them if they are willing to share their grant proposal. Having a winning proposal in hand is a beautiful thing. Also the agency itself can assist you in assessing the “alignment” of your research with that agencies specific funding objectives. First, do your homework before you call or write as they will remember your name and the name of your company especially if your waste their time.

These often overlooked grant programs can provide a decisive financial edge to greentech startups and greentech entrepreneurs who are looking for cash and have a “novel” GreenTech (or other) R&D idea.

Brian Hennessy provides proven expert, hands-on assistance to start-up company founders and executive management. He has worked on 12 start-ups and with 9 Founders or CEO’s of start-ups over the last 25 years. www.maxroix.com

Everyone has scraped or cut themselves at one point or another. Once a finger has an unfortunate encounter with the edge of a knife or your knee falls against rough pavement, exposed skin is damaged and you start bleeding. It’s all temporary, though. A scar is eventually all that is left from a painful injury.

Machines aren’t so lucky. Tiny cracks that form in all plastic structures widen over time. Fixing these cracks before they become an issue would increase the overall integrity of anything made from plastics. This isn’t an unrealistic concept: In 2001 aeronautics engineers at the University of Illinois developed a self-healing man made material. The idea was to eliminate microscopic cracks that form on a material’s surface.

The whole process works with the help of microcapsules filled with dicyclopentadiene (a liquid) that are dispersed throughout the plastic surface. These microcapsules rupture as soon as a crack reaches them. Once these capsules burst and release the diclopentadiene inside, the liquid comes into contact with a catalyst which turns the liquid into a more solid state while it fills the crack, thereby healing the plastic. The healed plastic is then about 80% as strong as it was before it acquired the (now healed) crack.
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Self-healing plastic hosts a microvascular network containing a healing agent that automatically oozes in to repair cracks. (Photo: National Science Foundation)

It may take a while before this technology is perfected but self healing plastics have obvious benefits: We tend to grow less interested in our gadgets as they get scratched up. If our cell phones or ipods stayed scratch free, we would probably hang on to them a lot longer. Not only that, but it would be incredibly practical to incorporate self healing plastics into structures that are difficult (and costly) to get to, such as satellites, wind turbines and the inside of complex machinery.

Self healing plastics have already evolved since 2001: The original researchers in Illinois have eliminated the need for the catalyst (thereby cutting down production costs) while Biswajit Ghosh and Marek W. Urban from the University of Southern Mississippi have also taken things a step further by developing a polymer that uses natural sunlight to repair itself. (Polyurethane networks have been proven to exhibit self-repairing tendencies with exposure to ultra-violet light.)Click for more information.

As a whole, I look forward to when my cell phone looks new for longer than a day.