The Freshwater Man
Thomas Pfeiffer develops affordable desalinisation and irrigation systems
It started with a chance discovery in his inbox. Thomas Pfeiffer said to his business partner: “That sounds like a good idea. Let’s do it and see what happens.” The tender from Adlershof popped up on Pfeiffer’s screen in September last year. Just one month later, it was a done deal: Pfeiffer’s young company “Init” – which stands for “Intelligent Nano Irrigation Technologies” – was among the five winners of a competition for taking part in a workshop for business founders (the “Gründerwerkstatt” programme).
Since November, three young male and female employees from Chile and India have been working on efficient and affordable irrigation solutions in dry coastal areas at Adlershof’s new co-working space “Im.Puls” (Rudower Chaussee 17). Together with the two German founders, they form what Pfeiffer calls a “multicultural, multilingual, multicontinental team.” His business idea is based on two findings: in arid regions all over the world, the salt content of groundwater is increasing. Secondly, conventional irrigation methods bear risks and side effects. Flooding leaches the soil and precipitates the danger of salination. Sprinkling, on the other hand, produces too little for water for all the plants.
Pfeiffer and his partner Volker Korrmann want to help using an eight-litre plastic bottle, which will be produced by local manufacturers and initially put on the market using drinking water. Once the original content is used up, farmers can fill the bottle with oversalinated water. The heat on the fields vaporises the liquid, which condenses on the side of the bottle and penetrates the surface soil through an intricate network of pipes, keeping the ground evenly moist. “This is the most economical approach for reducing water demand and optimally supporting plants,” says Pfeiffer.
Originally from Darmstadt, the 52-year-old has seen the effects of (water) scarcity in many parts of the world. During the late eighties, while earning an engineering degree in his hometown, he volunteered for the civil protection agency Technisches Hilfswerk (THW). Development aid was an important subject all his life, including stints as the head of 70 THW employees, who constructed hundreds of houses in Kosovo after 1999, as the East Asia adviser of an EU agency for development policy in Brussels and as a head of a Red Cross delegation in Sudan.
He moved to Berlin with his family in 2011, where he started a career as a freelance consultant for renewable energies and a lecturer for water power: “What interests me especially is how to convey knowledge to people and how technology is accepted.” He has been involved in the irrigation and desalination project since the beginning of 2017. The idea is scheduled to be market ready this year. First interested customers have been found in Tunisia: “They will sell like hot cakes.”
By Winfried Dolderer for Adlershof Journal
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