Cleveland Water Alliance offering $75,000 for lead pipe grants

Cleveland Water works on underground lines in 2010.

The Cleveland Water Alliance is offering seed capital grants for the development of technologies that lead to the detection, without excavation, of lead and other hazardous materials in underground municipal drinking-water supply lines.

The Cleveland Water Alliance's (CWA) Open Innovation Challenge released a Request for Technology Concepts (RFTC) in hopes of solving the significant health risk from dangerous metals, including lead, copper or galvanized steel in service lines — like those in Cleveland that carry water from utility water mains to commercial and residential properties.

"The challenge in detecting lead pipes without digging doesn't exist and it is what keeps utilities up at night. We think there is about a $1 billion market for this solution as federal standards are requiring all public utilities to map out and develop a plan for hazardous line replacement," said Bryan Stubbs, CWA president and executive director.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is requiring public utilities to map service line materials and provide that inventory by the end of 2024. For many older utilities, historical records are incomplete or do not exist, and the only way to accurately verify the service line material type requires costly excavation and visual inspection.

The $75,000 in available grants, anticipated to range between $3,000 and $25,000 per grantee, marks the second phase of a program utilizing a CWA-partnered test facility, located in Parma, set up to test underground pipe detection, Stubbs said. Last year, three technologies were tested without an overall solution.

The focus of the program is to find a process that can identify service lines comprised of lead, copper and galvanized steel, and differentiate between safe and hazardous materials, with a goal of fostering the development of a new non-invasive technology with at least 90% accuracy, Stubbs said.

Finding a solution to the problem would not only improve the public health of Cleveland residents but could provide an opportunity for a new Cleveland-based startup, he added.

"We all want cleaner water," Stubbs said. "If we find that solution here in Cleveland, we could help address the problem, seed and grow that technology in Cleveland, and use the CWA Investment Fund to invest in commercialization of the technology."

The CWA Investment Fund created earlier this year is raising up to $5 million to fund technology companies addressing water challenges in the industrial, consumer, public utility and municipal sectors over the next four to six years.

The goal is to bring in both new tech and test out "adjacent technology from the mining and acoustics sectors," Stubbs said.

"We are interested in all different approaches and want to just see what works."