Drinkwell: HIX Nanotechnology for Groundwater Purification

By Minhaj Chowdhury 21 July, 2023

Drinkwell's 500+ water ATMs provide an economically viable solution for delivering water access. We talk with Chowdhury, CEO & Co-Founder, to learn about the benefits of their tech, expansion plans & the challenges they face

Drinkwell delivers clean drinking water on a permanent basis by blending locally-regenerable water filtration tech with a micro-franchise business model
Underlying issue in solving SDGs is lack of coordination & interoperability between sectors; water sector especially faces a vicious financing cycle of 'Build, Decay, Rebuild'
Climate resilience is an absolute must; existing water ATMs will have 3D add-ons & new ATMs will be resilient from start; to solve SDG6, we must adopt progressive indicators
Author: Minhaj Chowdhury
Minhaj Chowdhury (CEO/Co-Founder), as a Fulbright Fellow to Bangladesh with BRAC - the largest NGO in the world - researched villager willingness to pay for clean water in 2012. His work has been acclaimed by UNICEF, WaterAid Bangladesh, the US Ambassador to Bangladesh, and the Bangladesh Health Secretary, and serves as the basis for Drinkwell's growth strategy. Minhaj has prior experience as a Consultant with Exeter Group where he held roles in product development for state-based health insurance exchanges as well as project management for an operational turnaround of a large non-profit organization with an annual budget of $3B. Minhaj holds a BA in Public Health from Johns Hopkins and has won multiple awards from organizations such as the US State Department, SXSW, and others. He is a 2014 Echoing Green Fellow, 2015 Forbes 30 Under 30 Social Entrepreneur, and 2017 Ashoka Fellow.
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800 million people lack access to clean drinking water taking 4 million lives each year, of which approximately half are children. Drinkwell delivers clean drinking water on a permanent basis by blending locally-regenerable water filtration technology with a micro-franchise business model.

Building off of 200 profitable deployments across India, Laos, and Cambodia through local partners, Drinkwell Systems deliver 60x more water, is 17x more energy efficient, and reduces waste by 6 orders of magnitude compared to Reverse Osmosis, the current best practice. 

CWR: Minhaj, thank you for chatting with us. As Co-founder and CEO of Drinkwell, can you tell us about your journey in the water space, why you started the company and some of the major challenges?

Minhaj Chowdhury (MC): An absolute pleasure to be here. Drinkwell is honestly a labor of love. Growing up as a Bangladeshi-American what sparked my interest in water was my childhood visits to Bangladesh during the summers as my parents wanted me to stay connected to my ancestral roots.

“What sparked my interest in water was my childhood visits to Bangladesh…

…I realized how the tap I took for granted in Texas was nowhere to be found across Bangladesh”

This is where I realized how the tap I took for granted in Texas was nowhere to be found across Bangladesh. Now to zoom out a little, as global macro forces drive water scarcity and population rates continue to increase I find that the force of the arithmetic shows that the traditional tradeoff between impact and profit will continue to diminish in the water sector as externalities previously unaccounted for are finally being valued.

Further, the widespread digitization of water utilities post-Covid as well as a heightened consciousness around the importance of safe water infrastructure are both tailwinds that are shortening the traditionally multi-year sales cycle to water utilities which I believe creates new opportunities for startups to build large, valuable businesses.

This economic reality coupled with the immediate gratification one gets from providing safe, affordable drinking water to the masses makes building, recruiting for, and scaling Drinkwell a real joy.

CWR: It’s been quite a journey as you’re now selling over 40 million liters in a month – Congratulations! Can you explain how Drinkwell’s products and services work, and how your tech differs from others in the same space?

MC: The Drinkwell pitch is simple – private operators focused on ensuring safe water supply in urban communities can only achieve the scale they want, and that the SDGs demand of us, if they work with utilities, not against them.

We marry the tech with a utility-focused public private partnership model, it’s a win-win

By working in concert with the government, we avoid overlapping infrastructure investments in the same communities. We align on a co-financed strategy jointly owned by the utility and ourselves in deploying community-scale water filtration systems to provide safe water for those who live beyond the pipe – that is to say, those underserved communities who can be so hard to reach.

In quality-affected areas where there are trace amounts of arsenic or fluoride in the groundwater we use HIX- Nano technology – a proprietary nanotechnology based hybrid ion exchange (HIX) resin media that is capable of removing trace contaminants like arsenic, fluoride, iron etc consistently below the regulatory limit of WHO and IS-10500.

HIX Nano tech removes groundwater trace contaminants (e.g arsenic, fluoride, iron)…

…it use 16x less electricity, recovers 90% input water & reduces waste by 6 orders of magnitude

Unlike existing reverse osmosis solutions, Drinkwell’s technology requires 16x less electricity, recovers 90% of input water, and reduces waste by 6 orders of magnitude. By marrying this technological innovation with a utility-focused public private partnership model where the utility provides land, a water source (either groundwater or surface water) and sets the tariff we create “win-win” economic partnerships where both parties co-invest in capex and recover the investment via water sale over time creating alignment from day one.

CWR: Drinkwell is clearly playing a major role in access to clean water and sanitation, but this continues to be an issue – what do you think is the underlying problem that fails to be addressed because we are still quite far from achieving SDG 3,6 & 9?

MC: Coordination. Coordination. Coordination. Rather, lack thereof. The famous African proverb of how if you want to go fast go alone but if you want to go far go together I feel applies to the SDGs as they are so cross-cutting. I can frankly speak to SDG 6 so will double click on what I’ve seen in WASH in my response here, but feel the realities are perhaps applicable to other sectors as well.

The lack of coordination & interoperability between cross-cutting sectors…

…plus the water sector is victim to the vicious infrastructure financing cycle of “Build, Decay, Rebuild”

There is a general silo between the language, metrics, and operating cultures of governments which act in political cycles and are constantly mindful of the emotive issue of water tariffs in environment with abysmal GDP to tax ratios that make it difficult to keep tariffs low enough to appease activists while ensuring sustainability. You then have NGOs and private water operators who have promising pilots but are rarely able to impact the billions in need of their solutions because of a general lack of interoperability with the systems and scale the multilateral development banks (MDBs) and utilities operate at.

Bridging this requires overcoming inertia from all parties involved and doesn’t come naturally, but I do find an openness from MDBs and utilities today that I didn’t when I first started this journey in 2009. I feel one reality that has brought MDBs and utilities to the table of innovation is how procurement in the water sector lays victim to the unfortunately vicious infrastructure financing cycle of “Build, Decay, Rebuild” where tender winners make a gross margin winfall upfront on the capex and have no profit incentive to operate and maintain the very assets they deployed. This results in shoddy work that needs to be rebuilt creating more money for private operators than if they maintain their initial assets. I’m excited by the large scale success of innovative financial instruments such as hybrid annuity models that I feel is role modeling a break from this past.

CWR: Is the cost of water a part of the problem? In some places it could be considered too cheap and in others too expensive especially for those who struggle to afford it.

MC: I’m in strong agreement with the notion that water is too cheap for corporations and too expensive for low-income communities.

This comes back to the point I made at the top about needing to peg the externality of a scarce resource such as water to the volume at which corporations are diminishing the resource that is ultimately also needed by low-income communities for their livelihoods.

It is encouraging to see the rise of ESG goals around water stewardship and how being “water neutral” is something Fortune 100 firms are actively working towards, but these initiatives have yet to be mainstreamed as there is no adverse externality in today’s business environment beyond paying a yearly fee for drilling a bore well in the case of Bangladesh – you can extract as much as your garment factory needs.

Water is too cheap for corporations & too expensive for low-income communities…

…our water ATMs dispense 40mn+/ L/ month, which is >10x a typical water fountain & costs <30x than bottled water

Activists and NGOs are absolutely right in demanding water tariffs be as low as possible as it is tragic how the poorer you are in this world the more as a percent of your monthly income you pay for basic services such as water. Water fountains are for example free but if you look at the volume of water our water atms dispense at more than 40 million per month it is an order of magnitude higher than a typical water fountain. This creates substantial cost to ensure uptime which translates to a tariff that can sustain our ATMs irrespective of government subsidies.

We compare our offering to bottled water alternatives which usually cost 30x more per liter than our solution. In many ways, I find the scale of the bottled water market today to be a travesty as it underwrites the failures of water utilities who should have relegated bottled water providers to non-existence. But as bottled water providers continue to profit we feel the willingness to pay for water that exists today in a manner that I didn’t see a decade ago, I feel like our water atms are creating a space for a third solution that is more expensive than a water fountain but also much cheaper than bottled water to be a viable alternative to those who currently live beyond the pipe.

The bottled water market today is a travesty that underwrites the failure of water utilities

At the end of the day it will cost trillions of dollars to connect the 2 billion people who lack access to piped water today to be connected to a grid. That is money that simply does not exist in the sector today, and the time it will take to both mobilize that magnitude of resources and then implement it in hard-to-reach areas will likely take us well beyond 2030. To reduce this cost and time lag I feel like decentralized water has a large role to play akin to mini-grids in the energy sector.

The cost of deploying community water treatment plants are usually 10x lower than traditional MDB-financed, municipal scale, mega water treatment plants, and those decentralized plants can eventually serve as hubs for mini piped water networks that can more quickly connect those who live beyond the pipe. That is the next phase of Drinkwell’s evolution as we graduate from managing more than 500 Water ATMs today to transforming those ATMs into mini-water grids as the gold standard for water supply remains safely managed water available on-premise.

CWR: As climate change worsens, so does the challenge of providing access to clean water, especially in vulnerable areas lacking adequate infrastructure. How are you working to futureproof Drinkwell’s installed systems for the climate ahead?

MC: Climate resilience is an absolute risk we must manage every day at Drinkwell. Operating in Bangladesh, one of the most climate vulnerable countries in the world – our mandate of ensuring no downtime of water supply has us trialing different kinds of climate resilient infrastructure including recyclable sheds that are both (1) higher in height to be able to withstand the inevitable water logging during monsoon season while also being (2) sourced locally in the event of cut off supply chains whether they be due to pandemics or natural disasters.

Climate resilience is an absolute risk we must manage everyday…

…the existing 500+ ATMs will have 3D printed add-ons, whilst the next 500 will be climate resilient from the start

We have also needed to look into the use of solar powered assets to address the ongoing loadshedding issues in the region as the price of energy continues to skyrocket due to the Russia-Ukraine war. Futureproofing our deployments is a constant journey as we unfortunately cannot easily retrofit many innovations into existing deployments without incurring tremendous expense so we are looking more into modular add-ons via 3D printing that can upgrade our existing installed base of 500+ ATMs while also looking into how we can make the next 500 ATMs more climate resilient from the start.

While difficult it’s always nice to be recognized for these efforts as last year we were honored with the US State Department’s Award for Corporate Excellence in the category of Climate Resilience – it was an exciting milestone for us and gave us significant momentum to now partner with other actors and fellow winners to see how we can collaborate on futureproofing our ATMs.

CWR: What is a piece of advice you would like to give to governments/investors and/or entrepreneurs trying to solve these issues?

MC: Align on more progressive indicators such as month 6 customer retention rate. I feel it is too lazy and old fashioned to focus solely on the usual suspects of metrics such as number of deployments, households reached, liters sold, etc. I feel what the sector needs to rally behind is what marketing and behavior change tactics result in sustained usage of a certain water supply scheme over the long-term.

Instead of the usual metrics, using progressive indicators can shift the convo from a culture of building to ensuring utilization

The rich insights that type of tracking can yield can not only shift the conversation from a culture of building infrastructure to ensuring utilization of said infrastructure, but can also invite other much needed stakeholders who can help us in our journey to ensure safe water for all by 2030!

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