A Clean Glass in 2050: Shimon Constante Tells the Salvator Mundi Café Why Water Quality Is the Fight of Our Lives
Updated: Nov 3
On Sunday evening, 1 November 2026, members of the Salvator Mundi Café joined from Istanbul, Zagreb, Bangkok and beyond for Café No. 10, "The Future of Water at the Crossroads". Host Sally had set the stakes in advance. After his pre-interview with the guest a few days earlier, he told members, he had not slept well for two nights, though Shimon had also left him with some hope, and he wished the same experience on everyone joining. What followed was not a lecture about scarcity. It was a rigorous, at times uncomfortable examination of how leaders, in boardrooms and in government alike, are mispricing the resource their systems depend on.
From the Brain to the Tap
Shimon Constante, Executive Vice President of Atlantium Technologies, responsible for Latin America and Iberia, did not come to water through engineering. He holds a degree in neurosciences from Fordham University and an executive MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. What pulled him into the industry, he told the Café, was impact. A friend recruiting him answered his doubts simply: once you see the impact you have on people, you will love it, and you will never leave. His first project, connecting three million people in Manila to running tap water, settled it. That was almost sixteen years ago.
Asked what goes through his mind when he opens the tap at home, he did not talk about chemicals. He talked about cost. Even in countries rich in water, like Brazil, bringing water from its source to our homes across mountains and valleys is enormously expensive. "We think water should be free for everybody," he said, "but there is a cost for that." It is a sentence every executive in the room could recognise: the gap between what customers assume and what delivery actually requires.
Four Bottles Out of Ten
The world's conception, Constante said, is that water is endless. The numbers say otherwise: 2.1 billion people lack access to safe water, almost 26 percent of people worldwide, and more than 47 countries are classified as experiencing high water stress. The world has answered with capital-intensive supply: desalination, whose cost has fallen below 50 cents per cubic meter in new projects in Qatar and Saudi Arabia, and reuse, from Singapore's wastewater-to-drinking-water programme to treated water returned to aquifers in California and Spain.
Then came the figure that reframed the evening: 40 percent of the water the world produces is lost to leaks and commercial losses before it reaches anyone. His analogy landed hard. If the CEO of Coca-Cola told the board that out of every ten bottles produced, four had to be thrown away, how long would that CEO keep the job? No board would accept it. Yet Manila once lost 60 percent of its water, while Japan, despite earthquakes, loses only three to five percent. The difference is not geology; it is management. Building desalination plants for hundreds of millions while losing half the water on the way, he argued, simply makes no sense.
So Much Rain, So Little Water
Extreme weather deepens the paradox. In his presentation, Constante mapped five threats to our freshwater future: climate change and extreme weather, forever chemicals and emerging contaminants, groundwater overexploitation, untreated wastewater and urban pollution, and agricultural pollution. Traveling from Honduras to Argentina, he told the Café, he hears the same complaint everywhere: flooded cities, no water. Rain that once arrived as a resource now arrives as a shock the ground cannot absorb, so aquifers never refill. Mexico City, drained over a century of urbanization, shows what that means in structural terms: buildings have sunk by up to 20 meters, because an aquifer is also the pressure mechanism holding a city up. For anyone who thinks of water as a utility bill, it is a useful correction. It is load-bearing capital.
The Chemicals That Never Leave
The heart of the talk was PFAS, the man-made "forever chemicals" found in products from industrial adhesives to firefighting foam. They resist breakdown in the environment and can accumulate in the human body over time, and detection technology is only now showing how far they have spread, including into babies before birth. Today's solutions mostly separate rather than destroy: burn the captured carbon and PFAS returns in rain, bury it and it seeps back into the aquifer. The real race, he explained, is breaking the carbon-fluorine bond at a cost cities and industry can afford, without creating new environmental risks. Whoever closes that cost curve first changes the economics of water treatment worldwide.
The bill is already arriving, in his account. The Swedish army went from one lawyer handling PFAS cases to dozens, the 2023 3M settlement of around $10 billion was still not final, and more than 11,000 PFAS litigations were under way. His slides mapped a global regulatory turning point: the United States set its first nationwide enforceable drinking-water standards in April 2024, with limits of four nanograms per litre for PFOA and PFOS; the EU Drinking Water Directive has required monitoring since 12 January 2026, at 100 nanograms per litre for the sum of twenty specified PFAS and 500 for total PFAS; Japan introduced a binding limit of 50 nanograms per litre in April 2026, with Taiwan to follow in July 2027. For manufacturers, utilities and their insurers, this is no longer a scientific debate. It is a liability schedule.
Technology Is Not the Problem
If the technology exists, why does the crisis deepen? Constante's answer was the evening's refrain: technology is not the problem; consciousness is. Too often, he said, water utility management is a political position rather than a professional one, and governments use water as a ticket for the confidence of the people. The room pressed him on what that means in practice. Ferda Kert asked whether AI and new technology could create water abundance; Constante sees huge potential in systems that connect weather forecasts, reservoirs and pipe pressure the way the brain manages the body, but reminded the room that the water exists, and delivering it is the problem. Michal Zeevi-Bender asked what each person can do, and he pointed to cities where awareness campaigns cut daily use from 150 to 120 litres per person. Björn Söderberg, who has worked on water for thirty years, pressed on knowledge, and Constante proposed that this group lead an initiative for water.
Will Our Grandchildren Drink From the Tap?
Then the question the whole evening had been circling: will our grandchildren be able to fill a glass of water from the tap in 2050 and drink it without worrying? "I think yes, honestly," he said. He was candid about filters: at the moment, no filter fitted at home will be enough, and the responsibility lies with governments and water utilities. What citizens can do now is demand to know. He cited Singapore's national water agency PUB, which publishes its laboratory results on a portal anyone can open, and pointed to new sensors that measure water quality on the spot, and to companies that already guarantee clean water and air at the entrance to a building under performance contracts. Transparency, in his telling, is where accountability starts.
Muhamed Catic added a different angle: Cradle to Cradle, the design movement founded by William McDonough, which asks designers to love "the children of all species, all the time" and to keep harmful ingredients out of a product from its very first sketch. Education, he said, is where Salvator Mundi Global can make a long-term difference. "This is what I love, because I think this is the future," Constante answered.
An Idea Born at the Café: iAdmit
One word stayed with the room: admit. Governments don't want to admit. Companies don't want to admit. And honestly, neither do we. So the evening closed with an idea: iAdmit. Each of us, a citizen, a CEO or a prime minister, admits at least three things we can change in our own behaviour, commits to changing them, and inspires the next person. It is a disarmingly simple operating principle, and the discussion returned more than once to the economics behind it: prevention, the Café heard, is cheaper than treatment.
Inspired by the call to admit and change, Sally came up with the idea during the session itself. The next day, SMG came back with a demo site, iadmit.org, and the idea for such an initiative in the water world is now being discussed internally. Constante's answer was immediate: "I think it would make a huge difference." He proposed the conversation continue, and he has offered to come back for a second Café. The recording is available on Salvator Mundi Global TV on YouTube, and articles on Salvator Mundi Times.
Watch the Full Session
About Our Speaker
Shimon Constante
Executive Vice President, Atlantium Technologies
Responsible for Latin America and Iberia. He holds a degree in neurosciences from Fordham University and an executive MBA from the Kellogg School of Management. He spent many years at Miya Water fighting water losses in city networks, including the project that connected three million people in Manila to running water, and today leads the fight for water quality: treatment, reuse and the destruction of forever chemicals.
About the Author
Maureen Mwende Njagi
Editor, Salvator Mundi Times
Maureen brings more than a decade of operations, logistics and business experience in Kenya. At Grupo Salvador Caetano, the automotive group, she rose from Market Analyst to Logistics & Administration Manager, leading freight, warehousing and distribution, and later advised its management as an independent logistics consultant. Earlier she managed operations and business development at Mara Farming and Meal Pack. She holds a Bachelor's degree in Business Administration and Management from St. Paul's University and is completing an M.Sc. in International Logistics and Transportation Management at the University of Europe for Applied Sciences in Germany. At Salvator Mundi Times she produces articles, Café reports and video content.
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