CleanTech Forum Offers Ideas in Renewable Energy and Sustainability More Generally

I’m up at the CleanTech Forum today, meeting people, making new friends, and checking out the latest ideas in renewable energy, electric transportation, and sustainability more generally. There are quite a few concepts in water purification, including a system to remove selenium, mercury, etc. from industrial waste water.

I spoke with the CEO of Mar Systems, whose first customer was happily dumping water with 15 parts per billion into the local river. Recently, regulators, who were armed with compelling empirical evidence that mercury was hugely toxic in concentrations far lower than that, changed the requirements, and forced the company to find a solution or close its doors. Bingo. A sale was made.

Now, could the sale have occurred in the absence of the regulations? Yes, it could have, but from the way I heard the story, it probably would not have.

This raises the larger issue of why we’re all doing this. And there’s no easy way to summarize that. This is one of few industries in which doing the right thing can be profitable. Yet in the four presentations I heard before lunch, there was not a single word spoken about the fact that cleantech offers the potential to save mankind and all life forms from a catastrophic fate as the level of the environmental damage we inflict on the planet continues its exponential growth.

Maybe that doesn’t need to be said; perhaps it’s implied.