Launching clean water innovator Smart Ops

Smart Ops, a UK & Irish environmental tech company that uses ‘synthetic oysters’ to treat and rejuvenate polluted water, has appointed Diffusion to deliver a global strategic communication campaign as it exits stealth and accelerates its mission to clean up some of the world’s most polluted rivers and lakes, and boost the recovery and treatment of waste water from municipal and industrial sources.

Diffusion is supporting the launch of the technology internationally,  starting in India, where it is now being deployed in over ten projects, treating millions of litres of water.

Founded by Irish inventor and entrepreneur Dr Liam Ryan, along with UK businessmen Minesh Patel and Priyesh Patel MBE, Smart Ops’ technology is inspired by nature, using advances in material science, biotechnology, and engineering to achieve in hours what can take legacy water treatment technology or natural process months or even years.

The Smart Ops research team has spent the past two years perfecting SABRE Spheres (short for stabilised aerobic or anaerobic bioengineered reaction environment), developed from seaweed waste and containing targeted natural bacteria and enzymes, which mimic the ability of oysters to naturally filter and breakdown substrates. This technology is at the heart of the Smart Ops SCR System, which provides active continuous filtration that massively reduces the cost, infrastructure, and energy requirements of delivering clean, usable water in domestic, commercial and broader environmental settings.

Currently in the first wave of its commercial deployment, the Smart Ops system is now being deployed in over ten projects across India purifying and cleaning millions of litres of water and with more than hundreds of millions of litres of daily water treatment in the pipeline over the coming months.

Diffusion’s campaign will be raising awareness of the firms technology and its unique approach to one of the most pressing environmental challenges the world faces today.

Smart Ops commented: “We have spent a long time focusing on getting our technology right, proving our solution and making sure we can deliver. Now we’re ready to go public; but bringing new technology and approaches to a problem of this scale means that we need to tell our story in the right way to bring people along with us. Diffusion understood the broad range of global stakeholders we need to work with, and the need for a joined-up, strategic approach to communications.”

Peter Jackson, Head of Clean and Climate Technology at Diffusion added, “It’s hard to think of a better brief than someone coming to you and saying ‘we’ve invented something that can fix water pollution – can you help us get the word out please?’ Smart Ops is tackling complex global issues that can often seem overwhelming, and their technology is very different to the centralised approach to water treatment that has been the norm for decades. Promoting their vision for water treatment and ensuring their innovative biotechnology is understood and adopted by the market, is exactly the type of complex communication challenge that Diffusion’s Clean & Climate Technology team relishes, where we can help to drive real impact.”