Daphne Water Solutions

Water pollution is one of today’s most urgent environmental and public-health challenges. Conventional wastewater treatment plants were never designed to remove persistent, mobile, and toxic (PMT) chemicals such as pharmaceuticals, pesticides, microplastics, and PFAS, which now accumulate in rivers, lakes, and groundwater. These contaminants threaten drinking-water security, damage biodiversity, and expose utilities and industries to rising regulatory pressures.

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Daphne Water Solutions (DWS) is tackling this problem with a patented, nature-based tertiary treatment technology built on more than a decade of scientific research at the University of Birmingham. Our discovery began with pollution-naïve Daphnia—tiny freshwater organisms revived from early 1900s lake sediments, long before modern chemical pollution existed. These ancestral strains show exceptional filtration ability and far greater tolerance to today’s contaminants than their modern counterparts.

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DWS combines these high-performance Daphnia with engineered modular vessels that treat secondary wastewater within hours, matching the retention times of existing treatment plants. The system captures pollutants into a small volume of biomass, which can be safely destroyed or converted into valuable circular products such as biochar.

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Tested in near real-world prototypes, the technology has already achieved up to 90% removal of more than 32 contaminants, including microplastics and PFAS. It is modular, retrofittable, chemical-free, and energy-free, offering a scalable new approach to protecting water quality and ecosystem health.