Portrait of Mino Negrin, manager of NUF and “PRECIOUS WATER!” challenge laureate
Could you introduce yourself briefly?
My name is Mino Negrin and I was born in Italy. I later emigrated to Israel at the age of 19. After staying years in a kibbutz, I attended Technion (Israel Institute of Technology) at Haifa, where I graduated in Industrial Engineering and Management. After, I created with my father in the early 90s a company — Nirosoft ltd. — which was specialized in the design, production, installation, and commissioning of water and wastewater treatment plants of medium-medium/big size, with the main emphasis in the for-the-time highly innovative membrane separation processes (Ultrafiltration, Nanofiltration, and Reverse Osmosis). The company flourished and in the late 2000s, we had installations and projects worldwide, a team of almost 100 people — and mainly a very intimate know-how of cutting edge membrane separation technology solutions in water treatment. In 2010 I sold all my shares of the company to a group which was owned by Mr. Ronald Lauder. In 2010 I joined the studies of Philosophy and Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I received the BA in 2015.
Why are you working in the water sector? What is your motivation?
The water sector is one of the most challenging sectors in the last decade and seems to be of crucial importance in the next ones. Finding proper, clean, effective and affordable solutions to one of the most serious dangers of our environment (water pollution) is a huge challenge. My motivation to work in this field is being between the main innovators in the search — and eventually implementation — of those solutions.
Can you present your project? What is its environmental impact? What is your goal?
Around 2012 I was introduced to Prof. Yoram Lass — Professor Emeritus at the Faculty of Medicine at the University of Tel Aviv — which presented me the patent on the reuse of discarded artificial kidneys as a water purifier. After analyzing the patent and its innovative (and quite revolutionary) solution, I decided to purchase it from the University and create NUFiltration Ltd. (also under the registered trademark “NUF”), to develop and transform this ingenious and innovative idea into an industrial project. After a three years period of development of the product and marketing researches we launched the commercial activity of NUF, installing units in various parts of the world in a range of applications: safe drinking water production, drain water purification and recycling in greenhouses and nurseries, swimming pools and Spas water purification, municipal secondary effluents upgrading to produce unrestricted irrigation water and other industrial applications. The project is one of the most exciting venues in the water treatment technology scenario of those years, being a full “double-green” project: we reuse a medical product which otherwise would have been disposed to the environment (first “green” part) as the best filter in the world — while removing poisons and contaminants from the water (second “green’ part). All that is achieved by reduced investment, making it the best technology available access to a very wide public of end-users. Thanks to the NUF technology, the device saves lives twice: first by purifying contaminated blood and then by purifying contaminated water. The technology is one of the most paradigmatic examples of the huge potential advantages of proper implementation of circular economy
