We take the phosphorus out of your lake.

Not bind it to the bottom. Not kill what it feeds. Barges that work your water body through the season and carry the phosphorus off site — built from the start for lakes over 1,000 acres, where every other approach runs out of road.

Request a consultation Why scale breaks everything else

Western Lake Erie, Landsat 8 · NASA Earth Observatory / USGS

AquaAction 2026 cohort Foresight Canada Manitoba Innovates funded MEIA Cleantech Audience Choice, 2024 & 2025 North Forge Patents Canadian PCT & US provisional filed

Stopping phosphorus going in is solved. Getting it back out isn’t.

Blooms are the symptom. The cause is decades of phosphorus arriving from three places, none of which pause while you wait for the permanent fix.

Over 20%

The value lake-adjacent homes lose during a bloom. Homes within a third of a mile lose 11 to 17 per cent. On a lakefront community that is assessment base, not just property value.1

Nationally, eutrophication of US freshwaters is estimated to cost $2.2 billion a year in lost lakefront value, lost recreation, drinking water treatment and species recovery — a figure its authors call conservative.2

Wastewater infrastructure

fifteen years out

Plant upgrades are a multi-billion-dollar capital programme on a generational timescale. Phosphorus keeps arriving for every one of those years.

Municipal runoff

every rainfall

Storm flow carries nutrients off every street, roof and lawn in the watershed. There is no version of this that pauses.

Agricultural runoff

decades

Best-management practices work. Changing them across a watershed takes a generation of coordination between parties who don’t report to you.

Nutrient-laden water against a hardened shoreline

Nutrient-laden water at a hardened shoreline. Loading continues through every season, which is why a single treatment is overwhelmed by the following year.

Everything on the market works, until the lake gets big.

Chemical dosing, aeration, ultrasonic, electrochemical — all of it was designed for small, contained water bodies. Past a few hundred acres the cost curve, the logistics or the chemistry gives out. The water bodies that need help most are the ones nobody is serving.

Lakes need physical removal of phosphorus. Nothing on the market today scales to do it on a large water body.

Lakewater was built for that gap from the start. We treat lakes of all sizes today, and our target is water bodies over 1,000 acres. Canada and the United States have no shortage of them. As we grow, smaller lakes move to a network of regional contractors, so our barges stay on the water nobody else is treating.

Three decisions made at the outset.

None of them can be retrofitted onto a system designed for ponds. Together they are why the service scales.

The barge goes to the phosphorus

Competing systems are shore-based, or a single application spread across a whole surface. We put the filtration on the water itself and move it to where the phosphorus actually sits — the only approach whose cost doesn’t run away with acreage.

Built to suit each water body, not sold as a fixed unit
Add barges or treatment frequency to scale up
Works from roughly six to fifty feet of depth

We only remove. We add nothing.

Chemical treatments all work the same way: add a binding agent so the phosphorus settles out. The phosphorus stays in the lake, the binding agent stays in the lake, and every application adds to what is already there.

We work in the water column, and what we capture physically leaves the water body. Nothing is added to your water. Nothing is left behind in it.

Continuous, not one-time

A chemical treatment is a single event. On a water body with continuous inflow it is overwhelmed by the next season’s loading. Our service runs continuously under a long-term contract, and scales down as your wastewater and watershed upgrades come online.

Captured phosphorus is recovered as a usable byproduct
Filter media is processed and reused, not discarded
Removal continues while the permanent fixes proceed

First conversation to phosphorus leaving the lake.

Twelve weeks for a small contract, forty for a large one. The barge and the media are built to suit your water body — there is no shelf to pull them off.

First meeting

Consultation

We look at your water body, its loading, and what you’re required to achieve. This sets how much phosphorus has to come out — the figure everything else is sized around.

On your water

Demonstration

We bring equipment to your lake and show you phosphorus being captured from your own water, before you commit to anything.

Fixed price

Proposal

A fixed cost to mobilize to your site, plus the annual service contract for ongoing removal.

12 to 40 weeks

Built to suit

Barge and filtration built for your lake. We lease commercial space in your community, outfit it, and hire and train the local crew who run it.

Each season

Removal

Loaded media comes ashore, phosphorus is stripped off, media goes back out. Every chemical step on land, inside containment, never in your lake.

Where does the phosphorus actually go?

The question that separates every technology on this list.

	LakewaterMobile filtration	ElectrochemicalShore-based plant	Alum & zincChemical dosing	Lanthanum clayChemical dosing	UltrasonicAlgae suppression	ElectromagneticOxygenation
Where the phosphorus ends up	Removed from the lake	Physically removed	Settles into sediment	Settles into sediment	Not removed; targets algae	Taken up by bacteria, stays in lake
Designed for water bodies over 1,000 acres	✓	×	×	×	×	×
Leaves no residuals in the water	✓	✓	×	×	✓	✓
Risk compounds with repeated use	None	None	HIGH	HIGH	None	Possible
Phosphorus recovered for reuse	✓	×	×	×	×	×
Effective immediately	✓	✓	✓	✓	✓	Delayed; relies on bacterial growth

Scroll the table sideways to see every option.

A municipal boat launch and floating dock

A municipal launch and a leased local building. That is the entire site requirement. No capital works, and nothing for your staff to own or operate.

Tell us about your water body.

We’ll look at your lake, its loading, and what you’re required to achieve — then show you phosphorus coming out of your own water before you commit to anything.

References

Wolf, D. and Klaiber, H.A. (2017). “Bloom and bust: Toxic algae’s impact on nearby property values.” Ecological Economics 135, 209–221. Hedonic analysis of four inland Ohio lakes, 2009–2015. doi.org/10.1016/j.ecolecon.2016.12.007
Dodds, W.K. et al. (2009). “Eutrophication of U.S. Freshwaters: Analysis of Potential Economic Damages.” Environmental Science & Technology 43(1), 12–19. doi.org/10.1021/es801217q
Satellite imagery: NASA Earth Observatory, by Joshua Stevens, using Landsat 8 data from the U.S. Geological Survey.