The story

Protecting Life Upstream

SA Water Innovation
Born from SORR. Built to Deliver the Vision.

SA Water Innovation (SAWI) was born from SORR’s founding vision: that the most effective way to protect oceans is to stop pollution before it ever reaches them.

That vision began close to home at Tuggerah Lakes on the NSW Central Coast, where chronic stormwater pollution, hydrocarbons, nutrients and fine sediments were visibly degrading a sensitive coastal system.

Tuggerah was not an isolated case—it was a microcosm of a much larger problem playing out across Australia and around the world. What started as a local response quickly became a scalable model for upstream interception, recovery and circular remediation.

The mission is deeply personal. SAWI founder Rob Manning is alive today because of a liver transplant, following severe complications from an autoimmune disorder that damaged the blood vessels supplying his organs. That experience reshaped how he views the natural world. Just as the liver filters and protects the human body, Rob came to see the oceans as the planet’s liver, and our rivers, stormwater systems and industrial waterways as its veins. When those veins are polluted, the damage accumulates downstream—impacting ecosystems, public health, fisheries, tourism and entire regional economies.

Building on SORR’s proven interception and recovery technologies, SAWI now works across stormwater networks, industrial discharge points, ports and marinas, shipping ballast systems, manufacturing effluent and desalination-adjacent outfalls.

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INNOVATION

Mission: Clean Water Without Borders

The focus is prevention-first: removing pollutants at mid-catchment, before dilution hides them and remediation becomes exponentially harder. SAWI’s solutions are designed to tackle the real culprits: hydrocarbons, degraded today, including heavy metals, volatile organic compounds, PFAS and other persistent chemicals, microplastics, nutrients, and harmful algal blooms (HABs) along upstream nutrient drives.

All interventions are engineered to be non-invasive and modular, enabling deployment under variable conditions without introducing new ecological risks. Crucially, SAWI does not claim to be a silver bullet.

Waterway degradation is a systems problem, and requires collaboration, openness and humility across industry, government, research and communities. SAWI is structured as a platform—working with partners, regulators, technology providers and industry.

Where others have complementary capabilities, SAWI seeks to integrate, not compete. The organisation recognises that value is created through learning, not ownership. It is built on principles of engineering, governance and community-led progress.

Through its Swampum circular-economy framework, SAWI ensures that every captured pollutant becomes a managed liability, not a hidden cost. Projects are designed to deliver immediate environmental benefit, build local skills and jobs, and establish long-term operational capability beyond clean-up toward regeneration.

From Tuggerah Lakes to coastal Australia, and now waterways facing the same pressures, SAWI is driven by a simple but disciplined principle:

There is no single solution—but through collaboration, partnership and mentorship, it is possible to clean the world’s oceans, one waterway at a time.