MILWAUKEE--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct 30, 2026--
Zurn Elkay Water Solutions Corporation (NYSE: ZWS) announced today its inclusion on TIME ’s list of America’s Growth Leaders 2027. This ranking highlights the top 500 U.S.-based companies in demonstrating exceptional growth, financial stability and stock performance by creating lasting impact in the competitive global landscape. Zurn Elkay ranked No. 224 overall and No. 1 of only three Wisconsin-based companies to make the list.
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“We continue to invest in innovation, our capabilities and our people while staying focused on creating meaningful value for our customers,” said Todd A. Adams, Chairman and CEO of Zurn Elkay Water Solutions. “Our people are the driving force behind everything we accomplish, and this recognition is a testament to their dedication and the value we all create together.”
TIME and Statista ranked the country’s publicly traded companies based on analysis of five years of revenue growth data by both rate and consistency, profitability metrics and industry-specific KPIs to assess overall financial health and stock performance using indicators such as average annual growth, recent returns, market comparisons and volatility.
To learn more about Zurn Elkay Water Solutions and our sustainability efforts, including the company’s most recent sustainability report, visit www.zurnelkay.com/sustainability.
About Zurn Elkay Water Solutions
Named one of America’s Greatest Companies and America’s Most Responsible Companies by Newsweek and one of America’s Best Companies and the World’s Best Companies for Sustainable Growth by TIME, Zurn Elkay Water Solutions is headquartered in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and is a growth-oriented, pure-play water management business that designs, procures, manufactures and markets what we believe to be the broadest sustainable product portfolio of specification-driven water management solutions to improve health, hydration, human safety and the environment. The Zurn Elkay product portfolio includes professional grade water safety and control products, flow systems products, hygienic and environmental products, water heating and filtered drinking water products for public and private spaces. Learn more at www.zurnelkay.com.
Cautionary Statement on Forward-Looking Statements
Information in this release may involve outlook, expectations, beliefs, plans, intentions, strategies or other statements regarding the future, which are forward-looking statements. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties. All forward-looking statements included in this release are based on information available to Zurn Elkay Water Solutions as of the date of this release, and Zurn Elkay Water Solutions assumes no obligation to update any such forward-looking statements. The statements in this release are not guarantees of future performance, and actual results could differ materially from current expectations. Numerous factors could cause or contribute to such differences. Please refer to “Risk Factors” and “Cautionary Notice Regarding Forward-Looking Statements” in our report on Form 10-K for the period ended December 31, 2025, as well as the Company’s subsequent annual, quarterly and current reports filed on Forms 10-K, 10-Q and 8-K from time to time with the Securities and Exchange Commission for a further discussion of the factors and risks associated with the business.
Zurn Elkay Water Solutions has been named to TIME’s America’s Growth Leaders 2027 list, ranking No. 224 nationally and highest among the three Wisconsin-based companies recognized. Chairman and CEO Todd A. Adams credited associates’ dedication and the company’s continued investment in innovation, capabilities and people, underscoring its focus on creating meaningful value for customers.
Zurn Elkay Water Solutions has been named to TIME’s America’s Growth Leaders 2027 list, ranking No. 224 among 500 U.S.-based companies and highest among the three Wisconsin-based companies recognized.
WASHINGTON (AP) — One of the countless memorable lines that have tumbled out of the “Star Trek” universe over the years is this gem, originally from a 20th-century poet named Delmore Schwartz: “Time is the fire in which we burn.”
It was uttered as an existential warning to Capt. Jean-Luc Picard in the 1994 film “Star Trek Generations.” But it feels equally apt this week after a one-two punch of loss that is hitting hard for devotees of the epic, six-decade science fiction saga.
First, on Sunday, Walter Koenig, who played Ensign Pavel Chekov in the original series during the 1960s, died at age 90. Then, on Thursday, the cosmos lost Patrick Stewart, a Shakespearean actor who in 1987 began to inhabit Picard, the poetic face of that show's sequel, “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” and decades later the anchor of the darker streaming drama “Star Trek: Picard.”
For a fan base that has long signed on as acolytes of a brighter, more equitable future, recent days have given the present an unwelcome sting.
“What a heartbreaking week it has been,” said William Shatner, who played Capt. James T. Kirk in the original series from 1966 to 1969 and went on to star in six movie sequels. He is one of only two members of that long-ago cast still living; Leonard “Spock” Nimoy, his best friend on the show — and off and on in real life — died in 2015.
For all the characterizations of it as nerdy over the years — something many fans have come to accept cheerfully — “Star Trek” has long been at the vanguard of modern-day mythmaking. That has helped it seep into the culture in various ways, vacuuming up disciples as it goes.
The earliest space shuttle was christened “Enterprise” after the show's flagship after a mass letter-writing campaign persuaded President Gerald Ford to rename it, and the cast attended the ship's introduction. The handheld “communicators” from the show helped inspire early flip phones. Phrases like “Beam me up, Scotty,” “He's dead, Jim” and “Make it so” have infiltrated society ad nauseam. (The first one was never actually spoken verbatim on the show.)
Today, as the end of a decade-long streaming run of “new Trek” approaches and the franchise's longtime godfather, Paramount, rumbles into a new corporate era, Trek fans are legion and global and wondering what happens next.
They haunt online forums by the millions, discussing and arguing about themes, stories and minutiae — particularly “canon,” or how well the fictional universe adheres to or violates its own rules. Things can get contentious and aggressive for a fan base that has signed on for peaceful and utopian tomorrows.
This week, those same forums, now turned somber, are awash with tributes and laments — first for Koenig and now for Stewart. At the same time, the sense of mortality is palpable. “Bubble wrap George Takei and William Shatner ASAP,” one post on X said.
Fellow actors in the now-sizable cadre from various shows — and those behind the scenes, too — weighed in on the loss of two people who were, for them, legends.
“His Captain Jean-Luc Picard permanently expanded the universe of Star Trek without measure,” Akiva Goldsman, co-creator of “Star Trek: Picard,” said of Stewart.
Koenig was introduced in the show's second season for two key reasons. First, his character was a Russian in an era of U.S.-Soviet Cold War tension, part of creator Gene Roddenberry's effort to build a diverse cast that was groundbreaking for its era and featured, among others, a Japanese helmsman and a Bantu communications officer — not to mention the then-progressive presence of women in authority. Second, Koenig's Beatle-like looks, complete with mop-top, were calibrated to entice younger fans vibing at the time to the Monkees.
Koenig, oddly, was the first Chekov to exist but is not the first to die. His young counterpart in the lightly rebooted “Kelvin” universe series of “Star Trek” movies that began in 2009, the Soviet-born Anton Yelchin, was killed in 2016 when his car pinned him against a gate outside his Los Angeles home.
With Koenig's death, only two members of the original cast remain: Shatner and Takei, who played helmsman Hikaru Sulu. The two, who have had an occasionally prickly relationship across the decades, both remain active at ages 95 and 89 respectively. Shatner, a raconteur who has seemingly boundless energy, recently unveiled his latest project — front man for a heavy-metal band. Takei remains in the public eye on social media with his “Oh, Myyyy” content.
Takei and Koenig, who sat together on the Enterprise bridge as helmsman and navigator, were close in real life. On Monday, Takei said his “heart was heavy.”
“He was a writer, a teacher, a thoughtful man, and a loyal friend,” Takei said of Koenig. “Rest well, my dear friend. Keep navigating a steady course.”
Ever since the early 1980s, when Capt. Kirk said bitterly that “Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young,” the “Star Trek” universe has embraced aging and mortality. It became a theme in many productions, perhaps most prominently from 2020 to 2023 in “Star Trek: Picard.”
Even so, the ethos of “Star Trek” has always been optimism and life. Even its darkest iterations, like “Star Trek: Deep Space Nine,” have been suffused with the notion that humanity — which has always, in the show's universe, meant far more than humans — would endure and thrive.
“Spock, you want to know something?” Kirk once said to his first officer. “Everybody's human.” Responded Spock, dryly: “I find that remark ... insulting.”
That exchange came in “Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country,” a 1991 end-of-the-Cold War political thriller that was the final film to feature the entire original cast. The story focused on the idea of the undiscovered country being the future, and the journey ended in the galactic equivalent of what John F. Kennedy once called “a hard and bitter peace.”
In truth, though, Shakespeare — whose work has infused not only the various incarnations of “Trek” but the careers of its two most prominent actors, Shatner and Stewart — meant something else when he coined the phrase. “The undiscover’d country, from whose bourn no traveller returns,” he writes in “Hamlet.” In short: death.
But with “Star Trek,” as with Shakespeare, the show must go on. That's exactly what Shatner, then at the ripe old age of 77, told this writer when they spent the day together in 2008: “None of us will be around forever,” he said, “but ‘Star Trek’ will.”
Ted Anthony, director of new storytelling and newsroom innovation at The Associated Press, has been watching “Star Trek” since he was 18 months old. His younger son's middle name is Kirk, which is not a coincidence.
FILE - Walter Koenig appears at the Creative Arts Emmy Awards in Los Angeles on Sept. 8, 2018. (Photo by Richard Shotwell/Invision/AP, File)
FILE - Patrick Stewart, cast member in the Paramount+ television series "Star Trek: Picard" poses for a portrait during the Winter Television Critics Association Press Tour in Pasadena, Calif., on Jan. 9, 2023. (Willy Sanjuan/Invision/AP, File)
FILE- Members of the "Star Trek" crew, from left, James Doohan, DeForest Kelley, Walter Koenig, William Shatner, George Takei, Leonard Nimoy, and Nichelle Nichols, toast the newest "Star Trek" film at Paramount Studios on Dec. 28, 1988. (AP Photo/Bob Galbraith, File)
