"I'm in Big Water," says Tom Pokorsky, a veteran of the technology race to supply safe and affordable water to parched and polluted parts of the world.
Pokorsky has watched the water technology industry grow up around him since long before it became a $425 billion-a-year global market. One by one, he saw aging metalworking companies in his hometown of Milwaukee reinvent themselves using the science of clean water.
"They ended up selling technology instead of metal," said Pokorsky, a 55-year-old civil engineer.
So when he launched Aquarius Technologies Inc. two years ago, he chose the Milwaukee suburb of Port Washington for its headquarters -- even though his venture capital backers in Manhattan "preferred it to be on the East Coast."
"I knew there was enough talent in southeastern Wisconsin," Pokorsky said.
His previous company, a successor to Water Pollution Control Corp., had offices in Europe and Asia as well as Houston, Charlotte, N.C., and Palm Beach, Fla., "and I had trouble getting people in every area," he said.
Aquarius Technologies uses microbes and a new model of bioreactor to purify wastewater in a manner that doesn't produce sludge, which in turn lowers the cost of cleaning water. Already, the young company is installing bioreactors in China, Indonesia, Spain and Israel, as well as California and Georgia.
Annual sales are more than $5 million, with heavy sums plowed back into research, Pokorsky said. Most of the company's staff of 25 are engineers. "The science is what we sell," he said.
Aquarius illustrates the sort of company the Milwaukee 7 economic strategy consortium wants to attract as it tries to brand southeastern Wisconsin as a water research hub. There are at least 120 water-driven companies in the seven-county region, according to the M-7's research. In addition, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee is creating a graduate level School of Freshwater Sciences.
Water sector
Milwaukee's water sector began to emerge decades ago, Pokorsky said.
"Wisconsin has been strong in the water industry as long as I've been in this business," he said.
Pokorsky graduated from Marquette University with an engineering degree in 1974 -- heady days for environmental engineers in Wisconsin. The Environmental Protection Agency had been founded in 1970. Its first pieces of landmark regulation were the 1972 Clean Water Act, which imposed wastewater treatment controls, followed by the Safe Drinking Water Act in 1974.
Pokorsky in 1979 joined Water Pollution Control Corp., a Brown Deer company that had grown out of the Worden-Allen Co., a steel fabricator that welded everything from furnaces to bridges. Its engineers began making steel water tanks, and later, sewage-treatment equipment. By the late 1960s, the company was focused entirely on wastewater processes.
Water Pollution Control Corp. grew from $5 million in sales in 1985, when Pokorsky and three other managers acquired the firm in a management buyout, to $38 million in 1999, when they sold it to ITT Corp.
Within a year, ITT asked Pokorsky to use the division as a platform to help grow ITT's water group. With acquisitions in Germany, China and the U.S., Pokorsky grew his subsidiary -- then called Sanitaire -- to $350 million in sales by 2006.
Pokorsky then left ITT with the intention of retiring. But within a month, a call from Manhattan-based L Capital Partners put him back in the water business with Aquarius Technologies.
Reinvention of firms
The morphing of Worden-Allen into Water Pollution Control and then into ITT's water group is one of several examples of the reinvention of Milwaukee companies from metal-bending to water, Pokorsky said.
Others include:
--The Chain Belt Co., founded in 1891 as a maker of cast-iron chains, figured it could increase sales if it also made equipment that required chains to operate. That included a metal grate that could be lowered over water intake portals of utilities or factories to block fish and debris. One product led to another, and by 1968, Rexnord, the successor company, spun off a division that today is called Envirex, a major part of Siemens Water Technology.
--The A.O. Smith Corp. started out making baby buggies, bicycles and the undercarriages of passenger cars. It also made glass-lined beer kegs and brewing vats. It left the automotive business over a decade ago but kept the water-heater division that had grown out of its beer-keg days. Today, it keeps a big research center at its Milwaukee headquarters and is China's second-biggest maker of water heaters.
--The Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Co. employed some 12,000 at its peak and made everything from turbines to tractors. Although it went bankrupt in the mid-1980s, its water pump business survived and today is an integral part of the water infrastructure division of ITT, a Fortune 500 corporation with a commanding position in world water markets.
"The future of the Midwest will come from taking the assets of our grandfather's economy and applying them to the opportunities of our grandchildren's economy," said Ed Morrison, an economist in Indiana at the Purdue Center for Regional Development and an adviser to the Milwaukee 7. "The opportunity will be to convert this cluster into an open network of innovating companies."
Matter of survival
As Milwaukee works to brand itself as a freshwater-technology hub, it begs the question: Why Milwaukee, and not some other Great Lakes city?
Other cities theoretically have had the same chance to develop water-related start-ups, and Pokorsky notes that Chicago has spawned its share of water companies.
Detroit and other Great Lakes cities, however, have been largely fixated on single industries, said Richard Meeusen, chief executive of Badger Meter Inc., the Brown Deer-based maker of water meters.
In Milwaukee, the transition is a matter of survival, said Meeusen, who spearheaded the creation of an M-7 Water Council.
"Over the years, the technologies we developed have naturally leaned toward water, given where we're located," Meeusen said. "I don't think you see that in other cities on the Great Lakes."
Economists see only upside to the sector, in part because developing nations such as China and India are scrambling to build safe water infrastructures. Plus, nearly 4,000 children die each day from waterborne illnesses, according to the World Water Council.
Creating access to clean water around the world ranks as one of 14 "grand challenges" identified in February by the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.
"In my opinion," Pokorsky said, "there are way too many people dying because of the lack of clean water."
To see more of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.jsonline.com. Copyright (c) 2008, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services. For reprints, email tmsreprints@permissionsgroup.com, call 800-374-7985 or 847-635-6550, send a fax to 847-635-6968, or write to The Permissions Group Inc., 1247 Milwaukee Ave., Suite 303, Glenview, IL 60025, USA.
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