Making clean and green drinking water accessible: An interview with Ulf Stenerhag, Founder, Wayout

June 12, 2024

Company name: Wayout

Solution: Plug and play drinking water systems delivering high quality drinking water with a minimal environmental footprint.

Year founded: 2018

Location: Stockholm, Sweden

With the UN estimating that two billion people can’t access safe drinking water, it's clear that clean water is a global issue. As for the environmental impact, up to 12.7 million metric tons of single-use plastic – that’s the equivalent weight of over 2 million elephants – end up in rivers and oceans each year, where it never fully degrades… 

Wayout has created a water purification system that supports human health and ensures maximum environmental protection. Its water systems can convert any source water – yes, even salt water – into high quality drinking water. The result? Removing the need for single-use plastic water bottles and making safe drinking water accessible. 

We interviewed Ulf Stenerhag, Wayout’s Founder and Chairman, to find out how his team plans to revolutionize the way we produce and access perfect water.

What problem is Wayout solving?

At Wayout, we solve two problems at once: the issue of a lack of clean drinking water and the large global carbon footprint caused by the plastics industry. Most ‘clean’ drinking water is bottled. But this water isn’t truly clean, because it is polluted by microplastics and PFAS, more commonly known as ‘forever chemicals’. Furthermore, this water is packaged in single-use plastic, which has devastating effects on the environment.

We can take water from any source, from salt water to industrial wastewater, and make it cleaner than most drinking water sources. This opens up possibilities to offer high-quality drinking water to communities anywhere where there is a water source. All without requiring long distance transportation, which gives the water industry a large carbon footprint. And eliminating the need for single-use plastics.

What is Wayout’s emissions reduction potential?

Each Wayout system can replace over 10 million bottles annually, saving 1 500 tons of CO2 compared to typical water production systems.

These calculations, which form part of the life cycle analysis we conducted with Climentum Capital, are based on a scenario of each system providing clean drinking water for 10 000 people. Depending on the size of the community, the emissions savings could be even higher in practice. 

The emissions reduction potential increases even further, when taking into account that our water production systems eliminate the need for long distance transportation between water source and end customer. 

How do you plan to transform the water industry?

Large plastic bottle manufacturers are our biggest customer segment. These are the businesses most in need of a solution to transition to sustainable production, distribution and dispensing in the face of our planet’s intensifying climate emergency and government restrictions on single-use plastics. We help these industries transition to a sustainable business model.

Many of these businesses are trapped in a business model that relies on unsustainable technology and processes. Our water systems offer them a way out: We enable them to stay within their industry and evolve to suit the demands of the future.

What are the social benefits of your solution?

An important customer segment is vulnerable communities in desperate need of safe drinking water, such as people living in refugee camps or slums. By providing just one Wayout water system to a vulnerable community, we can supply 20,000 liters of clean drinking water per day.

It is not just those in the most dire living conditions who can benefit from our water purification systems - across the world, the average person consumes the equivalent of a credit card’s worth of microplastic every month, much of it from single-use water bottles. The long-term effects of this are yet to be seen, but the scientific consensus is that it has a worrying health impact. PFAS are increasingly being recognised as a serious public health problem. They have been identified at 17,000 sites of source water in Europe alone, some of them entering tap water, and are linked to a range of health problems including several types of cancer. Our ability to produce safe drinking water can prevent deaths across the world. 

What challenges do you face on your journey to scale?

As a startup, financing is always an obstacle, but we have recently obtained a debt financing arrangement, which has given us the rocket fuel we need for scaling. Now we are focusing on scaling our operations. We have already forged robust industrial partnerships around the world to source our equipment, with Siemens providing our IoT platform and Alfa Laval managing the industrial production of our microfactory.

Proving our solution to the market is another challenge. Regulatory changes are in the pipeline to force the transition from single-use plastics, but in the meantime we expect push back and a market hesitant to transform. We need to continue communicating the benefits of our Wayout systems - turning any source water into perfect drinking water with a minimal eco-footprint - to these manufacturers.

How did you come into contact with Climentum Capital?

We first caught Malin’s eye after receiving an entrepreneurial award at the Techarenan awards ceremony in Gotland, Sweden. 

Climentum Capital’s main contribution has been funding and raising awareness of Wayout in the investment space. They are also integral in improving our communications. They have opened my eyes to how unique the sustainability and health benefits of the water we produce are and push our team to share the advantages of the high quality water we produce with the world.

What’s next for Wayout?

We’re in a serious scale up phase right now. We are signing contracts, delivering systems and industrializing - all steps toward getting our technology out in the market.

Our long-term aim is to be a paradigm shifter in the way clean drinking water is produced across the planet. By enabling cleaner and safer drinking water production, we plan to improve water quality for people around the world and become the market leader of clean water production.