ADVERTISEMENT
Bryan Eagle of Glanris: Turning Ag Waste into Sustainable Filtration Media
Glanris turns raw rice hulls into water filtration media.
R
educing and reusing waste material are important conservation issues for both the water and the food industries. Bryan Eagle cofounded Glanris to develop a new technology that employs discarded rice hulls to create a filter material that can remove metals and organic material from water systems, all without any plastic or artificial components and with the added benefit of sequestering carbon after its use. In this interview, Mr. Eagle tells Municipal Water Leader how the Glanris technology works, its advantages over other filter materials, and the crucial role it can play in addressing climate change. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
24 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | May 2021
municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF GLANRIS.
Bryan Eagle: I grew up in McLean, Virginia. I went to the University of Virginia for my undergraduate degree and to Columbia University for my MBA. For most of my career, I have been a serial entrepreneur in the telecom space. My family bought a home in McLean when it was still fairly rural in the 1960s. We had a well and a septic tank. When you grow up in an environment without a municipal water supply, you really do have a different relationship with water. Our water came out of the ground, and we realized what a precious
thing it was when it didn’t work. I moved to Memphis in the late 1980s to help buy a satellite-based telecom company. After selling the company that I was involved with, I started a nonprofit incubator to help early-stage companies get started and grow. That incubator has been in operation for 20 years. We also helped created a $5 million nonprofit evergreen venture fund to help local entrepreneurs. I got involved with Glanris when an inventor approached me about a technology he had discovered for producing water filtration media. I was interested in water and all things water related, and this technology is at the confluence of a number of planetary macro trends. First, we’re running out of freshwater. We will either need to start reusing the water that we’re using for potable and nonpotable uses or we’ll have to desalinate a lot more water to make it available to our increasing population. McKinsey & Company came out with a study recently that states that by 2030, demand will exceed supply by 40 percent. We’re going to need a lot more cheap, effective, and sustainable water filtration technologies and more water filtration media, like what we’re producing. Glanris ties into another macro trend because of what our product is made from. Our material is a hybrid water filtration
