NSF Engines: Great Lakes Water Innovation Engine

This NSF Engines award to the Great Lakes Water Innovation Engine will advance our nation’s capacity for innovations in the circular water economy through research, translation, and workforce activities centered around the concept of waste-to-wealth-and-health. The NSF Engine will discover, develop, and deploy innovative viable technologies that (1) attract water-intensive manufacturers to the Great Lakes region while maintaining environmental health; (2) recover valuable resources (like energy, critical minerals and nutrients) from wastewater streams and convert them to wealth; and 3) create an innovation ecosystem to foster employment, ownership, and wealth-building opportunities for people and communities, especially those most in need of economic opportunity.

The NSF Engine has an initial region of service that spans three states – Illinois, Ohio and Wisconsin – with several anchor points including Chicago, Cleveland, and Milwaukee as priority areas of impact for the first two years. The NSF Engine will be led by Current Innovation NFP, a U.S.-based non-profit. The NSF Engine builds a strong ecosystem including core partners with representation from the manufacturing and energy sectors, national labs and universities (including public and private four-year institutions and two-year institutions), economic and workforce development organizations, entrepreneurship support organizations, non-profits, philanthropies and investment firms that are essential to the NSF Engine’s success.

This diverse coalition of partners will be central to R&D, translation, and workforce development efforts.

The vision of the NSF Engine is to transform “waste to wealth and health” in the context of water quality. Specifically, this means recovering energy, nutrients, freshwater, and critical minerals from water and wastewater for economic value and removing emerging contaminants such as PFAS— widely used chemicals that break down very slowly over time and have been linked to harmful health effects in human and animals— from water to protect human health.

The NSF Engine has three core functional areas: (1) Use-Inspired Research and Development (R&D); (2) Translations and Partnerships (Translation); and (3) Inclusive Ecosystems (Ecosystems), each of which inherently addresses one or more key barriers that must be overcome to realize the vision.

The Great Lakes Water Innovation Engine’s R&D and translation efforts will focus on the following challenges: Challenge 1 will lead to novel material platforms for efficient and selective separation of valuable resources and contaminants of emerging concern (e.g., PFAS) from wastewater and associated waste streams; Challenge 2 will result in emerging process technologies to advance recovery of energy and critical minerals from various water sources; and Challenge 3 will deliver sensors and sensor networks for real-time sensing, monitoring, and detection to support sustainable and economically viable processes needed in the first two challenges. Built on the NSF Engine’s strong and evolving partnerships across academia, government, and end users in industry and utilities, this NSF Engine aims to develop intelligent water resource recovery systems testbeds at multiple scales (bench, pilot, and full) to demonstrate, integrate, and deploy these novel technologies to support sustainable water-intensive industry that is growing in this region.

The NSF Engine also aims to develop domestic supply chains for materials essential to growing industries like battery production and electrification.

Recognizing the relatively undefined and immature nature of the markets for water resource recovery and circular water economy technologies, the NSF Engine centers the workforce development efforts around training and education programs aimed at preparing future innovators, workers, and entrepreneurs in the emerging space of a circular water economy. The NSF Engine will leverage the Inclusive Ecosystem Work Group, which engages more than a dozen regional foundations, family offices, community organizations and nonprofits with workforce development and entrepreneurship investment priorities, as a governing body to create and implement a workforce development and STEM education strategy that aligns with the NSF Engine’s technical goals.

Specific activities include developing new K-12 curriculum, pre-apprenticeships, apprenticeships, job/skills training programs, higher education curriculum, or other needs as the NSF Engine’s initial and continuous gap analysis concludes.

This NSF Engine brings together a strong coalition of partners and core functions that are in excellent alignment with regional assets and priorities. The leadership team has identified critical R&D topic areas and expertise to drive circular water innovations to support sustainable water-intensive manufacturing industry in the region. The innovation ecosystem built through this NSF Engine cultivates sustainable talent development and collective discoveries across critical partners, which creates connected pathways that translate innovation to impact in the circular water economy.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.