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DAILY NEWS 22nd January 2015
IWS 2015 driving innovation for another year COMING TO a close today, the International Water Summit (IWS) has successfully brought together world leaders, industry experts, and business innovators in showcasing world-class water and wastewater technologies and promoting water sustainability in arid regions. Shining a light on innovative and sustainable technologies has been at the forefront of the summit over the last four days, particularly with the addition of Innovate@IWS this year. The new initiative, co-organised by Isle Utilities, was launched at IWS 2015 to offer clean technology developers an opportunity in which to pitch their solutions to an expert judging panel as well as a platform to connect with potential investors and end users. Christina de Poitiers, senior environmental consultant at Isle Utilities, said, “This has created a fantastic opportunity both for our utilities to understand how the municipal market works here in the Middle East, but also to give our emerging technologies to opportunity to attend an event they would otherwise may not be able to.” Organised into three categories, with the judging process spread across the first three days of the show, winners of the 2015 Innovate@IWS are Trevi Systems (Municipal Water) with its Forward
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Two of the winners at Innovate@IWS – Pascal Le Melinaire, founder of BGH (middle) and Pál Kiss, managing director of Thermowatt Ltd. (second from right) – with panel members Dr. Piers Clark (second from left) and Dr. Bruce Ferguson (far right), and IWS international business development director Andrew Walker (far left)
Osmosis System; BGH (Industrial Water) with its ZLD technology; and Thermowatt (Water for RealEstate) and its solution for utilising communal wastewater for cooling large buildings. “It's been competitive and there have been very different technologies presented to the panel so it's been challenging for the judging panel to make a decision,” de Poitiers added. As part of the Abu Dhabi Sustainability Week (ADSW), which is expected to attract more than 32,000 attendees in total, IWS ran for an extra day this year as did its co-located exhibitions: the World Future Energy Summit (WFES) and EcoWASTE. Leon Awerbuch, director and past president of the International Desalination Association (IDA), dean of the IDA Desalination Academy, and president of Leading Edge Technologies, commented, “IWS is an important event to all of us who are involved in the water-energy nexus.” He added, “Gatherings like IWS provide an opportunity to show the reality of desalination power and businesses − a reality which proves that desalination is environmentally-friendly, is designed to have minimum impact on the environment and, more importantly, has significant improvements in energy costs.”
www.internationalwatersummit.com
22nd January 2015
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INTERNATIONAL WATER SUMMIT
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