It was during his PhD on membrane technology and desalination, that Dr Seb Leaper began to develop a way to challenge an emerging global water crisis.

He shared his idea with a colleague, Dr Ahmed Abdelkarim, and together they founded Watercycle Technologies – a company that could build filtration processes which extracted impurities from wastewater.

Today, Watercycle works across three main sectors: water treatment, battery recycling and desalination. They analyse the composition of different streams of solid and liquid wastes, determine what’s viable to remove, and ensure that their approach will at the very least offset the cost of treating the water.

For example, with every litre of freshwater produced through current desalination processes, around two litres of 'waste' brine is generated. That two litres of brine will have cost roughly $1 to produce, but the team estimate it has about $20 worth of potential value. In this scenario, they aim to unlock value from the brine and stop it from going back into the sea where it will damage the ecosystem.

And that's not the only positive impact they're having on the environment. Much of their current focus is on lithium extraction from sub-surface waters, such as those found in the southwest of the UK. With lithium's essential role in battery technologies for electronic devices and vehicles, the team know that developing a way to extract it from water cost-effectively, will prove far more sustainable than traditional lithium mining.

Looking to the future, Drs Leaper and Abdelkarim are aiming to have several of their modular machines treating industrial wastewater across the world, and hope to build a large-scale desalination plant. Both are driven by their ambition to bring more freshwater to the world. As Dr Leaper notes, "That's the mission we're on as a business"