Ok, so Aquacycl didn’t take home the final prize in the Fix our Climate category from The Earthshot Prize last week, but we still feel like winners to make it to the finalist stage. The Earthshot Prize is widely considered the Oscars of environmental awards, and the event and everything leading up to it lives up to this title. The selection process is rigorous; over 1,000 nominees were screened down to 15 finalists. To be one of the final fifteen companies is a tremendous recognition of the work that we are doing, and the potential impact that new wastewater solutions can have in addressing our water and climate challenges.
The Earthshot Prize is more than an award. It is a community, a movement, a platform to catalyze action and inspire people to create change. Our CEO and founder, Orianna Bretschger, spent a week in Singapore with the other finalists during Earthshot week. This week was packed with masterclasses, networking, and exploring ways to scale the various solutions to the five challenges. She connected with world-changing impact entrepreneurs with bold, ambitious goals. During this week and the awards ceremony, we are truly inspired by these changemakers. If you aren’t familiar with them, each and every one is worth getting to know: https://earthshotprize.org/winners-finalists/. They bring passion, purpose, and commitment to leaving the world a better place.
The Earthshot Prize is supporting us and the rest of the innovators by bringing a mighty community of partners, customers, investors and advocates to provide the necessary resources to help us scale. This network will be invaluable in helping us achieve the ambitious growth targets ahead of us. In particular, we are looking to connect with The Earthshot Prize network to increase commercial deployment, meet like-minded investors, and ultimately to connect with NGOs and partners that can bring us to areas which lack sanitation and the infrastructure to facilitate it.
We continue to keep our mission of sanitation for all as our North Star. Today, in 2023, there are still over 2 billion people without access to safe and reliable sanitation. Our team is motivated every day to bring new technologies and business models that help close the gap. We provide off-sewer and off-energy grid for industrial companies and communities, addressing some of the most challenging wastewaters in the world. And we are doing it with the lowest possible greenhouse gas emissions, producing less than 10% of the GHG emissions that traditional technology would use to treat the same wastewater.
Today, 80% of wastewater is discharged globally with minimal to no treatment, creating massive problems of biodiversity loss, human and ecosystem health, food insecurity, and access to clean water. We must deploy the best solutions to make a meaningful dent in this incredible challenge ahead of us.
We are working to clean water, reduce water stress, improve lives, and do it without adding emissions. We can’t do it without the incredible network of advocates, accelerators, employees, investors and customers who believe in us today and every step of the way. To be recognized as a finalist for The Earthshot Prize is a recognition of each of you who contributed to Aquacycl’s success.
We love how His Royal Highness, Prince William, framed it when The Earthshot Prize was launched in 2020: “We don’t need a moonshot; we need Earthshots.”
We couldn’t agree more. Forget about going to Mars; we are working every day to give Earth our best shot.
