Water tech's best and worst of the decade

摘要

This month we list the biggest water technology breakthroughs and the worst busts of the past decade. The ranking is quite subjective, based on both the overall impact on the market and a view of the money gained or lost. The winners are all quite self-explanatory. The losers are more of a mixed bag. Some did fail because they didn't live up to their billing (e.g. chemical crystallisation and pressure-retarded osmosis). Most, however, were good technologies which failed because there was a mismatch between the amount of money they needed in order to prove commercial viability and the amount of time it took to reach that stage. So much credibility was burned along the way that the technologies became unfundable.