It started with wanting better water in my apartment in Detroit, MI. I didn't send out any lab tests or know that anything was wrong with my city water other than taste, but it was 2016 and the Flint water crisis was in full swing. The city of Flint cut some corners in ways city governments are want to do, and in turn 100,000 residents were exposed to toxic levels of lead.

The thing that hit me the hardest about the Flint crisis, was that there was no immediate notification to the consumers of this water. With potable water being only second to breathable air in human survival, I was in awe when I found out that it took over a year for the city to issue any notice about the lead, rather they attempted to downplay the situation until a research team from University of Michigan, Virginia Tech, and the EPA conducted testing that was impossible to spin. From the time the city was aware of a major lead problem with verified professional testing, it still took them 7 months, an entire school year, to send a letter saying the water was not safe to drink. This realization, combined with years of market / trend research in the venture capital field, lead me down a very, very deep rabbit hole, one I am still buried in today.

From that day in 2016, I vowed to learn as much as I possibly could about drinking water. I am intrinsically interested in the way that humans over time have constructed and then later neglected the water infrastructure that is essential to all human life.

Artificial Barriers

In order to actually accomplish anything I had to narrow the scope of my research. The first delimiter was choosing to focus only on drinking water. While agricultural water use dwarfs all other types of use, I could not find any directly actionable non-political stones to unturn. Industrial, commercial, and general residential water use is of concern mostly due to water price and volume, not necessarily due to quality. While there are many worthy endeavors in this space (Check Badger Meter Inc NYSE:BMI stock chart), there is very little room for small startups in the slow moving RFQ/RFP/NET90/ETC process. I have excluded wastewater for many of the same reasons listed above, sewage is also gross and I don't want to spend the next decade of my life being around it.

So if I know all of the things I am not interested in, or the things that are too big to start small with, I am left with the only thing that is truly realistically applicable to a startup project: Drinking Water.

Individual Drinking Water Quality is a Solvable Problem

One of the major reasons I was lured into this market is that the problem we as humans are encountering, is functionally solvable. It does not require the commercialization of some nascent laboratory technology, nor does it require a major change on any large scale. From a regulatory perspective, the regulating bodies require that water filters pass objective, data-driven testing. Data-driven testing rather than relationship/stature based licensing / purchasing creates a much more hospitable environment for startups.

Can we get clean drinking water to everyone on Earth in one year? No. But what we can do is build machines that help solve the problem from the bottom up. I don't believe (for a host of reasons that will be stated elsewhere on this site) that the problem is realistically solvable at a national scale or in any large top-down manner. I think that the days of being confident your tap water is safe to drink are over.

Structure of the Project / This Site

Over the previous few years I was running a venture-funded crypto business called Sarcophagus, so all water research was being done in the background, and loosely documented. Now I will start expanding and publishing documentation of the research I've done along the way, as well as documenting my ongoing filter design, fabrication and eventual sales of filters. I think that showing potential customers WHY decisions were made in designing/building water filters is a much more effective marketing technique than showing a lot of pretty renderings in ideal conditions.