NB Ekonomi: The invisible cost of water has become investment’s new address

In the feature “The invisible cost of water has become investment’s new address”, published on page 17 of NB Ekonomi dated 13 October 2026, Dr. Melek Demiray, CEO of Ecofolio, and Faik Baykuş, founder of Loopyon, described the water savings, production efficiency and global growth potential of a technology developed in Türkiye.

The report stressed that as the climate crisis deepens, water is ceasing to be merely a natural resource in need of protection and turning into a strategic economic asset that will determine the future of agriculture, industry and the investment world. In that picture, consuming less water is no longer enough: the water used has to be returned to the production cycle.

“Measurable impact and economic value meet in the same business model”

Dr. Melek Demiray said sustainability on its own is not an investment criterion: “It matters, of course, that a venture produces a solution to an environmental or social problem; but that solution has to be verifiable through technology, commercialisable and scalable. Loopyon is a good example in this respect. We are not talking here about a sustainability story that merely ‘saves water’. There is a technology made applicable at industrial scale, an intellectual property base protected under a WIPO/PCT application, and validation work carried out in a real production environment.”

The true cost of water was not visible

Demiray noted that with water the real cost is not just the price per cubic metre: “There are many indirect costs — production loss, treatment, chemical use, maintenance, water scarcity risk and regulatory compliance. A significant part of these has until now not been sufficiently visible in investment decisions. But that picture is changing. Drought, water security, food security and new regulations are taking water out of the environmental column and turning it into a directly economic matter.”

She defined the aim of the investment round as commercialisation and export: “We see this round less as financing for R&D than as growth capital for commercialising and scaling a validated technology. The first commercial focus is Türkiye’s roughly 22 million square metres of modern soilless greenhouse market. MENA and European markets follow.”

“We are taking water out of its role as a single-use input”

Faik Baykuş explained that in the traditional model water enters the system and a significant amount of water and nutrients leaves it with the drainage: “Our approach is to take water out of its role as a single-use input and turn it into an asset managed within the production cycle. Loopyon’s cold plasma technology — Plasma Activated Water, or PAW — reduces the unwanted microbiological load in water while limiting biofilm formation in irrigation lines and enabling the reuse of drainage water.”

Baykuş said the share of water that can be reused varies with the crop, the greenhouse infrastructure, the volume of drainage and the initial characteristics of the water, so quoting a single percentage would not be right; with the improvement in water quality they foresee a potential increase of 5–15 percent in annual production efficiency. He noted that in field work carried out in July 2026 at large-scale modern greenhouse facilities in the Sandıklı district of Afyonkarahisar, findings on bringing the microbiological load in irrigation water under control at a rate of 99.99 percent were documented by the facility concerned. Analysis and application work continues on different source waters in Antalya, Afyon, Denizli, İzmir, Balıkesir, Ankara and Eskişehir.