Seeds&Chips, held between 7 and 10 May in Milan is the most important food innovation summit in the World. The organisation has put out a worldwide appeal in 2018 to encourage companies to present their best innovations for sustainable water management. The Dutch company Hydraloop, which has one of its divisions located at WaterCampus Leeuwarden, has been chosen from more than a hundred entrants as one of the thirty finalists. The company develops installations that can purify water from showers, baths and washing machines into usable water.
Seeds&Chips is by no means an arbitrary location to present this kind of innovation. Seeds&Chips is very important. Hundreds of CEOs of multinationals visit the event, and the speakers are the calibre of Barrack Obama (2017) and the former US Secretary of State John Kerry (this year). The winner of the Water First! Contest will not only garner a lot of publicity and prestige but will also take away the first prize of €10 000. The prize, in honour of the diplomat Giorgio Giacomelli, who called for the better husbanding of water resources and who passed away in 2017, will be awarded on May 10 in Milan.
The problem of the shortage of clean water, in the light of an increasing world population, will not have escaped anyone’s attention. At the present time, almost 2 billion people suffer from thirst and the World Bank anticipates that this figure will be doubled by 2050. This is why numerous organisations of note, such as the United Nations, are lending their weight to the Water First! appeal.
For Hydraloop, reaching the final is a confirmation of the ongoing positive flow that the company is experiencing. For example, the company recently won the ‘Innovation Award’ at the International Water Summit in Abu Dhabi.
