Q&A With Water Industry Pioneer and IP Counsel, Gary Ganzi

Interview published in citybiz

You have more than 30 years of experience as a chemical engineer and are recognized as a pioneer in the water and wastewater industry. How have you seen technologies like electrodeionization evolve and impact the industry?

At Evoqua Water Technologies and its predecessor companies—where I spent most of my career before transitioning to private practice—my colleagues and I had the opportunity to establish the commercialization of a new water treatment process. It was a novel concept where people have been purifying water one way or another for thousands of years.

The process called “electrodeionization” or “EDI” provides purified water to meet stringent levels of quality for ultrapure water. This quality is so high that the impurities in a single drop of drinking water would be enough to contaminate and render unusable, purified water of a volume the size of an Olympic-size swimming pool.

The EDI process ultra-purifies water inexpensively and continuously with low energy consumption and in the large volumes needed for use in the microelectronic, pharmaceutical, and power industries. It does so simply and silently, at low pressures and for years at a time, by passing pretreated water through beds of specialized ion exchange resins in an electric field, without chemicals for regeneration or disposable elements.

Explaining the EDI process, moving ions in an electric field, seems simple. However, that simplicity masks the technical complexity of the electrochemistry and construction features needed for a commercially viable product. Further development in EDI is possible, and each incremental innovation, whether resulting in better quality water or lower operational costs, could lead to expansion into new applications and markets.

You’ve moved on from in-house work and taken a new role as senior counsel at the boutique intellectual property law firm, Lando & Anastasi, LLP. How do you stay updated on industry trends to best serve your clients in developing and protecting their innovations?

My interest in cutting-edge technology drove my interest in IP. There has never been a time when advances in technology are more needed…

Read the entire Q&A with Senior Counsel Gary Ganzi, at citybiz.co.