Companies promoting everything from water pipes to desalination plants and ship ballast water management were featured at the Singapore International Water Week (SIWW) held in July.

Smaller companies have stood out from their bigger competitors with simple yet innovative ideas that may make a tremendous difference in managing water resources better worldwide.

One difficulty people in many parts of the world have is obtaining clean water at an affordable cost.

Impact on lifestyle

Women in parts of Africa, South Asia or Southeast Asia, for example, may end up walking four hours a day or more to obtain enough water for their family. Even so, the water may not be clean. And if the government builds a water purification facility, there’s often no infrastructure to carry the water beyond a single village.

Seeking to solve the problem of clean drinking water on levels ranging from an individual household to an entire city, Australian company F Cubed came up with a new solar-powered water purification product that produces purified water just by using solar power.

Along with producing clean water, the units can also reduce carbon emissions by eliminating small fires or coal-produced electricity that people use to boil water. The product can even be self-funding if seawater is used, since it will produce salt which can be sold.

Best use

Another challenge related to water is figuring out the best use of scarce resources. Planners may need to choose between different scenarios.

One idea is to build a dam and subsidise those affected by the building of the dam with rain barrels for water collection. Another is to choose between subsidising household devices to reduce water usage and build a desalination plant. The other is to expand an environmental conservation area and build a water catchment area in it.

Australian-headquartered eWater launched new software called Urban Developer at SIWW that enables local or national planners to use simulations for water management. The software is designed to provide simulations for everyone from individual households at one end on through to planners managing an entire watershed at the other end.

On the household side, the same software can provide “simulations of water consumption from individual end-uses at the individual household scale”. Further upgrades to the software could also include the impact of weather on water use.

At the other end of the spectrum, this software can enable modeling for an entire watershed and help with the assessment of tradeoffs such as the comparative impact of building a dam or maintaining water spaces for conservation.

While Jones said that a simple set-up of the software to model household water usage could take about half an hour, modeling an entire watershed is far more complex and could take days of work as well as significant engineering expertise.

While it’s obviously not the only water modeling software available, it may add a valuable new tool for effective water management.

Simple, cost-effective

What’s especially striking about these innovations compared to many others is how they provide simple, cost-effective solutions that can be used almost anywhere in the world.

True, it would be difficult for a Singapore flat-dweller to set up their own solar panel. An individual in other places in Indochina or Africa, however, could easily put one in their backyard. And in Australia, it turns out that the entire city of Ceduna plans to use solar panels to produce clean water. The panels could be used for disaster relief as well.

For urban planners, having ready-made software to model solutions can enable better decisions when deciding how best to spend limited money or make tradeoffs. While software alone won’t solve the problem, it can provide a valuable tool.

Even as bigger solutions from multinationals and other far larger organisations grabbed most of the attention at SIWW, these smaller firms showed once again how good ideas can provide big solutions that can positively impact many peoples' lives.

*Aiming to provide clean, drinking water to overseas communities the Singapore International Foundation launched a Direct Service Project in Cambodia called Water for Life. Bio-sand water filters are installed in rural households to provide the residents access to improved drinking water sources. Click here to find out more.