Companies save water with solutions that even use artificial intelligence that “listens for leaks.”

Initiatives reduce waste, invest in purification systems, and serve vulnerable populations from the Amazon to the semi-arid region.

Almost 40% of treated water in Brazil is lost before reaching homes, due to problems such as leaks and faulty water meters, according to a study by Instituto Trata Brasil. These alarming figures are driving the work of Stattus4, a Brazilian startup that uses artificial intelligence and sensors to detect problems in distribution networks.

The company develops two main technologies: a mobile system that analyzes the noise from water meters and sensors that measure pressure variations to identify leaks. “The sensors ‘listen’ to the vibration of the pipe to assess whether there is an anomaly. When a leak occurs, the water causes a different vibration in the pipe, allowing us to classify the potential leak,” explains Marília Lara, CEO of Stattus4, founded in São Paulo in 2015.

“Water is finite, and efficient management is extremely important to bring resilience to cities. If we could save just 20% of the water lost, we would have enough to supply the 35 million Brazilians who currently do not have access to drinking water,” adds Lara.

Thanks to partnerships with sanitation companies such as Sanepar in Paraná and Copasa in Minas Gerais, Stattus4 is now present in 250 Brazilian cities, having audited 6 million water meters and saved more than 250 million liters of water.
Concern for avoiding waste is also present in the industrial sector. A notable example is the Nanobolhas project, developed by Sistema Coca-Cola Brazil in partnership with Chilean startup Kran Nanobubbles, which began in 2023 in two factories in Chile and has now expanded to Brazil in plants in the northeast of the country.

“This technology reduces water consumption in industrial processes, such as equipment washing and returnable bottle cleaning, by between 17% and 40%. In the pilot projects, a 29% reduction in energy consumption was also observed,” says Catalina Pfenniger, director of strategy at Kran Nanobubbles.

In addition to efficient water use, other initiatives focus on developing innovative alternatives for water treatment. One notable example is the global Xprize Water Scarcity competition, which for five years has been promoting the creation of seawater desalination systems with a prize of $119 million. These types of solutions seek to address the lack of access to drinking water, a problem that currently affects 2 billion people—about 26% of the world’s population—and could reach 2.4 billion by 2050, according to UNESCO data.