Purer waters

A sense of kaitiakitanga is driving a Christchurch technology entrepreneur to help clean up waterways. 

- CAITLIN SYKES

Growing up in Canterbury, Ngārie Scartozzi (Ngāti Porou) recalls swimming in rivers and visiting mahinga kai (food resource spots) to eel and fish as part of her childhood. When she returned to settle in the region after years in Australia, however, she noticed things had changed.

"Some of the places where you could swim before now have signs saying 'polluted water, do not swim"," she says. "I went to take my kids to places to swim and we couldn't because these signs were up. That was a real eye-opener for me when I got back, and I was like, 'What? What happened?"

Although the experience was sad and surprising, it has also served as fuel for the Christchurch-based entrepreneur, who's now on a mission to restore the health of our waterways. Scartozzi is the founder and chief scientific officer of eClean Envirotech, which is developing technology to remove contaminants from waterways such as rivers, ponds and streams.

The company, which recently won the Early Stage category of the 2023 Fieldays Innovation Awards, is developing "engineered microbiome" technology. It involves feeding contaminated water into a system housing microbes that eat or break up the contaminants, such as nitrates, phosphates, heavy metals and E coli, and funnelling cleaned water out the other end. The "engineered" nature of the technology, Scartozzi explains, means it's adaptable for different environments. Each system can be customised with its own unique "soup" of microbes to strip out the contaminants in the particular waterway where it is installed.

"We call it an engineered microbiome, because we put in different bacteria to do different things, so we actually control all the different parameters. We're controlling everything in the system and we're applying that to specific bodies of environmental water."