Goal 6: Clean Water and Sanitation

Technology · Agriculture

Ecorobotix ARA: the Swiss sprayer that looks at every plant before it sprays

Most crop sprayers treat a field like a single surface. ARA, built by Ecorobotix in the Swiss town of Yverdon-les-Bains, photographs the ground as it moves, decides in a fraction of a second which plants are crop and which are weeds, and fires a dose onto a square about 6 centimetres wide. Five years after launch, 1,000 machines are working in Europe, the Americas and Australia, and the company is now assembling them in Kansas.

6 min read

Technology · Agriculture

John Deere See & Spray: cameras that let a giant sprayer aim at single weeds

The world's best-known farm machinery brand taught its big sprayers to spot a weed at 15 miles an hour and fire only the nozzle above it. In 2025 farmers used See & Spray on more than five million acres and cut non-residual herbicide by nearly half. For model year 2027 Deere has merged its three versions into one, added wheat, barley, canola and sugar beet, and says factory orders are nearly doubling.

6 min read

Technology · Ocean

Planys Technologies Beluga: the IIT Madras robot that inspects dams and ships without draining them

Most of the infrastructure that holds back water, moors ships or carries oil sits below the surface, where it is hard and dangerous to inspect.

5 min read

Technology · Space

constellr SkyBee: the European thermal satellite that spots crop water stress before leaves wilt

A thirsty plant closes its pores to save water, stops cooling itself, and warms up by a degree or two long before it looks unwell.

6 min read

Technology · Space

Pixxel Firefly: India's hyperspectral satellites that read the chemistry of crops, soil and water from orbit

An ordinary satellite camera sees a field in three colours, or perhaps a dozen. A hyperspectral camera sees it in more than a hundred.

6 min read

Technology · Water

Boreal Light WaterKiosk: the Berlin-built solar desalination container that sells safe water for cents

Along Kenya's coast and in its dry north, the only groundwater is often salty, and bottled water is far beyond many family budgets.

5 min read

Technology · Water

Desolenator: the Dutch solar-thermal desalination unit that turns seawater into pure water without membranes or toxic brine

Most of the world's desalinated water is made by forcing seawater through membranes with fossil-fuelled pumps, then dumping concentrated brine back into the sea.

5 min read

Technology · Water

Hydraloop H600: the Dutch home appliance that recycles shower water for toilets, laundry and gardens

Most homes use drinking-quality water to flush toilets, then pour lightly used shower water straight down the drain.

5 min read

Technology · Water

LifeStraw Community: the power-free purifier giving whole classrooms safe water in Kenya

In many rural schools, children drink water from a rain tank, a river or a shared borehole, and diarrhoeal illness keeps them out of class.

6 min read

Technology · Water

Uravu Labs: the Bengaluru system that pulls drinking water out of the air with salt and waste heat

Bengaluru, India's tech capital, now depends heavily on borewells and private tankers, and in dry years both run short.

6 min read

Materials science · Reusable products

Dopper Original: the Dutch refillable bottle built to replace single-use plastic water bottles

Europe sells billions of bottles of water each year, most in single-use plastic, even where tap water is safe to drink.

5 min read

Materials science · Sustainable textiles

Colorifix: the British biotech that brews textile dyes with bacteria instead of petrochemicals

Dyeing fabric is one of the dirtiest steps in making clothes, using large amounts of water, energy and chemicals that often end up in rivers.

5 min read

Materials science · Sustainable textiles

Lenzing REFIBRA: Austria's wood-based fibres that put old cotton back into new clothes

Every year the clothing industry throws away huge amounts of cotton scraps and worn-out garments, while cutting down trees to make new fibre.

6 min read

Materials science · Sustainable textiles

SPINNOVA fibre: the Finnish textile fibre spun from wood pulp without dissolving it

Most wood-based textile fibres, such as viscose and lyocell, are made by dissolving cellulose in chemicals and then regenerating it.

6 min read

Green architecture · Micro climate systems

Optigrün Retention Roof Flow Control: a green roof that stores rain to cool the city

A normal green roof dries out in a heatwave, just when the city needs its cooling most. Optigrün's retention roof keeps a reservoir of rainwater under the plants.

5 min read

Green architecture · Sustainable site planning

ACC Permecrete: ready-mix concrete with holes, for Indian car parks that drink the monsoon

Indian cities flood in the monsoon and run dry by summer, often in the same neighbourhood. Much of the rain that could refill the ground hits concrete and runs off into drains.

5 min read

Green architecture · Sustainable site planning

GreenBlue Urban RootSpace: room for street tree roots under the pavement

Most city street trees are planted in a pit not much bigger than a dustbin, surrounded by compacted ground. They stay small, lift the paving and die young.

5 min read

Green architecture · Sustainable site planning

Hydrorock: stone wool blocks that hide a sponge under the garden

A wet lawn, a flooded driveway, a downpipe that overloads the sewer: Hydrorock's answer is a block of spun stone that drinks rainwater in minutes and hands it back to the soil over hours.

5 min read

Green architecture · Sustainable site planning

PURUS ECORASTER: a car park that lets the rain through, made from yellow-bag plastic

Every new car park seals another patch of soil under asphalt. ECORASTER grids give cars a firm surface while leaving the ground open to rain, grass and gravel.

5 min read

Green architecture · Sustainable site planning

Wavin Q-Bic Plus Low Carbon: an underground rain store made from recycled plastic

When a cloudburst hits a new housing estate, every roof, road and car park sends water into the sewer at once. Wavin's Q-Bic Plus crates build a hidden tank under the site that catches the peak and lets it go slowly or soak away.

5 min read

Green architecture · Urban eco innovation

GRAF Platin: the flat rainwater tank that fits under a German garden

Flushing a toilet or watering a garden with drinking water makes little sense in a warming Europe, but storing rain usually means a huge buried cylinder and a deep hole. GRAF's Platin tank is flat instead.

5 min read

Eco-restoration · CleanTech

Biomatrix Water: the Scottish floating islands that bring wetlands back to hard-edged rivers and docks

City rivers, canals and docks are often walled in stone and steel, with no shallow edges where plants can root, birds can nest or fish can shelter. The water is busy, but biologically almost empty.

6 min read

Eco-restoration · CleanTech

Groasis Waterboxx: the Dutch plant cocoon that helps young trees survive on dry, degraded land

Planting trees is easy. Keeping them alive through their first dry summers is the hard part, and on eroded, rocky or arid land many saplings die before their roots reach moisture.

6 min read

Eco-restoration · CleanTechAbout ONGC TERI Biotech

Oilzapper: the Indian bacterial cocktail that eats oil spills and turns sludge pits back into land

Oil spills on land and the black sludge left at the bottom of refinery tanks are some of the most stubborn pollution in the energy industry, usually dumped in lined pits that fill up and leak.

6 min read

Eco-restoration · CleanTech

The Great Bubble Barrier: a curtain of air that lifts plastic out of rivers before it reaches the sea

Most plastic in the sea starts on land and travels there by river. Booms and nets across rivers can catch some of it, but they block boats and fish, and they miss plastic drifting below the surface.

5 min read

Eco-restoration · Climate resilience software

7Analytics FloodCube: Norwegian building-by-building flood models that warn of cloudbursts 72 hours ahead

Most flood maps show rivers bursting their banks. But in cities, much of the damage now comes from sudden cloudbursts that overwhelm drains and send water down streets and into basements, often far from any river.

6 min read

Eco-restoration · Climate resilience software

AIResQ Rain2Resilience: physics-guided AI and Made-in-India sensors that warn Gurugram which streets will flood

Every monsoon, roads in Indian cities vanish under water, trains stall and commutes stretch into hours. Usually the response starts only after the rain: pumping, rerouting and cleaning up.

6 min read

Eco-restoration · Robotics

Clearbot: India's fleet of AI-guided electric boats that clear plastic and water hyacinth

Small electric workboats, born in a Hong Kong university lab and now built and run from Bengaluru, that pull plastic, temple offerings and invasive weed out of India's ports, rivers and lakes.

6 min read

Eco-restoration · Robotics

RanMarine WasteShark+: a Rotterdam-built electric drone that skims litter off harbours

A battery-powered aquatic drone, about the size of a small car bonnet, that swims into dock corners and canal edges to scoop up bottles, bags and weed before they drift out to sea.

6 min read

Advanced technology · Extreme environment engineering

Genrobotics Bandicoot: the Kerala robot that goes into toxic sewers so people don't have to

Every year, sanitation workers in India die inside sewers and septic tanks, overcome by toxic gas or drowned in sludge. A group of young engineers from Kerala built Bandicoot, a robot that climbs down a manhole and does the cleaning while the operator stays at the surface. It now works in more than 180 towns and cities across 23 states.

6 min read

Advanced technology · NanoTech

Elmarco Nanospider: the Czech machine that spins nanofibres by the square kilometre for cleaner air and water

Nanofibres, hundreds of times thinner than a human hair, make excellent filters, battery separators and wound dressings. The problem has always been making enough of them. In Liberec, in the north of the Czech Republic, Elmarco turned a university invention into the first industrial machines that spin nanofibres without needles, in webs up to two metres wide. In 2026 its team was a finalist for the European Inventor Award.

5 min read

Advanced technology · NanoTech

NX Filtration: the Dutch nano-membranes that pull PFAS and parasites out of drinking water without chemicals

"Forever chemicals" are turning up in rivers and lakes across Europe, and old treatment plants struggle to remove them. A company in Hengelo makes hollow fibres with nanometre-scale pores that hold back PFAS, pesticides and pathogens while letting useful minerals through. In 2026 it won its biggest order yet: the membranes for what it says will be the world's largest plant of its kind, in Östersund, Sweden.

6 min read

Advanced technology · NanoTech

TriNANO: an Indian nano-coating that helps solar panels make more power with less cleaning water

India is building solar farms at record pace, often in dry, dusty places where panels must be washed again and again. TriNANO Technologies, a start-up from Navi Mumbai incubated at IIT Bombay, applies a transparent coating 0.4 microns thick to the glass of new or old panels. It says the coating raises output by about 4% and cuts cleaning water by 55%.

5 min read

Tagged with Goal 6