On the outskirts of Delft, a young company is working on a quiet revolution in water purification. CIWI — short for Chemical Innovation for Water Industries — was founded in 2023 by engineer Jasper Schakel and Erik Kraaijeveld, with roots at TU Delft. Their mission: helping industry treat water without the massive amounts of chemicals currently required. And they have ambitions to expand into Italy.
“Normally, factories, drinking water companies and wastewater plants use so-called metal salts, such as ferric chloride, to clean water,” Jasper Schakel explained. “These cause particles to clump together so they can be filtered out. These chemicals have to be produced, transported and stored — all steps that consume energy, money and produce CO₂. We have developed a new method: instead of producing these metal chemicals elsewhere and shipping them, the active substances are created on-site using electricity and ordinary materials like steel and salt. This happens through an electrochemical process, in which metals are converted into metal hydroxides that then treat the water.”
The result is that factories or drinking water companies can install compact electrochemical units alongside their existing treatment systems, significantly reducing transport movements and dependency, Schakel said.
CIWI has grown quickly over the past year. “Less than two years ago, my business partner and I literally started in his backyard, and now we have seven people working in the YES! building [a facility for promising startups on the edge of Delft].”
What gave growth a significant boost, he explained, is a joint pilot with eight of the 21 Dutch regional water authorities. Schakel now hopes to use the Ecomondo fair as a springboard into Italy. “Water scarcity is a global issue, and Italy also has plenty of industry where water is critical. Think of the leather industry. We want to see if we can connect with end users or Italian partners who would like to use our units to treat water in a cleaner way.”
This article is part of ‘Tapping into Italy: Dutch watertech making waves’, a series of short stories featuring several Dutch water technology companies in the Watertech2Italy cluster. Through the Partners for International Business (PIB) programme, and supported by Water Alliance and the Netherlands Consulate in Milan, these companies are working to establish a foothold in the Italian market.
