Aquacycl is an award-winning, woman-owned Water Start-Up that might reshape your vision of hard-to-treat wastewaters.

This episode is part of my series on the way to leverage Wastewater’s Energy. Check it out!

What we covered: 

Microbial Fuel Cells: when amazing natural bacteria species breathing electricity can be triggered to treat incredible COD levels

Two simple product design and product-market fit moves, that enabled Aquacycl to make it economical where others failed

How modularity and ease of use empower a perfect fit to an industrial process’ variability. (and how this can be linked to 𝘔𝘢𝘺𝘰𝘯𝘯𝘢𝘪𝘴𝘦) 

How source-remediation lightens the burden on the municipal wastewater treatment plant downstream

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Get the 3 Page Synthesis for free!

What if Chemical Oxygen Demand (COD) was so high, conventional biologies would be totally out of touch?

Is it possible to treat incredible COD and TSS loads, while keeping it easy as pie for end-users thanks to Plug & Play solutions?

Check out the best of an Episode, that's full of treasures, from growing a start-up in the water industry to being a Female lead company in a Men's world!

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Resources:

Send your warm regards to Orianna Bretschger on LinkedIn

Check out the Aquacycl website

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Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Full transcript

Antoine Walter:
Hi, Orianna, welcome to the show.

Orianna Bretschger:
Great to be here.

Antoine Walter:
Usually you are based in San Diego, but I heard that right now, you are in Nevada, in Las Vegas. So let me just ask you to send me a postcard from there. How is it today?

Orianna Bretschger:
It is bright and sunny. Nice and moderate temperature.

Antoine Walter:
Actually, I was intending to start with the San Diego story because that just made some research. And as I noticed that you are an expert in pitching your company. I was thinking, you know, there’s this famous thing of the elevator pitch. And I found that the elevator, which goes to the highest place in San Diego takes about 30 seconds. So I was thinking why not asking you to make an elevator pitch in 30 seconds, which would be your take at that?

Orianna Bretschger:
All right. AQUACYCL provides onsite wastewater treatment as a service for industrial food and beverage customers. Oftentimes we will save our customers anywhere from 20 to 60% against the cost that they’re paying now to discharge, to city sewer, or haul off site. We’ve got an energy neutral solution that provides a performance guarantee, always saving our customers money.

Antoine Walter:
Wonderful. I think with many things that we will unpack in a second, but just before unpacking all of that, I was just wondering, having a look at former interviews you’ve been giving or at your resume I’ve found online. How does one transition from aerospace to finding a wastewater treatment startup? How did you end up in this industry? I mean, it must be so cool. Aerospace,

Orianna Bretschger:
Not as cool as wastewater, not at all. Well they’re both very cool. You know, my path to where we are now has certainly not been direct. My undergraduate degree was in physics and astronomy and that’s actually what brought me to aerospace. So I was doing, I was working for a commercial company in the electro-optical systems department, basically doing guidance systems for missiles. So I was able to apply my degree in physics and do some modeling, you know, basically looking at electron flow and how electrons can be controlled and new digital systems. And that was the first iteration of CCD cameras, right. Which we all have in our phones now. But back in that day, that was revolutionary technology. And so really my love of electrons and understanding electron flow is what brought me into wastewater through my graduate work, where I was studying, how bacteria lose electrons to each other and to their environments and how this electron movement actually generates electricity and facilitates respiration or the ability to breathe within these bacterial systems.

And kinda in that study, that’s sort of just graduated on into a practical application for now. We have a kind of a different type of metabolism that we can exploit specifically for wastewater treatment because how we move electrons from bacteria in this generation of electricity process actually controls their metabolism. So the more electricity we make, the faster these bacteria breathe and the faster they eat. And so we’re able to really do some very cool things in wastewater treatment, simply by how we’re controlling electron flow across a circuit and therefore electron flow in a biological system. And that’s most wastewater treatment is biologically based, but now this is a whole new approach to how we can apply it for very specific and unique purposes that may not fit necessarily in the conventional infrastructure.

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Antoine Walter:
So basically for the stupid like me, it’s bacteria that breathe electricity. Right? Yep. Exactly. Is that your secret sauce or do you have even a different taker at the market or at the metric, which would be your secret sauce?

Orianna Bretschger:
Well, our secret sauce is really much more in the manufacturing and development of components that take advantage of this capacity. So the biology is super cool. Nature did that, right? We can’t take any credit for that. And my group, when we were doing research and my group now on the commercial side, you know, we were one of many groups trying to understand how these bacteria work, where they are in the environment. My group then kind of took a leap out of the academic research space and into commercialization. So then, okay. Take our fundamental understanding of these natural bacteria and what they do. And then let’s build engineered systems around them specifically to control them for what we want them to do, our special sauce. Isn’t that control mechanisms.

Antoine Walter:
Okay. That’s fascinating. I’m sure we will dig a bit more into that, but just before starting to dig, I’d like to again, ask a question for the stupid microbial fuel cell, which is what we are talking about right now is around for not decades, but good 15 years and still, I’m not sure it was really popularized to the stage that everybody listening to this right now understands how that works. So can you just make it really for this two piece? So they brief electricity and through that you can trigger the fact that they eat the organic

Orianna Bretschger:
That’s right, exactly. Yep. That is exactly right. And you right. Microbial fuel cells. The concept has been around for a very long time. And in fact, the first publication about a microbial system generating electricity was in 1911 and the UK. And there’s been various spins and iterations on studying these processes and how to put them to use. But it hasn’t really been until the last 15, 20 years or so that we’ve known enough, understood enough about the biological mechanisms to then begin a commercialization process.

Antoine Walter:
It’s over one century old, crazy. It takes a while. I mean, it’s a constant in this industry. It’s not the fastest movie in three, so I can understand why it takes it was, but I’ve read something really interesting in one of your interviews where you were saying that the fact that others had some takes at that before with a different approach than you, and didn’t succeed with their different approach, isn’t helping you, which I can. Of course, there’s a conservative industry that tries something and they burn their fingers. I’m not sure they come back with it and still you’re successful. Then you found your, your niche. So what makes you so different? What’s your different take at that matter?

Orianna Bretschger:
The biggest part of this industry of course, is the municipal and residential, right? The large centralized plants. And that’s the biggest market opportunity where a lot of big players are very successful integrating conventional technologies and often, you know, so from the business case, the approach has always been, let’s develop an energy neutral solution to fit into that market. Well electrochemical systems, which is what a microbial fuel cell is, right? It’s a bio electric chemical system has very specific parameters relative to scaling that. You know, if you take a conventional environmental engineering approach is going to be very challenging, right? To get it past the lab because you can’t just add a bigger tank and a bigger pump and a bigger electrode, right. To make it work better. And to make it scale because of all of the different reactions, the reaction chemistries and the, you know, all of the different, multiple dynamics that are happening within bio electric chemical systems, you have to be really careful at how you scale because bigger is not better.

And that’s the approach that we took is that in order to maintain the efficiencies, right, both on the biological side and the energy recovery side, we needed to keep things pretty small. And so when we were doing our development, we made all kinds of mistakes, too. We wanted to do the big tank and the big pump and the big electrode. And we tried that and it failed miserably. And, you know, but we did that under the research environment and we learned a lot from it. And so when we went back to the drawing board, we boiled down to a battery size standard car, battery size module. And we came up with the very, very specific dimensions, which enables us to optimize all of the different reaction chemistries that have to happen in that little black box. Right. And then to commercialize it, we just figured out how to make that little black box really cheap so we can multiply them.

And, you know, we, we stack them together like Legos so that we can have meaningful treatment capacity and treatment quality right. At an industrial site. So that’s kind of the technology development side. That was a little bit different spins on what we did, but also the market that we’re addressing is a bit unique. So we, you know, I mentioned the biggest part of the market is that municipal side, but this technology is not a great fit for that. The municipal wastewater is actually very low concentration in terms of chemical energy that you can recover as direct electricity. And so, you know, when you’ve got an anaerobic digestion, that’s digesting the sludge, right. It’s digesting the concentrate and that’s where they’re getting the energy out. So if we’re going to take a basic wastewater flow, which is a hundred million gallons a day, but you only have 400 parts per million of chemical energy in there, right.

It’s better to have a big tank and a blower and do activated sludge. I mean, it just is right, but on the, on the sludge side or on these really high concentrates, which pads, you know, these really difficult peaks of concentrates into centralized systems that make, that may result from industrial processes like food and beverage production, right? Even at small volumes, these production facilities are discharging concentrations that are now a hundred thousand parts per million, 50,000 parts per million into the sewer. Then you start to get these spikes, right. And it’s just a lot of sugar, but it makes it more difficult, right? For the larger centralized facilities to predict what their energy input needs to be, you know, waste activated, sludge return, all that good stuff. So the niche that we’re addressing is basically point source remediation, right? It’s industrial pre-treatment because our system is now really uniquely defined to take these concentrates without dilution and knock them down right before they get to sewer.

So that helps reduce the surcharges for the customer to the sewer, but it also helps the downstream treatment plant because you don’t see these spikes. So you’re not getting these really consistent loads. Now, if you’re in a huge city, that doesn’t matter as much because your flows are, you know, millions and millions of cubic meters a day. But when you’re in a small municipality where a lot of these industrial settings are up and running, that becomes the challenge. And so we’re addressing that part of the market. So small municipalities, big facility discharge, and basically being the buffer between the industrial discharge and that small municipal treatment plant and, or eliminating the hauling that might have to happen to a,

Antoine Walter:
So basically it’s the industrial sites where you have the highest CBD concentrations, I guess I’ve seen, you know, I had to I’m French, I’ve seen it. You have references on my unit plans. So knowing a bit than by Inez, I don’t know if it’s a, really the real millionaires, but still, it must be ICU. Gee, I could imagine high turbidity, maybe hive is because it’s really difficult conditions, right?

Orianna Bretschger:
Yes. And that’s what we like the dirtier, the better, that’s a really high energy content. It’s high suspended, solid. And we don’t like a whole lot of fats oils and grease. Right. We were kind of limited to around 300 parts per million. So sometimes we’ll need to put a dissolved air flotation ahead of our systems to minimize that fat oil and grease before it comes to us. But we love the concentrated sugars. We like higher conductivity. Wastewaters high TDS doesn’t bother us. We don’t remove any of the TDS, but it actually enhances the power production. And yeah, we liked the higher TSS as well because that’s more organic energy.

Antoine Walter:
So you mentioned the dissolved air, flotation you treatment is not a one, one step or one size fits all. If I get it right there, the treatment friend, you have some conditions to fulfill and you can have a pre-treatment that helps in that case.

Orianna Bretschger:
That’s absolutely right. And to be honest, I don’t think that there ever will be a one size fits all solution, right?

Antoine Walter:
If one day there’s one thing like that, we all lose our jobs. So,

Orianna Bretschger:
But insurance, right? There’s not a silver bullet. There’s so many unique conditions, especially in the industrial side that you have to plan for a lot of variability on the industrial side, because, you know, you’ve got plant shutdowns for cleaning. They shut down for the holidays. It’s not a 24, seven operation in many conditions. And so you got to have a technology that is robust enough to be able to deal with that. And that’s another kind of benefit that we’re able to provide is if it’s not continuous flow all the time or consistent flow all the time, it’s okay. Right. We can handle that variability, which would otherwise be very challenging for say an activated sludge system, but, you know, putting together post and pre treatment is important, but it’s all defined based on what their customer requirement is. So it’s all a little bit unique. Each thing

Antoine Walter:
Decentralized, it can be, I mean, it’s really flexible. You can handle the fact that sometimes it’s shut down, sometimes it’s on, sometimes it’s off. And if I got you right, just before you were mentioning this car Bradbury aspect, so basically you can then multiply and scale to the needs of that specific site. And if those needs evolve, then you just add more of the car batteries. Right?

Orianna Bretschger:
Exactly. We have that in a containerized footprint, right? So your standard shipping container, 20 foot, 40 foot, and we’ve got a certain number of batteries we can put in each configuration. And so it usually ends up being, you know, a multiple container type of job if it’s a high flow, but sometimes we can accommodate treatment and a single 20 foot container.

Antoine Walter:
And so if I got it right, your differentiation doesn’t stop with the technology. You also different shifts in the fact that you offer a treatment as a service. What exactly is the service? Is it the treatment capacity itself? Or do you, let’s say I’m this and mayonnaise plants because you know, I’m French. I have to take my NS. I keep that one. I’m this industrial, what is the service exactly about it is it’s you treat a certain amount of water or you offer me a treatment capacity. So it’s a, is it a means or an end goal that you’re offering as a service? It’s a little bit of both.

Orianna Bretschger:
Right. And it really does depend on what the customer needs. So in every scope of work, we know there’s going to be a range of volumes that we’re going to have to deal with, right. Especially if it’s a dynamic production environment. So we may see peak flows on Wednesday and no flow up Saturday, right? So we need to plan for the peaks and the valleys, but ultimately right. What the facility is going to be governed by is their discharge permit. And so what we’re treating to is to ensure that they always stay with them, permit compliance on their bod and TSS discharge, right? And so we’ll accommodate the volume and we’ll figure out to what quality do we need to treat the water so that we can guarantee performance to their existing permit. So the service includes the use of the equipment and the monitoring capacity, which is already built into the equipment, right?

Because we’re generating an electrical signal out of each one of these batteries, we’re taking a data point every five to 20 minutes off of those reactors and all of the embedded sensors that we’ve got. So we know exactly what’s going on at all points in time. And so we can catch any potential issues before they become problems. And it’s very easy for us to troubleshoot remotely. So there’s not a need necessarily for full time, 24 seven operator to run our equipment, right. We still have that service visits and regular maintenance, a part of the service, but you don’t need somebody sitting onsite there, you know, looking at the screen. So we do that remotely. So that’s part of the service. And then all of that right. Is tied together with that performance guarantee. So how much do we have to treat and how clean do we need to get it,

Antoine Walter:
Come up with this idea of providing a service instead of a good physical good.

Orianna Bretschger:
Some of it evolves from the modularity of the technology, right? Because when we’re installing a unit, we’re not digging holes in the ground, this is not permanent infrastructure. And so it gives us the flexibility. So for whatever reason, right, if they’re changing their production model to higher volume, we add another container and we upgrade on the service. If for whatever reason, you know, or are reducing their capacity, we can actually take some of the equipment out and charge them less. Right. It’s very flexible to the customer need, but it also is good for us as a business because we have a recurring revenue model and, you know, these are multi-year contracts. And so the technology and the way that it’s configured as enabling there, but we’ve also learned, and we’re not the first ones to do this wastewater treatment as a service approach. But what we’ve learned in the sales cycle, within the water industry, of course, that’s long, right.

But especially as a new technology with very, you know, many, many fewer case studies than a Suez or Veolia or Q Rita, you know, we have to be able to provide flexibility to the customer and how they’re purchasing. We can’t ask them to purchase a million dollar piece of equipment that nobody’s ever heard of before. It’s just not gonna, that’s not gonna fly, but what we can do is say, okay, look, we’re going to provide a performance guarantee. We will fix anything that breaks, and we’re not going to charge you for it. And we’re going to do this on a full op ex model. You have to put a little bit of money down is that security deposit. But, you know, we will promise the service for the duration of the contract period. So it’s a negotiation every time, but it takes the pressure off of the customer

Antoine Walter:
That might be appealing for an industrial, because that means if his business is running, basically he has the money to pay for the OPEX. And if he’s down, because for whatever reason, industry’s shut down and with the pandemic, we know some industries which are in that case. Well, it doesn’t have to be either because it doesn’t have some wastewater. So it sounds like a win-win.

Orianna Bretschger:
And of course there’s always a, you know, a minimum payment, right. Cause we, we still have to make some money too. But we can slice the contract and a lot of different ways, right? So there’s that minimum. And then there’s overages, you know, based on volume or based on surcharges, but most of these customers are already managing their wastewater on an OPEX budget, whether it’s, you know, paying surcharges to the city sewer or paying a third party vendor to haul their wastewater off site and put it somewhere else. So, because we’re, you know, basically continuing onto a model they’re comfortable with that also helps.

Antoine Walter:
What I’ve read is that if, for instance, they are today paying a fee to destructure the sewer, your system is actually saving them money. And your figure was saying savings of 50 to 95%. So that’s, that’s a huge,

Orianna Bretschger:
Really high end on the high end. Yes. I mean but, but we’re also seeing, you know, even a 20% saving on surcharge costs is very attractive.

Antoine Walter:
Even one person is already something. I mean, it’s really about you produce you good water. A wastewater is an after thought, it’s just a cost. So if you can reduce that cost, of course it’s a it’s of interest.

Orianna Bretschger:
Yeah. So it’s been fun learning about all of these different challenges that all of these different industries are facing. Mayonnaise is different than confection. It’s different than wine. So it’s been fun to learn from our customers too.

Antoine Walter:
So basically your system comes in that shipping container, you plug it onsite and it’s really plug and play in the sense as well. That’s you don’t need to bring any energy to that container because basically energy is the byproduct of your operation and of your treatments.

Orianna Bretschger:
It can be, but we don’t actually sell that back to the customer. Right. Okay. So one of the innovations that we’ve been driving forward is right now just being very energy efficient. So even if we’re not harnessing the energy that we’re recovering in, the treatment process with the power bill is going to be to the customer is extremely low. It’s, you know, tens to hundreds of dollars a month for them to operate a single one of our containers, right. Which is barely a blip on the op ex budget for most of these facilities. And so even if we’re not towering ourselves, the energy cost for running us is very, very low. And that’s another benefit, right? Because in order for us to recover that energy and make it useful, because right now we’re measuring it, right. We’re dissipating it and we’re grounding it out.

Essentially we have to install the battery pack, right. And then most efficiently, because we’re making DC power, we recharge that battery pack. And then we run our units off of the battery pack. And if there’s any excess, we have to add extra storage capacity. And then the customer could take advantage of that for charging electric forklifts or EVs or led lights in the facility. But that’s all, that’s more infrastructure costs. You know, there’s extra planning to that. There’s more space allocation required to that. So even if we’re not talking about the energy recovery side of it at all, just the efficiency and then the reduction in that, in the management of wastewater is really where the biggest selling point

Antoine Walter:
Is that good for you in the future to achieve this neutrality or even grip positive aspect?

Orianna Bretschger:
Absolutely. I don’t think ever grid positive, but yeah, I think, I think neutral and I think maybe a little bit of extra positivity where we could, you know, we could do something like an EVs charging station, right. But probably not more than that. And that is absolutely a goal for us in the next couple of years, you know, we’re defining our R and D process to move toward that, but it really is also a function of customer demand. If this is something that’s interesting to the customer, we’ll, we’ll develop it, but otherwise we’re not going to spend too much more time on it until we know that there’s going to be a, you know, a payback for our efforts

Antoine Walter:
Makes sense. You’ve mentioned Suez, Veolia Cavita do you work alone or do you sometimes partner with those companies to fit into a bigger picture?

Orianna Bretschger:
We certainly know about all of those folks and we’ve had some wonderful collaborations and discussions with many of the larger companies, but we are as Aqua cycle, pretty small potatoes relative to the types of projects that those companies deploy. And we do, we kind of fit into a very unique market niche that they’re not necessarily addressing, right. Small onsite industrial treatment is these would be pretty one-off projects for companies of that size. And so we do work with engineering firms, especially on any of the civil infrastructure upgrades that that needs to happen at the plant site. That’s not what we do, right. We, we tie in our technology, but you know, if there’s a concrete pad that needs to come in or, you know, any of the electricity panels that we need to access, right. We will work with them. We’ll work with engineering firms to do that. Usually the customer recommends who they want us to work with, but we, you know, we encourage collaboration and, and all of those post and pretreatment technologies, right? That’s not. And so it’ll be, we work with a multitude of different types of companies early stage, mid stage, big companies to learn about what’s out there and, and how we can work together for the best solution.

Antoine Walter:
So you’re a small potato, but you’re an agile potato and a, and a collaborative one. I wouldn’t have done it, but

Orianna Bretschger:
We got some potato starch wastewater where we’re checking out.

Antoine Walter:
I think that’s one of the most famous experiments you can do in science is to try to power a simple thing with a potato. So somehow I see a link on the market perspective. You know, it, it has been intensive emanates time. Even the big ones are starting to buy themselves one in another. I mean, this story’s ongoing, but I was wondering for a company like you, what does the bath, how do you see that coming in the next two years next five years? Is it like you are going to name that niche and try to grow from that niche? Or, I mean, you don’t necessarily have to grow outside a niche. I mean, you can be the King in that kingdom or the queen to be fair, or what’s your vision in two years or in five years, where do you see Aqua cycle?

Orianna Bretschger:
Well, I see office cycle is profitable. That’s our first goal, get the business to a point where it’s profitable, you know, engage our customers. So we’ve got good word of mouth, right? Where we we’ve got happy customers and case studies that we can share. And through this process of getting to profitability, you know, we’re consistently driving down our cost of goods, which means now we can open up new value proposition within other markets, right? And so once we get to that stage where we’ve got annual occurring revenue, that’s interesting to these larger players, then it’s a much more in-depth discussion relative to acquisition and how we could compliment existing portfolios within the big companies, but really it’s all about, you know, getting to profitable and getting this business stable enough. So it is an attractive acquisition and, and we’re able to, to negotiate a good price.

Antoine Walter:
So I think that, to that extent your, your business model with annual recurring revenue is helping you to have this stability, I guess.

Orianna Bretschger:
Yes, absolutely. Having a predictable revenue stream is critical. So not following the cap ex model is also helpful for that.

Antoine Walter:
There’s one aspect that they’re just slightly touched. One minutes ago with my queen of the kingdom aspect is that one of the bold statements there is on your website is that you have, you are a woman owned business. Is that an important message to you? I’m asking you, let me just tell you where I’m coming from with that question. I’m a son of feminist, I’m a father of two daughters, and I’m very, very, very mad at myself that we are episode 20 of the podcast. And you’re the third woman on the microphone, Switzerland. It’s, I’m really a minority and I’m ashamed of that. So that’s why it’s important to me to ask you that question and I stop talking and let you the microphone.

Orianna Bretschger:
Well, thank you for that question. Yes, it is absolutely important to us. So we are, we are three co-founders and two of the three of us are women. And two of the three of us are immigrants and the U S and the diversity of thought and idea, and disciplines in office cycle as a company is what has enabled us to get to the point where we are, and hopefully thrive beyond where we are now. And so we are most definitely minority in terms of gender composition within the industry. And, you know, we’re also from an investment perspective, too, right? If you look at the amount of venture capital, which is invested into early stage companies, right, and there’s decades of data supporting this, now only 2% of that funding goes to female founded companies, even though women and men found companies are pretty much equal rates, right? It’s 50, 50 founders across gender, and that’s not just in wastewater, right. I’m talking very broadly. And so, you know, that speaks volumes to some of the hurdles that we have to cross, but we are very proudly a, a women owned business and and women led business with the terrific gender diversity, you know, across the team. And I, I hope to strengthen that as we grow

Antoine Walter:
One of my previous guests, Fajer Mushtaq, she mentioned that it’s important to have some examples for women not to say that you have to actively push a woman, but rather lead by the example. And I think somehow you founding a company being in the sea level, in a company and in the water industry, which is a male industry, let’s, let’s face it. You can serve somehow, as an example, is something you would like to be seen as an example, or would you say that too? We, we win the day that we don’t notice anymore that they are women and men in that industry.

Orianna Bretschger:
I certainly hope I’m setting a positive example.

I think that mentorship is crucial and you know, all of my co-founders feel that same way we do. We actually do a lot of outreach within middle school and high school college. You know, we take on interns all the time and largely they’re women that come and work with us. And that’s not always intentional, right. As where we’re always seeking the best candidate as possible. And we ended up with a lot of ladies, which is great. I think it’s very important to recognize the fact that because we are as a gender, you know, in the minority, within this industry, that we recognize that, that we help each other, that we bring up, you know, as many new women and minorities into the industry as we possibly can. And there’s plenty of room at the right and that the goal is equality. And so it’s not a matter of let’s get there and stuff. It’s a matter of, you know, let’s achieve some equality and maintain that equality.

Antoine Walter:
Would you have some advice to give to the future people that would like to follow your path?

Orianna Bretschger:
Yeah. Well, don’t stop the tenacious. It’s hard. It’s difficult in water. It’s a very challenging industry. It’s, it’s conservative, it’s slow to adopt new technology, but it’s also extremely fun and filled with terrific people who are very passionate about what they do. And so, you know, I’m consistently learning something new every day and that’s thrilling, right? From a business perspective, of course, there’s an additional challenge, right? How do you take a technology into a commercially successful business? And that transition is a challenge and has a recovering academic, right? I’m still learning how to speak the language. And so, and so my advice to those who, who follow that path, whether it’s in water or, you know, transitioning out of, out of research and science and technology development into commercialization is keep an open mind. Listen, listen to everybody who has, who has come before you maybe not on exactly the same path, but who has experienced similar issues and, you know, learn from them. But also you’re, you’re gonna make mistakes. And I certainly have, and continue to make them. But as long as we learn from them and push forward, and the only way you fail is when you give up. Right? And so, so you gotta stick with it. If you, if you’re passionate about it, you love it, keep doing it. And eventually that becomes infectious than other people will join you in, in your mission.

Antoine Walter:
I love that statements you fail when you give up. That’s a really good one. I’m going to keep that one. Thanks a lot for that one. Thanks a lot for everything. But it’s particularly for that one to go to the deep dive is to switch to the rapid fire questions.

Rapid Fire Questions

So here, the rule is the following is that I tried to keep the question short and in exchange to that, it’s good. If you can, on your end, keep the answers short, but of course I’m not cutting the microphone. If you have something to express, feel free. Okay. My first question would be what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on?

Orianna Bretschger:
Ooh, most exciting project. Our first really big commercial rollout to a very large food and beverage producer, super excited. It’s deploying a January. I can’t wait to talk more about it when it’s up and running, but it’s awesome. You can follow me on LinkedIn to see some of the pictures of, of how this thing is constructing.

Antoine Walter:
You’re not allowed to tell who it is. I was wondering reading your, your interviews.

Orianna Bretschger:
Not yet,

Antoine Walter:
Not even like the color of [inaudible]

Orianna Bretschger:
One of the world’s largest food and beverage companies.

Antoine Walter:
Okay. So I think you’ve got everybody teased with that. So we have to follow you as definitely. What’s your favorite part of your current job?

Orianna Bretschger:
Always learning something new. That’s

Antoine Walter:
Sounds like an advice as well. I’m sorry. Are you playing the game? And I’m cheating by making

Orianna Bretschger:
That’s all right. That’s all right. I stick to the rules, man.

Antoine Walter:
What is the trend to watch out in the water industry?

Orianna Bretschger:
Distributed treatment? Not just because we do it, but you know, the, this opportunity to deploy on-site treatment and increased water reuse capacity, right? That’s really going to change the game and enable a lot of great things within the industry. And that requires sensors requires you know new approaches for water reuse that requires, you know, everything that multitude of different technologies under development today, but we’re, we’re excited to be a part of it.

Antoine Walter:
So is it the water reuse, which is the trend, or is it the decentralized aspect of it?

Orianna Bretschger:
Decentralized aspect of it? Because water reuse is happening, right? There’s large centralized reuse projects that have been popping up everywhere, but the ability to do that in a distributed and decentralized fashion is really exciting.

Antoine Walter:
Okay. What is the thing you care about the most when you’re working on new projects and what you care the least about

Orianna Bretschger:
Most as customer satisfaction? Are we, are we going to get the job done right. And have a happy customer thing? I care about the least. It’s always a difficult one. I know. Yeah. I gotta say my least favorite thing about being a CEO and having to roll out these projects is making sure we’ve got enough insurance selecting insurance.

Antoine Walter:
That’s a fair one. I guess Jeff sources to recommend to keep up with the water and wastewater market trends.

Orianna Bretschger:
Oh yeah. There’s a lot. Well, I mean, you know, you’re, you’re a part of this. We got the water Foundry team. There’s the folks that have been, you know, watching the trends and reporting the trends for quite awhile. I think at the BlueTech research, you’ve got TMA BlueTech that does ocean and water they’ve they’ve had some interesting blue economy reports coming out. Of course there’s the global water intelligence group. Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot out there. And then there’s a lot of folks that are, are really good at reporting out and active on social media, highlighting some exciting things and trends and putting out surveys. So yeah, I mean, there’s, there’s a lot out there. It’s hard for me to come up with names right now, but certainly many different options.

Antoine Walter:
And still, I’m going to try to make you come up with a name because from all these forms, do you have someone that you would recommend me to invite on that same microphone?

Orianna Bretschger:
Oh, well, I’m mostly engaged with startup founders like myself. One person that might be very cool for you to talk to who just completed a series B in her round and does some awesome stuff. Is Nina, who is the CEO at ketos, K E T O S. And she does sensor technology in a distributed way for monitoring water quality real time. And she’ll, she can tell you more about it, but they’ve been going gangbusters this year. Super exciting to watch them grow nor your water. Also very cool. Los Angeles based female founder. There’s a theme here. You might recognize.

Antoine Walter:
It’s good to see people applying their own bias. I mean, that, that’s important. Thanks a lot for those advice I will reach out to, to definitely. It sounds interesting. So you sold me to the ID. You mentioned LinkedIn as a good way to follow you. Your website, I guess, as well, might be a good place. Is there someone else where you will like to redirect people that would be interested in learning a bit more, what you’re doing?

Orianna Bretschger:
Sure. You can follow us on Twitter at Aqua cycle. You can follow me personally at H two Oriana. You can follow us on LinkedIn. We do most of our posts through LinkedIn. We do have a Facebook page because we have to, we don’t put a lot on it. You’ll see a lot of the same types of information across those different platforms. And our, and our website will have the latest and greatest news and announcements for sure.

Antoine Walter:
Sure. Arena. Now I’m jealous. My name also starts with the NOAA. That’s a good fat, that’s really a good pan.

Orianna Bretschger:
I can’t take credit for it. I have a friend of mine came up with when I, when I started on Twitter a few years ago, it’s like, okay, I’m totally taking that one,

Antoine Walter:
But that’s a good one. Well, Ariana, thanks a lot. You’ve been an awesome guest. I hope listeners will be as interested in what you said as I was. I mean, I learned a lot, so maybe that’s because I started being stupid in the field, but still along the loss. So thanks. Thanks. I hope to talk with you again in two years or five years when you are not in five years in two years, when you are cash positive and perfect. I think that’s something we have to celebrate on the podcast.

Orianna Bretschger:
I think so too. Well, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure and hope you have a wonderful evening.

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The post How to Clear Crazy Pollution Loads in an (Electrical) Breathe appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Oxyle is an award-winning Water Start-Up offering a Swiss Solution to a Global Problem.

What we covered:

How do long-time banned substances keep polluting our raw water sources?

How and where shall we treat the round 100’000 different chemical substances one can find in water?

A revolutionary way of leveraging the most potent oxidant: the hydroxyl radical

How to smartly monitor wastewater quality and treatment efficiency

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Get the 4 Page Synthesis for free!

Micropollutants, Endocrine Disruptors, Microplastics, PFAS... Whatever we call them, these emerging target compounds are a major challenge for tomorrow's wastewater treatment

Can distributed treatments increase efficiency, by bringing specialized solutions closer to specific pollution sources?

What would be the most powerful treatment means? And how can you efficiently monitor process performance?

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Send your warm regards to Fajer on LinkedIn

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Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Full Transcript:

These are computer generated, so expect some typos

Antoine Walter:

Hi, Fajer. Welcome to the show. I’m very happy to have you.

Fajer Mushtaq:

Yes. Thank you so much for inviting me. Very excited to talk to you.

Antoine Walter:

I’d really like to start with the postcard every time. So maybe you can tell us where you are sitting right now.

Fajer Mushtaq:

Well right now I’m in my office at [inaudible]. So that’s in the basically downtown Zurich. I have a really lovely view of the Alps and the Zurich Lake and all the beautiful autumn tree colors. So I have a little younger than my office. I have a lot of plants, so it’s a good place to be right now.

Antoine Walter:

So you see, we just started them. I’m already Jarius. You mean the Swiss Alps, the Zurich Lake. That’s just a wonderful place to be so lucky you.

Fajer Mushtaq:

Yes. Thank you.

Antoine Walter:

I would be really happy to start with your story. I’ve read on your LinkedIn profile, actually, that you’ve been studying electrical engineering and you then evolve to micro nanotechnology is that’s you’re applying to environmental remediation, but that’s just what I read. What I would be interested in is the you telling the story. So what’s the story behind

Fajer Mushtaq:

Well, the two red is mostly accurate, so I did my electrical engineering bachelor’s in the UK and followed by that I worked in industry for a year. I wanted to know how it feels if and how I decided if I wanted to further education. And after working for a year in the automotive industry, I decided I would like to study more. And the reason for that was that during my bachelor’s, I also took some courses in nanotechnology and I was really fascinated by how amazing this field is starting from the fact that you might not see anything. And then when he goes to the microscope, you see a whole world living on that same surface. So I knew that this was an exciting field and I wanted to learn more. So I took a few courses in, in my bachelor’s in the UK, do my extra engineering course loved it, decided to pursue a master’s in that field as well.

And I came to each and Zurich applied for the macro in nanotechnologies course. It’s an excellent course, which really gives you a very broad overview of what all is possible in the field of microbiome technology. Be it biomedical applications, environmental applications, electronic applications. It’s amazing what all is possible. Be a learning more and more every single day. And during my master’s at ETH Zurich, I as my semester project in a lab where they are developing really smart nano materials for a wide variety of applications, but mostly biomedical. When I started working for a PhD here after my master thesis, I realized that why working in the lab, we work with a lot of antibiotics and chemicals for the experiments that literally every week, once a weekend in a university, we are allowed to collect all the water in special containers and then ship them for basically treatment.

And upon inquiry, I realized that treatment happens to be incineration for wastewater contains heavy metals. So it contains organic pollutants, et cetera. And that didn’t seem right. I thought maybe we can expect that in some other country, but insensitive and we have to advance. It’s a green, why are we burning our water? And literally within the second month of my PhD, I decided to change tracks. I was still working on developing more advanced micro and nano technology based materials, but I switched the focus from biomedical to environmental science. And my focus sole focus was to find a better way for treating the space water that we are using in the labs. And I thought if I could just start there and how is he using that can help people in every lab of ETA Zurich. That’s tons of water that we can say for burning.

And the problem basically starts from there, right? It’s a huge problem. The more you know about the field as I’m sure you do, you know, a lot of people do use incineration cause over the most toxic chemicals that I just read difficult to treat right now. So that’s what sort of sparked this joy in me that it’s something I want to explore more and see if I could contribute in any way. And so I spent the last six years of my doctoral research at ETH Zurich, researching new kind of catalytic materials that can treat water in a sort of a cost effective in a sustainable manner and prevent the release in the environment and also prevent any direct CO2 emissions coming from that treatment.

Antoine Walter:

You were exploring that field. And let me guess, I think you found something because actually if I get it right too, you just found that you are your own company and it’s not like you were just doing that in your garage. You already won several prizes. And one of which being venture, which is somehow the biggest competition you could win. It’s kind of the world cup for startups in Switzerland. And when you see the list of people that won those prices before it sets you on quite an impressive path, but you somehow started doing it, but can you pitch us your company?

Fajer Mushtaq:

Yeah, so that’s true. In the very beginning of my PhD, I sat in realizing that the materials that I was working on had definitely a big promise going forward. So my hope USD was really focusing on different types of materials and trying to find which one is the most stable, the most, the nerds in harsh environments and can be reused multiple times. And once I knew in the third year of my PhD, we have something really good. We filed for patterns, you secure the technology. And after my PhD, I applied for the bridge proof of concept grant. It is this business national science foundation grant that supports young to be entrepreneurs on the path to developing the better technology with the sustainability aspect in many cases. So that’s what I was doing for the last one year where I took these smart nano materials, so to speak.

And I tried to implement them into a way where we could easily upscale their production and we don’t cause any secondary contamination. And that is something that can be easily on an industrial scale. You know, so the last one and a half and two years have really been focused on how do we take this technology for the lab where it works in amazing, but it has to be suitable for the real world. It has to be practical. It has to be cost effective. We should be able to make large varieties of them in a, you know, reasonably manner with high level of accuracy. And that’s what I’ve been doing for the last two years as part of my ongoing research for market entry of this innovation. And then during the lockdown this year in March, I stopped spending so much time in the lab because yeah, being in the lab makes me happy as is that’s most engineers in sciences.

So I was really in way first and us be in the lab and do more treatments with new material. And I started looking at the commercialization strategy, the business plan, and that is also going to be applied to the venture competition, which will be one day before the deadline in March. And it does surprise me to this day that we did so well, honestly. And at that point we had not even founded a company. So we legally founded the company in may of this year. So we are quite young, but the idea and the innovation behind what we do has been going on for the past seven years in the lab. And now that we know that we were able to deliver successful results, especially through some of the customer proof of concepts that I have been doing for the past two years, we knew that yes, it’s depend demic.

It’s scary, but you know, what dependent make is going to be over in two years for the vaccine everything was valid, but the water crisis is just growing and yeah, we all need to be worried about the next big global crisis. I think that is why we did so well in the venture competition because we were so motivated. Like we need to get our product out there and what better platform than venture, where just the jewelry that you interact with in different stages of the competition, they are come from some really big companies. Some of them who could actually be a potential clients at that point. So we were trying to answer the question, but I was impressed the jury, right? So we were doing it to really make a case known then what we have done so far. And we got some really interesting questions for them.

Some of them asked us questions based on what is their biggest issue in water treatment in the company. And it was very useful for us to see the insights from industrial point of view, but our potential customers see the biggest problem and if we can help them. So overall, it was a great competition. And I think we developed it because the technology product we were very confident about. And then this year we focused more on the business aspect that it’s good to have an idea, but do you have the right team, right? You have the right execution plan. Do you have the right business plan? So that was our big focus this year as well.

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Antoine Walter:

You just mentioned the team. And actually before jumping into the deep dive in and talking about your solution, I noticed that your team was one of the two only teams in venture that was featuring a majority of women. And I have to say, I’ll tell you, I’m really not proud. I’m a son of feminist and father of two daughters. And you’re only the second woman which I have on that microphone. So that shows how under represented the woman are in our industry, in, in our business. And I was wondering if that matters to you or if it’s just something that we should maybe even stop noticing.

Fajer Mushtaq:

I mean, that’s a very good question. I was actually in female round table conference a few days ago, and we discussed that at the brilliant woman, how they feel about representation, you know, because it’s not just in the water treatment industry. We see the lack of women in leadership roles in many different aspects as well. And my honest opinion is that it is not something that’s really bothers me. I mean, do I notice it? Yes, of course. When you have these meetings, like today’s meeting, they were 10 people and I was the only woman on the table. It’s not something that is surprising. It’s something I had sort of accepted, right. I started doing engineering in my first class ever electrical engineering. There were 220 people there and five girls and we all sat on the first row and right behind this were 200 plus men, right?

So I got that dose early on 12 years ago. So that, that is how the nature of STEM research is. And also wastewater treatment that I realized is, and it’s not a great thing, but I’m have a very positive outlook towards that because I am seeing more and more women actually taking part in research topics and education topics there. It was mostly male dominated before. So I think we are seeing a good change. Women are feeling more and more comfortable studying whatever they want to study and not because the thing would be a better job role because of, you know, the dynamics of that role. I think that’s a very good thing. And I think going forward, we just going to see this getting better and better, obviously representation matters and wherever possible, wherever I see more women where I had not expected to see them, I get in touch with them.

I communicate with them. I say, that’s great. I’m so happy you’re doing this. I think representation matters. And if we can celebrate this, we should try and do that. So that other women, if they had any apprehensions about doing so they can just come forward and be like, Hey, you know that more of us are entering this market. So I think it should be fine. And I think if it keeps doing what we are doing, supporting choices made by people, so individual choices for their education and their career and not something that the society and poses we are on the right track. I have no worries about that. And wherever possible, I think we should really celebrate diversity based on not just gender, but in general, as well as I think that’s a very good thing. And I knew this, this wastewater treatment is heavily male dominated, but I did not realize how heavily it was.

And I realized that actually the summer for the first time when we were doing our onsite pilot at treatment plans and the very first day after having lunch I was just like, okay, I need to use the washroom. And you know, there is the women’s restroom. So you can’t do that because they’re just any women who work in those plants. They don’t have one that one month of working there all the time. That was a tough month. And that’s when you realize we need more people out there from agenda. So it’s just not even a discussion it’s just normal. Right. I don’t believe in forcing my ideas on anyone. I think if more than a woman come out there, they will be everyone’s washroom in these plants because it’s needed. Right. And in that same drive, I also, when I meet women who are excited in this area, I like to work with them.

I like to get them more excited. So yeah. For example, one of the team members, someone I worked with for her master thesis, and then she joined the company and now she works here and she’s equally, if not even more excited about this. So I don’t think it’s agenda based preference. If you’d like it, you should do it. And we are seeing more and more women out there. It’s all good. And something to celebrate. And just mentioned once in a while I feel, but nothing that we need to, I think worry about this. So feel if the trend is right and it’s going to hold,

Antoine Walter:

I think you you’re fully, right. It’s a matter of trend of examples. I remember in engineering schools, which was really about water environment, we were maybe half and half women. And so I was like, it was an engineering school. And yet we have this equality in terms of gender diversity. But then when we were just choosing our specialty and it was coming to wastewater, then I just wondered where were, where they all gone. You know, I always say, yeah, but yeah. Terms of heads. And I think we’re on the, on the right track and that’s thanks to people like you. So thank you for that. I’d like to switch to our deep dive of today. And actually our deep dive is pretty written. It’s about what you do and which kind of problems you solve. And there, I would like to start with your tagline. I was really intrigued by your tagline. The tagline of your company is a global problem, which is solved by a Swiss solution. So there’s two aspects with the global problem. And this is solution. Let me just start with the problem. What is exactly the threats that we are facing that is that global problem?

Fajer Mushtaq:

Well, the global problem that we referred to is really a multifold problem. The current technologies that have been used to treat water beat industrial or municipal are just simply not effective. And there is enough data and proof to show that we are unable to treat some of the most persistent mobile. And even in some cases, toxic chemicals with the existing technology. So what is happening is that these chemicals, because of lack of proper treatment and now being found in our surface body. So our rivers and lakes, and even in the ground and drinking water, and what should I think raise some alarms in people is the fact that even in a developed country like Switzerland, where we take our water quality. So seriously that we found in beginning of the year banned pesticides, which are carcinogenic in the drinking water of 12 cantons of Switzerland, including that of Zurich, the water that I drink from the tap every day, I’m very well aware of what’s in there.

It is something that I think it’s important to know these facts supporting that these studies are done. So we are aware of how big the problem is and that we can’t just keep zooming. The problem is going to go away. We should invest heavily in new treatments. We should really invest heavily in making sure the problematic areas where the new advanced technology does not exist should be a graded as soon as possible. So that there’s global problem, because I know you talked about example of Switzerland, but we are one of the few lucky ones. If you look around at other places of the world, India, China, the problem there is so much more tragic where in Switzerland, we can say that our ecosystems are getting harmed. Our aquatic animals are getting harmed in other countries like India, where they produce of the largest pharmaceutical production gets carried out there.

There are people that are really suffering because there’s toxic pharmaceuticals and high doses in the drinking water and kids are consuming it. So this is really the problem that we can’t just pretend that, you know, once the water leaves the facility, which is not a problem anymore, that’s not true. We need obviously proper legislative insight into these matters. And we need to talk about this. Most of the people that are aware that we need to step up our game, it’s a global problem, and it should deserve a global attention, not just a few countries who talk about it. And in that sense, we’re lucky it’s, but Dylan does talk about it a lot. We do actually have this Fitzwater ad from 24 14, which asks to implement and upgrade. I think if I’m right, I’ll have 700 more than 200 wastewater treatment plants have to be upgraded with the advanced treatment.

That’s a very good step in the right direction because we know that these micro pollutants, these pharmaceuticals, these person get products, banned pesticides, carcinogenic, insecticides are in our bodies of water. They are in our lakes. Our aquatic animals are ingesting it. We are seeing feminization of male fish because of the EDC combatants. We are seeing the presence of PFS forever chemicals in the bloods of pretty much every aquatic animals, including humans. It’s a much worse problem in some parts of us, of course, but I don’t think we can just simply accept. Yes. We all have a bit of PFS and a blood. I mean, yes. I think we need to have a more direct conversation about it. It’s a problem. And it’s a problem that our future generations are going to really have to tackle. And I think we need to start by doing our part of the road here by addressing this problem. Current treatments do not work. We need a new solution.

Antoine Walter:

You mentioned how Switzerland is forward-looking. I remember a couple of years ago, there was a study around the Geneva Lake, which said that the micro pollutants, w we say micro pollutants. So it, it sounds like, you know, nothing but prize of the Geneva Lake. It was one ton. If you put all of them together, it’s one of pollutants which are there in the Lake embedded in the Lake. And I remember at that time were looking at them personal care products. And they were like, you know, just scan and read what’s written. There is, it needed, you need all of those. And by putting this kind of pressure on the industrials, they were triggering the fact that some of those pollutants were removed from the recipient of those products. So that made the change. But that change is only on scratching the surface. Somehow you still, as you say, we have pesticides, which are banned in full Europe for 40 years, and still we find them in the buddies just because nobody’s treating them. But that leads me to my question. Where is the best place to treat that is in the wastewater treatment plant? Is it in the industrial waste water treatment plant? Is it on the drinking water side? What would be your best guess?

Fajer Mushtaq:

We honestly believe that the best way to treat waters, which contain these micro pollutants is to be as close as the source as possible. If possible, we know it’s not always going to be the case, but for example, we can have a treatment in every household complex to treat gray water before even enters the municipal wastewater treatment plants. Because we are aware that there are leakages in the pipes that’s cross-contamination issues. There are many issues when you only centralize the treatment. So I think decentralized treatment should be the norm going forward. There is nothing wrong with imagining a water cleaning system for every household, every household complex with streets, their water onsite to prevent further contamination. The same can be said for industries. Some of the biggest polluters out there where instead of thinking, how, how can we now move this world with treated in a safe way?

The conversation should be, how can we treat this wastewater directly close to where it’s being produced even more so to maybe treat this wastewater in the particular stream? So in our conversations with some of our clients, but we have learned is that every industry obviously produces different products, have different production lines in different streams. And a challenge that they face is that when everything collects in a centralized location, we have this sort of cross-contamination into mixing problem. And then the problem is even worse for them because they don’t even know how to treat it because those active ingredients from different streams have now reacted with each other, right? And the problem becomes even worse, which is now in forcing some of these people to use incineration because the existing pieces do not work. And what we have in proposing to some of these clients is how about we bring our, let’s say a medium scale reactor with streets, let’s say 10,000, 20,000 liters per day.

And we installed that at sort of the most problematic streams that you have on your production line and treated where it is. Not only is it going to simplify the treatment, because we know in a given day, there are these X amount of chemicals and nothing else in this specific stream, we can treat it. And this will not be a bigger problem by mixing everything up together and making a larger volume, which is now diluted. Yes, but still contains a vast variety of these pollutants and no one treatment can solve the problem. So we think of it as a centralized treatment is great. It has been working for awhile, but I think is time to talk about a decentralized approach where pollutants should be treated closer to the source, where they are being produced at hospitals and households, and definitely end the chemical industry or the food and beverage industry or pharmaceutical industry. I think it would benefit them more. I think in the long term, this would be more cost saving. They could make sure that they meet the regulations. Well, they can make sure that they don’t have any cross-contamination leakage issues and it’s good for the sustainable image going forward as well. So I think we need to move away from the centralized and more towards a decentralized treatment, wherever possible.

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Antoine Walter:

That is the route we’re exploring we going to the de-centralized treatment. So really next to the pollution source. So that might be even inside an industry sites, it could be that you don’t go directly at the outlet, but rather directly to the production dine, which is producing one specific pollutants, right? Yes. So how does your solution actually look like now that you speak, I see a box that you put somewhere, but that’s, I don’t know if my mental picture is right in that case.

Fajer Mushtaq:

I mean, yes, it is a black box from the outside, right? That is true. So obviously going forward, our plan is to make it as easy as possible for our customers. It will be a turnkey solution. I know we throw the word a plug and play easily around, but that is a vision to have a system that you can easily adapt to the existing infrastructure. It is already included in the existing water collection networks at the very end of the pipeline for that particular stream. So in our solution, what we plan to do is deliver these wastewater treatment reactors at varying scales. Obviously inside these reactors, we will have a catalytic material. It will be integrated. And depending upon the TUC values or whatever water matrix, it has a bit of mechanical. It has, has every reactor would obviously have a different amount of the cleaning material.

We add different arrangement of the cleaning material to get the most efficient and fastest speed possible. And this is one thing that we do right now. That’s a lot for clients every time a client makes a contact with us regarding the water requirements. We obviously ask them to provide us with the technical assessment. Is there water followed by exchange of water samples, carefully collected and shipped and stored and on these water samples. And we do our preliminary studies where we study different conditions and let them know the results from performance perspective and also from an economy and a sustainability perspective and bevy design move forward and start designing a larger reactor for them, which would really fit where they wanted to fit and where they can get the most benefits off. So I think it’s very important to have the dialogue with them early on.

So you really understand, you know, in some cases we hear from the customers, Oh, we have this problem in the centralized tanks. And we asked them, where do you think this particular chemicals is the most problematic for you construct? And in some cases they know right where it’s coming from the production chain. So we suggest why don’t we directly there and treated because then the other chemicals that you have are not problematic, they can be treated with existing treatments. And so you don’t have to have a much larger volume. That is a bigger problem for you. So these are the kinds of conversations we have with them. And our plan is obviously to provide them in a fully functioning, automated reactor, which is easy for them to use. They have to do nothing really. We control operation remotely and our catalyst as a job. And they get as quick ideas about how the cleaning is going.

Our mission has obviously to integrate our reactors with a real-time monitoring system. That’s something we have extremely passionate about. And we know, I think that’s going to be one of the areas where wastewater treatment has sat moving. You can’t just rely on a surprise audit once in a while and hope it goes well. I think we want to do is make a customer extremely confident in the treatment that they’re using with the reactors. And they can do that once they have a real time water monitoring information that is good for the customers, but it’s also very good for us. So we can always deliver, you know, a food group treatment. And that’s part of the switch solution tagline that we have. We want to do a good job. Switzerland is known for its efficiency, and we want to be efficient in what we do. And we want to show them that we are treating it. And if sometimes they have a different load in the wastewater, we want to be able to do the treatment longer and have a feedback loop from the real-time monitoring, which will help us control the treatment time to always deliver the right effluent quality at the end.

Antoine Walter:

Actually, there are many things what you just said that, let me just try to, when I would have questions on the catalytic material on the monitoring, but let’s go step by step. Let’s start with the catalytic material. That’s the hurt of what you’re offering, right? How’s that working? How does it glute? Like, did you develop it from scratch? Tell us the story of, of that catalytic material.

Fajer Mushtaq:

. Yeah. So this catalyst material was yeah, it was pretty much from scratch, starting from the nano materials that are embedded in the material to how we sort of assemble our catalyst and how we give it the vide porosity. So the materials that we work with are sort of the baseline is formed by polymers that are accepted in the wastewater treatment industry. So we’re not working with a chemical that you’re not comfortable with working with. So we are working with materials that are used quite frequently in the wastewater treatment industry, for example, in the MBR reactors. So we work with some of the polymers. Well, what we do in our technology is that we functionalize them in a specific manner. So we sort of crystallize and treat them in a way that they become functional and they will not function before we do that.

By giving them a specific prosody, we give them by giving them and embedding them with smart nanoparticles. And then we functionalize the entire catalyst on its own once all of these small ingredients add to the recipe. So it’s a multi-step process that we have to keep making it more and more efficient. So that one catalyst is really efficient. And by making this recipe from scratch and we sort of, you know, improving it every year for the last seven years, but we now have, is super flexible catalytic material that can be basically made into any shape on an industrial level really, really fast, like using a rule to rule technology pretty much. And then it can be designed to be fitted into any reactor size that a customer wants. And this material is very enough. It’s quite robust in terms of harsh chemical environments. So it’s sustainable in that sense, you don’t need to be replacing it or cleaning it.

It is actually a self cleaning material, which is one of our biggest USBs because of treatment method basically uses clean energy sources, such as we use a light sunlight would do the job, the room light I’m in right now, which is a novel white led that would activate this material, mechanical noise vibrations in the water. This material can, can sort of harness those vibrations from the water and get activated and even magnetic fields. For instance, activate this materials. There are more than one energy sources that actuates the material. And once the activated, it produces large doses of radicals, these radical treatment, AOP advanced oxidation processes, so to speak are very well established. We know the benefits it provides. We use a hydroxyl and the superoxide radicals. We don’t use ozone radicals and there are advantages of using the hydroxyl radicals specifically they’re non selectivity, meaning they will react with pretty much every other chemical that is in their surrounding.

They don’t show a resistance, certain chemicals that ozone would do. And more interestingly in the last pilot that we did to the customer, but we also realized that the part of the parliament ozone treatment that they were facing was they had an, some bromide in the water. And if you have that and deforming, carcinogenic roommates as a byproduct yeah. And they have to implement new technology according to a law. And they were hesitant to go towards ozone just because they can’t use ozone alone. They would have to have a secondary polishing treatment like pack. And then the cost is just too expensive if they have to have these treatments, you know, side by side. So they contacted us. We did the pilot with them and trauma treatment as a direct comparison to ozone. We found no bromate in our reactions. We dedicated directly the ions in the water to bromine gas with the OSTP radicals. And that’s also one of our USP. So we can apply this technology where existing technologies are able to clean yes, but producing harmful byproducts at the same time.

Antoine Walter:

So you have a catalyst that catalyst reacts with sustainable energy, which is around and the sustainable energy produces this hydroxyl radical, and that’s helps you to then oxidize, whatever kind of compounds you have there in the water. And you mentioned, did I understand that right? They’d self-cleaning so it’s just a perfect material yes. Happening because these

Fajer Mushtaq:

Radicals is invaded in the surface of the catalyst. Right. Okay. And these OAH radicals and days, Oh two radicals are well known, set cleaning agents that even this infection agents, people have been using, for example, catalyst like titanium dioxide, which is activated by light for many years for disinfection purposes because of bacteria viruses, because with radicals are extremely oxidative in nature and they will react with anything in their surroundings. And that is also something we have seen from a biological assays that we have done that after the treatment, the cells prefer to grow in the treated water more than before. And I strongly believe that has to do with some that is infection properties that we bring to the water. We be kind of sterilizing the water as well because of these radicals.

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Antoine Walter:

So it is like a form of a treatment. Once you have the reactor up and running, you don’t need to maintain it. That sounds too good to be true. Come on.

Fajer Mushtaq:

Well, that’s really depends upon what’s in the water. If you only have, for instance, only organic solvent organic compounds, then it can really go on forever, et cetera, meaning. But if you do have any suspended solids, if you have any organics in there which can sort of, you know, flock the nanopores of some catalysts, then we do have to take the capitalist out regenerated and then put it back on. And in one of the cases of water we got, we did see this docking mechanism, right? Because it was an organic species in there, which you can’t treat with the radicals. Like you treat organics. And there, we did face a part of having to do more regenerations every few months, we had to take it out, do acid bases, reflect cleanings and regenerated and keep it going. So it really depends on what’s in the matrix of the water.

If you would just give me a really nice, comfortable water sample, like the municipal water, we love that we have been using municipal wastewater treatment with the same material for months and no issues, but some of the industrial waste water samples are indeed challenging. And there we develop a strategy where we can maybe do some pre-treatments first, and then what’s coming into the reactor is free of the suspended solids and inorganic components basically. So then we can improve the lifetime and yes, as cleaning materials, underrated, and that’s the way to go, I think, in the future.

Antoine Walter:

So that was actually going to be my question about the treatment train, because if you mentioned suspended solids to be an issue, I could imagine that you could just have a pre-filter B2, sand filter and ultra filtration step of whatever, but then you get rid of the suspended solids and then you would have your catalyst. How do we insert it today into a treatment train? Is it like you put it really at the source and you put roll water on it, or is it something that you implemented between existing treatment?

Fajer Mushtaq:

We see ourselves as a polishing step, just how as a nation also see, so we are a touch-free treatment. We do require suspended solids, big biological matter to be treated beforehand. And for these pilots that we do, we normally obviously do a pre-treatment and we do them in the laboratory. Like you said, we do situation. We do ultra filtration to remove some of those problematic pollutants that can be removed well with existing treatments, and then comes the challenge of how can you remove the stuff that he can’t see. And it’s a little water and it’s hard to remove, right? And that’s our expertise. So for the pre-treatment steps, we usually collaborate with other people who have expertise in providing, let’s say a membrane bio-reactors right. So we connect our reactor with them in succession, and that’s how we do a treatment. And so these cases, and if you go to a municipal wastewater plant, that’s the best case to try.

They already have a primary and secondary treatment installs. There’s no issue at all in the biologically treated water, we just entered the one directly into a reactor. We don’t have to do any treatments, any pretreatment there it’s quite cleared. It’s suspended solids, but then that’s free water. We do need a, for a stage in there. And for that to be a working with people who have direct experience in doing reverse osmosis infiltration, and then the water will come into our reactor. So it will be a multi-stage process. And not just our reactor cannot just solve all the water problems that a customer would have. So you see here, you see, it’s not too good to be true. You see, we need other people’s help.

Antoine Walter:

I said that as a joke, you know, I’m really impressed by it. I think I understand now how the catalysts work. I mean, on the surface, not in depth, but you mentioned something about monitoring. I’d like to come to that. What exactly are we monitoring? Because if I recall what was tested in Switzerland, there were many things, there was this cud monitoring, there was some biological monitoring. And what exactly are you tracking?

Fajer Mushtaq:

What we know about micro pollutants for example, is that they absorb and they fluorescence at different wavelengths, right? So if you want to do a really quick test, you can just look at the UV value at two 54 nanometer and see how these micro balloons are absorbing the light. And then you more or less know how many max exclusions were gone, because there’s an established rule that the absorbance intensity goes down by 40%. That means 80% of micro pollutes remove it. So there’s a trend that is established well in terms of getting a quick answer, but what we are doing is being going a step forward because absolve itself really relies upon the fact that water has to be absolutely clear, not turbot, which is really not the case for a lot of industrial science. So we are looking at fluorescence as one of the methods where we can combine it with Raman spectroscopy and do like [inaudible].

So we are working with other companies that have the expertise and we working together and sort of correlating lab based testing, where we know how much viewed was removing that treatments and what that means for the spectra of the fluorescence, for example. So that’s one of the things we are doing apart from that. We’re also looking at new innovative methods, such as a microwave residents technology. That’s a completely a new hair in this field. And we are working with a player in this who has experience with that. And we’re trying to sort of retrofit their sensors that they are developing is especially for us in this case, into our reactors and do the next pilot testing with them. So like the last pilot we did, we already had a collaboration with a second company that does real-time monitoring with deep fluorescence, and we can show the customers, you know, you can see the spectrum going down with every minute of the treatment.

And then we did the offline analytic treatments, you know, HPLC, GCMS of standards. And we were able to correlate that spectra intensity here means this. And this spectra is very different from the existing absorbent session is that you do right. This can be applied to all types of waters, you know, murky turbot, it’s quite good. So we are using machine learning. We’re using AI technology to read out from the spectrum and quickly present online to the customers what’s happening with their water. It’s really interesting because it’s not just treatment. I think what really bothered me in the beginning was I had to wait for a few days to get the results of the treatments. It gives the HGC and GCMS the ICP, and it takes some time, right? I was sort of impatient. I wanted to know, did it work and how good was it?

So that is when I realized we have to do better at a better real-time monitoring. And we have to be able to give the customers that they are happy with how the treatments are going and that we have a feedback loop control. And we really have tried that in the last two pilots, having a real-time monitoring sensor attached to our reactor, we have the machine learning, we have trained the software to know only when this spectrum reaches this level for this water, should the valve open, should the water be getting out until then the treatment goes on? So we are doing studies like this, so we can always guarantee the best cleaning performance. And we are teaching our system to AI and machine learning to learn these tricks. So yeah, that’s what we are doing

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Antoine Walter:

Are really very interesting at the border between those two last topics between monitoring and the place in the treatment trend. You mentioned that contrary to the use of ozone, where you would have the byproduct and the bromate bromate problem. You don’t have that because you’re working with a hydroxide, but if you have a look at the way ozone is used in Switzerland, when it was on, is put in wastewater, you have to put after a sand filter to use an existing sand filter as a pollution step. What about your process if you are using your process? Okay. There’s no, no matter of bromine bromate, but still, if it’s an oxidation, I could imagine that there might be some byproducts who take a big molecule and you break it into smaller, which are then faster biodegradable, but still it’s still the, the, the small pieces. So did you test that? Because I know it has always been a debate about the toxicity just right after the treatment we know in the long run that the toxicity is going to get much better, but just write up the treatment. That’s always the touchy points, let’s say.

Fajer Mushtaq:

Yeah, we totally agree. Just to give you a quick example of how we see that problem. In the last we did our reacts to treatments for the catalyst. And at the end, we had a way to sample water directly from the reactor. And then in one way, we were sampling the water that was coming out of a, sort of a post concentration step. And so we took waters from both places. We did a deep analytics, found no roommates in both cases did biologically, I says, found notes, had toxic essays, and also looking at the fluorescence intensity, because what is also important to know is that once you break these compounds down with the oats radicals, you do break them into smaller pieces. We agree. I will be. So interestingly at the fluorescence spectra, the real-time monitoring was that after the sand situation there, the spectra does decrease even more.

So this is clear that we are breaking those compounds with always radicals in the small products. They don’t have any roommate toxic effects, but they are still there. And that is where this fluorescence spectra and that real-time monitoring came really handy. I know there’s a debate out there. I recommend the user real-time monitoring to answer those questions like we did here. So we know that they’re there and the sand filtration absolves them. And this spectrum becomes almost like a water spectrum, Clearwater spectrum. So we know that those are absorbing on those cases, but we still have to definitely do is extract those compounds from the sense of situation. And we look at what they are and how bad they could be. What we did only so far was just look at some mutagenic essays and estrogenic essays off the water collected directly to treatment. And also after the post sand filtration step.

And we didn’t find any discrepancies, any differences in there, but that being said, as you are excited about what happens when they break from, I find it fascinating and how much time, what products are formed, right? This is interesting. I know that a million different combinations that can take place West radicals can attack a ch bonds. He all bond [inaudible] randomly anytime. So it’s very hard to predict that. And that is also why we are working with some experts from Europe whose specialty really is doing a modeling on a degradation product. So we are working with them to really understand at what time, what should we expect? And we do that by their modeling and doing analytics of water that we collect every minute, for example, and seeing what are we finding in the water? So I think going forward, we would definitely have some more interesting results to share in this front.

I think it’s fascinating to know that so that we can even control our treatment time better. If we know that that’s what we have after just five minutes is not problematic anymore, can be treated. Maybe we don’t have to run the peak of the 10 minutes, right. We can just save in costs and time. So I think once we have more data on that, that would be good. And I think the trend in this area also is to really take help from modeling and kinetic dynamic, kinetic modeling and using machine learning. I think these two fields can really go in because yeah, doing a testing for everything takes much, but if you have simulations and AI to guide you, that is the future to get faster answers to these questions.

Antoine Walter:

You’ve mentioned a couple of partners that you’re working with, a partner for modeling a partner for sensors, I guess, maybe a partner to make it happen like an installer or this kind of companies educating to treatment. How do you arrange that? Can you name some of those partners or are you working today?

Fajer Mushtaq:

I don’t think I’m at Liberty to disclose the exact name, but I can definitely discuss how do we get in contact with them. But in some cases we were contacted by them. For example, in the case of machine learning, we were contacted by the company as they were looking for another approach to ozone. So they had already done some testing with real-time monitoring, with ozone treated water, and they were looking for a different approach that is always radicals. And they heard about us through the university landscape basically ETH contacted us and we decided to exchanging some samples. And to their knowledge, we learn so much about the spectrum [inaudible] samples. And we saw how different aspects were looks. That that was fascinating. In some cases, these really start from getting the word out that you exist, you’re doing something cool. And if someone is interested, they should contact you.

And in some cases, you know, it’s really us trying to call an email and get in touch, ask for a meeting. And this first, what we are doing, what the bigger picture is and make them see the potential in that in a collaboration. Because I feel sometimes that she can be able to conservative and changing and trying a new thing out. But I think if you convince them with enough case studies and data from these customer pilots, they start listening and they’re interested. And that is how we are working with such a diverse portfolio of collaborators, because yeah, that’s one thing to say, we just bring the reactor on site and our job is done that I think we can do so, so much better by giving the customers a real-time monitoring, but telling them what’s in the water using AI and machine learning to be figured these important topics out what’s left in the water and providing all this information to the customer online, right?

So they can access it whenever they want. So really trying to make this field with some people sometimes say, it’s an unsexy field. I disagree. It’s very interesting to make it from this un-sexy point of view to a sexy pump. You know, you have an app for that. You can test what’s happening with your reactor. In fact, it helps you, it tells you what’s in it. And I think that should be the way going forward so that there is a lot more transparency and a better checks and balances like for us, this whole real-time monitoring, for example, comes from the point that we really want to tell them that it’s clean and we want to be a hundred percent sure ourselves that what we have done it’s clean. And if you don’t have a constant checks and balances, how do you guarantee that sometimes there could be differences in production streams.

There could be differences in the dilution of the water. How do you correct for that? And when as people are there, how do they do that right now? They don’t right. They just trust that everything is signed and that when the audit comes, everything goes smoothly. I think we can do so much better for our customers. I think a lot of them really are trying to have an easier life when it comes to wastewater treatments, there are in troubles. I think we can help them. If the industry is trying to change small companies, new companies like us, the different vision to solve this problems should do all we can to help them change. And that’s where we are.

Antoine Walter:

You mentioned the bigger picture and the, you mentioned customers and pilots. So where are you exactly in terms of business deployments of your solution pilot stage already with the commercial references, or how do you see those next steps?

Fajer Mushtaq:

This whole year has been sort of a, you know, building a credibility phase for us, where we started off the year by doing proof of concept studies, mostly to lab exchange of samples and, you know, studying how we can treat it, providing them an assessment. And then based on the design, we propose for them to this group of concepts, we then move the step forward towards onsite pallets. And recently they also started doing some paint pallets for the customers, in which case it required longer time and more resources from us. So we are still at the stage where we have shown on sites that are treatment roads fixed and periods of time. We have shown to real-time monitoring, whether it means to add analytics, whatever that means. And the next stage really for us is to raise more funding. So we are in the middle of a fundraising stage.

So we can literally build more of these prototypes. We call them prototype version two, which will be integrated with the real-time monitoring option and have an online platform integration. So that can run on the customer sites for a few months so that they understand the new products. It’s not too spooky, it’s just new and fancy. They can try it out with all these new features that we have been building up slowly together. And the idea is to really start from providing our customers with a small scale reactor first. So that product we aim to be in the market by the second or third quarter of 2023. So in two years we envision the first product is out there and that is exactly the solve this decentralized cleaning needs, right? So it’s kind of going back to the full circle. The idea for this came from a lab in a chemistry lab at ETH Zurich university, whereabouts 60 people work pretty much a given day.

It’s, it’s a very busy lab, it’s a big lab. And we collect a lot of water, a thousand liters in some cases of contaminated water that we send off for birding once a week, the idea came from there. And our first customers that we envisioned are going to be like, we institutions like ETH Zurich, where we have one of the small scale tabletop reactors installed in every lab saying we want to do with research and development institutions for be at a biomedical company or pharmaceutical company, have these attached closer to the source and clean about 2000 to 5,000 liters per day. So really small quantities, but really a solution at the source attached. And the problem is solved. There that’s the first product. And then a year later we would be setting a medium scale reactors, which would be ideal for pharmaceutical companies that we are working with. And agrochemical companies that require 200,000 liters per day per stream. So that’s the size we have in mind for 2024. And obviously the big prize is a large scale ones, which will come in the next five, six years

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Antoine Walter:

You intended go to markets. Do you think you will deliver the turnkey solution? And that’s what you’re going to do on the long run? Or is it something that you would make available to the players in the market speeds for, to take Swiss example like [inaudible] or alpha level or Suez to give just some names? How do you see that?

Fajer Mushtaq:

I mean, in the very beginning, the small-scale reactors that I mentioned, I think that early stage, we want to be able to do it ourselves. I think we can do that working in collaboration with the manufacturing partner. So in our business models, we work with the manufacturing partner that we work closely in the product development cycle right now. And then we work at a blueprint that makes sense is gets to buy certification to there. And they make the reactors for us oxide manufacturers and provide the catalyst for these reactors. That is a recurring business model. If your water is requiring that the catalyst be changed once a year, once every two years, we will be making money from the recurring scale of the catalyst at any maintainers and just providing you with this AI based water services. So that’s how we would like to generate revenue going forward, the catalyst and the service itself of telling them how the water looks.

The manufacturing partner produces these reactors and basically delivers them on customer sites and provides certification. And I think for the small scale reactors, we strongly believe this model will hold. That is something we know is we’ll be able to do, but definitely going forward for the medium and large scale, we will be collaborating with water utility companies. We have already opened talks with some of the large players in this field. And I think the more and more case studies we do, as soon as the small-scale reactors are functioning in the market for your, we would like to, at that point work more closely with these global versus energy companies. They earlier plenty of them out there, and they have shown excitement that we’ll be doing is great. And then going forward, our idea would be to work in collaboration with them, use their sales and distribution networks. And even a licensing model is also on the table. Nothing is off the table in the future. And yeah, it’s a big plans. Yeah.

Antoine Walter:

I have a last question in that section, you’ve mentioned the cost effectiveness, and you’ve mentioned that if you compare your solution, for instance, to a, someone that would have to combine ozone and activated carbon, your solution would be much better in terms of cost effectiveness. Actually, that would a huge step forward and ups have always been praised as something which is really, really effective, but always is something which is very expensive. So if, if you have the golden nuggets that is same time, has the effectiveness and is now cost-effective, then you’re really onto something you do do some comparative study against all other technologies.

Fajer Mushtaq:

Yeah. So the last few studies that we did with the customer’s water, we did, we tried to have a better understanding on the energy requirements of the system and the cost. And our preliminary assessment shows that to treat, for instance, say for me to cube of water, treated on treatment would cost between 0.5 to 0.6, Frank. So half a Frank for me to cube is the treatment costs that we would be providing. These are really sort of a modest assumptions. That’s based on what we have learned in the small-scale reactors and we are interrelating, but we still believe that once we have the last systems, we can even drive it down to about 0.2, a 0.3 francs for me to queue. And I think that would make us really come in line with either ozone or patch treatment, not the combination, of course. And when we talk about wastewater treatment for industrial clients, some of them, the ones we talked to, a lot of them use incineration at the moment. And there, there is really no comparison how much money we saved those guys. So there are, we don’t even try to do calculations. Anything is fine for them, as long as it’s under installation price, which is ridiculously high. And when we compare technology to ozone on a pack, I think with a preliminary analysis beyond the same ballpark figure, and we know that the better react to modeling and better design, we can even drive it down to the last few reactors.

Antoine Walter:

Incredible well for the non Swiss people, listening to us, just a one-on-one small precision one, Swiss Franc is about $1 and a it’s very close to be one Euro as well. So just that people get a scale of things, but it’s really incredible numbers, especially of course, if you compare it to incineration, it is really breakthrough that you have here February. It could be speaking another Howard with you about that matter. But I think at some point it’s going to be interesting much more for me than for the audience. And I want to be cautious of your time as well. So if it’s fine with your proposal to switch to the rapid fire questions

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Rapid Fire Questions:

Antoine Walter:

So this last section, actually the ideas that I tried to keep the questions short and for you to keep the answers short, of course I don’t cut the microphone. So if you need to explain a bit more, you’re absolutely free. So let’s start with the first one. What is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Fajer Mushtaq:

There are a few, I know that’s not the answer you’re looking for, but the most exciting would be where we are treating as particular stream for a customer. The CIMA is part of the hydrogen production stream. So they are trying to make hydrogen in a more green manner with the stream, but that also unfortunately produces some pollutants for them that they would like to find a green technology to get rid of. And we are working directly with them for that as we feel it’s part of the same sustainable vision that we have for the planet. If someone is trying to build technology around a more sustainable hydrogen production, we would like to help them and make sure that the treatment of that production stream is also sustainable and they don’t have a negative side effects in that. So that I feel is something I’m very excited about because it’s a very, very green project overall.

Antoine Walter:

So you’re treating something in gas or is it in water as well?

Fajer Mushtaq:

I know it’s in water. So the it’s just the process condensate that comes from that production stream for hydrogen production. They need to be treated once the hydrogen has been produced. So we help them with that choosing a technology.

Antoine Walter:

Okay. What’s your favorite part of your current job?

Fajer Mushtaq:

There are a few, I mean, definitely presenting the treatment results analytics to customers like we did today. That was very exciting, very proud day. We loved that. And I think I have to say the most important thing is the sort of privilege where we can, you know, directly work with the customers and hear their problems and sit together as a team and design a solution that helps them. It really helps them out. And the fact that this sort of whole thing started in the chemistry lab one day for me, you know, six years ago, and now we’re out there trying to really help people. That is the most favorite part. Like really having an idea and following through it and trying to really create a positive change to that. What is

Antoine Walter:

The trend to watch out in the water industry?

Fajer Mushtaq:

I think since we do so much with wastewater, I really tell everyone, like we will stop saying wastewater at some point and just call it water treatment because it’s not just a wastewater, like there’s so many things we can do with wastewater. You can really design a treatment that helps you reuse the water, recycle the water. We should not be wasting this water. It should not be getting burned. It should not be getting into our rivers and lakes when it’s not clean. So I think the recovery of precious resources from the water is definitely going to be something we will watch out for and it’s been going on for awhile and it’s definitely the right trend, water reuse and water treatment. Reduce new water consumption is definitely the next one. And I do believe maybe I’m not joining the others that some sort of a real time monitoring option that provides a data to the customers on cloud in real time, I think is going to be something we all need going forward.

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Antoine Walter:

I love all your answers so far, but this one is really close to my hurts. Or thank you for that one. What is the thing you care the most when you’re working on new projects and the, what is the one you care the least,

Fajer Mushtaq:

Huh? The most would have to be when I get to know what’s in the water and what is their biggest problem. And if I also believe that it’s really a big problem. For example, if a customer tells me they have PFS in the water and they are not treating it well, and it is getting into the groundwater, I will be more interested to take that project in because we know how problematic PFS and groundwater is. So if I know the scope of the problem, and I know that the existing treatments can’t really help, that’s a challenge for us and I like challenges. So that is the favorite part for me when taking on a new project, because there’s so many exciting projects to take on and limited time, if it can really make a difference and there’s no other good technology to do that and they have a problem, we will take that problem on. So that is exciting. The least exciting. I don’t know if there is any pilot is least exciting for me, honestly, I feel like I’m involved in every project. We, I still fine. Not maybe when we have bigger and we have more things to do, I’m sure I will find the bookkeeping and all those things, not so exciting so far. It’s all fine

Antoine Walter:

Sources to recommend, to keep up with the latest market trends.

Fajer Mushtaq:

I mean, what I’ve always been doing throughout the PSD and now is I look at any new articles that are published. For example, the global intelligence. I love their takes on different CTOs at different companies. And they always tell you how the market is growing the trend lines. I like reading their assessments and their reports. I think they do a great job. We also have the international association. There are many of these word associations in different countries as well, like closely follow the ones that report details in India as well. I’m from India. So I care about how we are changing our water view in that country. I think we have a long way to come there. So it’s not just one resource. I try to do that in the places I care about and we think we can make the biggest impact. So these journals and these reports are always very good.

Fajer Mushtaq:

And I closely also follow. I know it sounds weird to say, but there’s legislative process. For example, at the EU level, the water frame directed, it’s really interesting to see how they’re feeling about certain and so far, they have mostly either banning them or putting them in a watch list, but not outright you know, regulating them. And I keep following them to see where the trend holds there. So yeah, watching how these different countries legislate on that two EPA guidelines or U guidelines is also something I followed quite closely. And now I have to say, I’ll be listening to the wastewater podcast as well. I have started doing that and I have to say, and being, learning a few things. So thank you for doing that.

Antoine Walter:

Thanks a lot for mentioning, but from all these sources and from all these people you are working with, who would you have someone that you could recommend me to invite at that same microphone?

Fajer Mushtaq:

I could recommend someone who has not met, but whose work I have been following, because I just wanted to maybe see what they have to say is that allowed, of course. I have, for example, I’ve been closely following what this, a UK based company, you also do AOP treatments. They do a chemical oxidation and they have been doing quite well. And once they started, I felt there was a right negative attitude in the skill that they will not do well. They have been doing well, they have expanded to China. So I’m happy to see that they were able to make it so far in this field and that they are excelling. So I think it would be very interesting to see how they feel and if they found the beginning challenging, can you repeat the name? R a R V I a it’s from UK.

Antoine Walter:

So thanks so much for this advice. Let me just before closing, where should I redirect people that would be looking for you oxide that ch is there any other place where you want people to have a look at what you’re doing?

Fajer Mushtaq:

We also constantly updated information, LinkedIn profile, and our website is the best place. Obviously, LinkedIn is there. We are also in Sparrow and if someone wants to reach us, I’m always happy to talk over LinkedIn. And my email address is also on a website, so they can also do that.

Antoine Walter:

Perfect Fajer. You’ve been an awesome guest. We thanks a lot for everything you’ve shared today. I hope that we can meet again, maybe in two or five years just to have a at your, your path and where you are standing, because I think you’re onto something really exciting. So thanks a lot.

Fajer Mushtaq:

Yeah. Thank you for inviting and wonderful conversations. Always nice to talk about these issues with someone from the same industry, right? So it’s, it’s, it’s fascinating. It was great. Thanks for inviting me. And I’ll definitely take you up on the two to five years old.

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The post How to Solve a Global Challenge in an Easy, Affordable, Innovative, and Efficient Way? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

SUEZ in North America is the US’ second-largest environmental services firm.

What we covered:

Back to the roots: Why do we treat water? And what are the challenges that the water industry still needs to address?

What are #PFAS compounds and how are they regulated? Is it a major concern or the latest trend?

How can one treat them? Which routes does SUEZ currently explore?

On a broader level, what are Utilities’ future challenges?

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨

Get the 4 Page Synthesis for free!

Why it's important to go back to the roots: why do we treat water and why do we have to adapt to today's challenges?

How are the 4'700 PFAS substances regulated? How do they behave in water? What is their impact, and how is it handled, state by state?

How does a major environmental service company like SUEZ react to this pressing challenge, and what are the treatment options on the table?

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Resources:

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Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Full Transcript:

These are computer generated, so expect some typos

Antoine Walter:

Hi, Anthony, welcome to the show. I’m very happy to have you. It’s been a while since I didn’t talk with you. So it’s good to have this podcast as an occasion to exchange thoughts with you. And let me start with a new Europe and joke. You know, we are recording that on the 6th of November and to my knowledge, you still don’t have a president, right?

Anthony Dusovic:

Well, we do have a president, but we don’t know who our president will be in January of 2021. So this is going to take awhile. You know, this is a process. This is a new process into the world of COVID. It’s a, certainly a test of many things, you know, be it politics process and everything else. And look, we’ll see, you know, all we can do is wait and see. It’s like waiting for your child to be born. You don’t know which day it’ll usually happen. You just wait and see,

Antoine Walter:

You’ve actually mentioned that there were the COVID, how is it on your end of the word? Are you also working from home? And like we do doing that daily Europe. Yes.

Anthony Dusovic:

We shut down our office early in March. And the majority of us who are not considered, I hate to use the word. We’re not essential employees, but we don’t need to be out in the field or operating a plant are working from home. You know, we’ll talk a little bit about the business, but you know, our utilities are essential services that we provide water and wastewater services, and we need to make sure operations run. So we did a lot of work in the background, ensuring our supply chains were strong, ensuring that managing, you know, who’s getting sick, who’s not getting sick. We were quite successful. We had a very, very low incidents in Suez, North America of COVID cases. And people worked, you know, when a main break happens, people are out getting the job done. We really tested the resilience of the organization and the people who work in the organization. So, you know, overall though, we are in a hotspot, as you know, you know, I’m in the New York area, you know, New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, this is the, what we call the tri-state area. So there were restrictions and you know, personal restrictions some work restrictions, but things marched on. So it was a great Testament to the will of a lot of people.

Antoine Walter:

That’s the positive way to look at things. Well, you’ve been slightly touching the, the elements of your role and your managing aspect, but I was just curious about your path, if I’m right, you’re coming from a technical background and you eventually made it if I might say so to management roles, can you maybe tell us what were the steps?

Anthony Dusovic:

Absolutely. To understand the bit about my steps. I think you need to understand a little bit about where we come from in the world of Suez. So I know a lot of people know the company, but as many of your audience know, Suez is a global group, about 90,000 people, strong, you know, our purpose is shaping a sustainable environment. Now the vision of the companies to be an agile leader in environmental services by 2030. Now this doesn’t necessarily mean we want to be the biggest company by revenue or by size, but concretely it means three main things. One is we want to be a partner of choice for customers with innovative solutions and technologies. We want to remain a pioneer and solve the planet’s greatest challenges. Our company, whether in the U S or in France has a long history in France. You know, we were the original developers of the Suez canal here in the U S we started as the Hackensack water company of 1859.

And we want to focus on our three main strong activities, water waste, and smart environmental solutions. It’s kind of interesting that in different parts of the world, people see Suez or think of Suez as a different company or different sets of expertise. You know, for example, in some parts of the world, we’re known as a waste management and recycling services company. In other parts of the world, we’re known as an equipment technology provider or a water concessionaire. If I bring this back home to the United States, people know us as a technology company, which was obviously reinforced by the acquisition of GE water and they know us quite well as an operations and maintenance operator. In fact, what I always find really interesting is that here in the U S we are one of the top three of 13 major investor owned, also known as regulated, what are utility companies?

And we serve as the water company for over 2 million people. I needed to tell you that because that ties back to my career. So I started, as you know, we worked together for some years. I started in the technology side of the business. I sold equipment and sold technologies to utilities be they municipal or private utilities. One of one of my customers was company called United water, which is Suez water regulated utilities today. So I was always intrigued by the regulated business model. It’s really a in terms of business, it’s a really interesting model, a little bit different than what we’re used to. So because of this width and broad depth of Suez, I was able to move on over, to understand both the supplier side of the business and get the three 60 view as the owner side of the business as well, which is a great opportunity to working in a large company like this.

So you asked a question about my technical background. Yeah. I started as an engineer. I actually started my career in the defense industry. We were doing radar systems for jet fighters, and about seven years at a school, I moved over into the environmental field and I kind of never looked back. So I started with a little company called [inaudible] at the time, which was partly owned by Suez and partly owned by another major industrial company called [inaudible]. I grew through that company. Had a lot of great opportunities. I started in project management and eventually became the CEO of the Americas. Is it a typical path in our industry? I think in the large organization industry, it is a pathway. You can start as an engineer and work your way into management. I think there’s other ways to get where you want to get as well in our industry. You know, there’s plenty of folks who are doing things like in private equity, smaller startup type business. There’s a lot of disruption in our industry going on now with all these tiny little startups, you know, seeded venture capital, private equity, and so on, but I’d say it’s what you make of it

Antoine Walter:

I’m interested in what you just said about the startups, because I don’t know if I wasn’t watching before, when I was working for Suez, I had the impression you will have the big groups and I didn’t see that those startups around and over the past couple of years, you’re right. I think there’s, there’s really something happening about disruption, about startups entering that field. What’s your take on that? Do you think that’s the future of our industry to have those startups around them and to have them disrupt Suez and the likes,

Anthony Dusovic:

You know, from the disruption point of view? I think I see it as a couple of ways. I see it as potentially disrupting some areas, but potentially complimenting other areas. You know, a lot of, a lot of the goals of the startup companies aren’t necessarily to become the biggest water treatment company or the biggest technology company. We could talk about digital because I think there’s a lot there. I think a lot of the goals of these companies are to provide something very unique and then have a big attractive company with a lot of mass in our industrial environment, acquire the technology let’s say, or partner on the technology and really create more value added. So I think there’s room for both. And I think innovation is driven by that world. And I think it’s also a generational thing. There’s a new generation of young people coming out of schools and coming into the workforce. And they’re used to things like hackathons and design sprints, and all this wonderful stuff. Whereas, you know, our industry had followed the old consulting engineering model where you start with a plan and then you do some assessment and then you do some alternatives and then you do designs and then you go on and on and on and on. So I think it’s great for the industry. And I think it’s great for the future.

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Antoine Walter:

I’m sorry, because I took you to a sidetrack, but it was interested by this startup and disruption aspect because it really, I think that’s, that’s something which is happening right now, but let’s circle back to you. What’s your role?

Anthony Dusovic:

Sure. So today I am part of the utility regulated utility side of Suez. And here in North America, I am the vice president of special projects. I’m working on two main initiatives to help the utility out. I’ll talk about one of them today. Mainly one is really helping our procurement teams do some process improvements and manage vendor resilience and vendor risk. The other is helping the company deal with the issue facing pretty much at least the United States and other parts of the world is which is basically getting ready to deal with PFS regulations.

Antoine Walter:

So actually you teased it. PFS is going to be our deep dive for today. Let me start. I have to be negative sometimes. You know, I’m very positive on that podcast, but let me be now the devil advocate back in the time where you and I were working at, Zunia the big topic around those micro pollutions in the U S was one, four dioxane. At that time in Europe, they were regulations about micro pollutants, especially in Switzerland. And then there was big discussions around endocrine disruptors. There was microplastics, heavy metals and all that stuff, and now it’s be fast. So now if really I was to be, I said, I’m the devil’s advocate, but is it a trend? Is it is to fashion or do you think there’s a real problem with PFS?

Anthony Dusovic:

That’s a good question. So if I go backwards in time a little bit and say we as a world community have probably dealt with the most, I’ll call it the low hanging fruit. We’ve cleaned up the water and the environment in areas where you drink some water, you get sick you’re so, you know, you have to run to the bathroom or you die. We’ve we’ve done those very basic fundamental things very well. So they very apparent, you know, that they have those health effects. They were immediate. You can see an immediate payback by doing treatments and so on. Fast-Forward we’ve got, what do we have? We have technology, which is improved. We can measure things to levels that were unheard of years ago. I mean, we’re measuring P foster the parts per trillion range. That’s one, number two, we’re looking at things and trying to figure out, you know, what these health effects really are out into the future.

Cause they may not be as apparent today for us. So is P facet thing. I think there’s science says it’s a thing was one, four doc sign a thing. Yeah, I think that was the thing too. The question is with so many things that we can measure today, which thing is the most important thing at what cost and what technology do you have available to purify or remove some of these things. And, you know, you have to kind of pick and choose. And of course, on top of that, there’s an industry and regulatory framework around all these chemicals and compounds and things that kind of have a force to play. If I could say that

Antoine Walter:

You mentioned the regulation aspect, I did my homework just before our discussion. I was checking what is regulated in the U S and the only thing I found is PFA and PFS. And if I’m right, PFS is about almost 5,000 different compounds. So is it right that you have two which are regulated and why only two?

Anthony Dusovic:

Good question. So you talk about 5,000 compounds. That that is a fact, you know, PFO, PFO S in some areas like New Jersey, we have a limit on PFNA as well. Those are the long chain compounds. Basically they were deemed early on. They were the, I’ll say they were the original develop compounds. And there was research and study then on them by the EPA sometime ago, because they were health effects. You know, I go back to Hoosick falls, New York in 20,014, or so there were all these lawsuits and all these health effects found. They were the first ones to be limited because they were the first ones to be looked at by the EPA, the new ones, the shorter chain, and the ones that have come since they claim have less health effects. But we don’t really know. So the question is 5,000 compounds. The EPA has very strict mandates on how it does its evaluation timeframe, number of contaminants and so on. So there’s a process that you can’t really test 5,000 compounds at once. And do you have the technology to test all these 5,000 compounds for some really better or some worse, what are the compound effect? So there’s a lot of questions. So I think you have to start somewhere is ultimately the answer. And that somewhere happens to be basically PFO PFS. And to some extent, PS,

Antoine Walter:

You mentioned New Jersey to have this additional component, which is regulated. Is it really only New Jersey, or do you have all the areas in the States where by the federal aspect, you would have a different compound regulated there that would not be regulated here?

Anthony Dusovic:

That’s actually a good regulatory question. So there’s a couple of things at play here. One is where’s the research and the science on a compound. So the EPA is a federal agency or a federal body that basically tries to create their mission, was to try to create a uniform standard of water quality, basically throughout the nation. There’s an issue of course, of state’s rights as well. You know, the essence of the U S constitution was States versus federal rights. So PFS, you know, the main concentrations are around industrial areas, folks who produced and use these chemicals and military basis. So once the EPA sets a guideline and you know, there’s a bit of a nuance there, the States basically requirement is to set guidelines, at least as stringent. They can’t be less stringent, but they certainly can be more stringent. So, yeah, there’s flexibility too, to set your regulation based on what you see. But for example, a state like New Jersey, isn’t going to pick PFN just on their own. There’s going to be some science behind it. There probably be some regulatory research from the U S EPA and other and other bodies as well.

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Antoine Walter:

The federal regulation has to be then translated locally, which sounds a bit like, like it works in Europe. You know, there was this water framework directive in the year 2000, and we are thinking 2020 and parts of that framework directive are still not translated into every state. So is it similar in the UK?

Anthony Dusovic:

Yes, absolutely. To some extent, you know, you’ve basically, if the EPA sets a regulation like right now, if we stick to the PFAS situation, the EPA is only set. What’s called a health advisory level, Hal out at 70 parts per trillion, that is not a regulatory enforceable limit that’s notification that says, Hey, you know, your water may contain chemicals to this limit, which we believe may be hazardous to your health. So now the States in this regard had the opportunity to stay with the Hal only provide health advisories or create regulatory limits on their own certain States, which have been noted to have of course, industrial areas, military bases, and so on. I have created their limits, New York and New Jersey. So I talked about those States because they are States that are in our territory. If I could say that. So we’re focusing on those States, but you know, Michigan as well, a lot of manufacturing, California, you know, others. So there’s a wide variety of what people are doing around the country around this issue.

Antoine Walter:

I’m curious, just because you mentioned the military and I know that’s one of your field of expertise. What exactly is the military doing, which is generating PFS. Yeah. So they invented

Anthony Dusovic:

These wonderful compounds called firefighting foams. So basically on the military sites, they did two things. They did firefighting trainings. And if you have a runway where you have an airplane crashing, skidding out, whatever the case, you might have a fire, you basically, you flood the area with these foams. They immediately put out the fire and they were super, super efficient in that regard. What makes these such a challenge to treat is the fact that they’re so effective in what they do, right? So firefighting foams have been the number one issue around military bases and the federal government around the military basis is looking at another subset of P phos as well, in addition, and not to get into all the details. But yeah, so there are different things are being looked at by different priority.

Antoine Walter:

From the consumer point of view, I’ve read that some associations have said that they would like to see a regulation, which says PFS is bent in the sense that you should not have more than one part per trillion. And I guess for the 4,700 compounds, which sounds ambitious, how do you come to a deal between consumers and utilities because there’s a regulation, but there’s also the fact that of the end user, a CTE or a utility in general, they might have to find a way which might be a both.

Anthony Dusovic:

Yeah, absolutely. So that’s a good question. So when you talk about 5,000 different types of compounds, the question is, does one treatment serve all of them? We know, for example, that the long chain [inaudible] and the short chain aren’t necessarily treated to the same extent by using activated carbon, maybe after use it ion exchange, maybe you have to go to our own. Maybe you have to go to other techniques. So the question is, how do you solve the issue of 5,000 compounds that are in the water? If we don’t have the science yet, it’s really hard to say I’d like to get here. And then the other question is, are all of these 5,000 issue? Is there a combined effect between soda? Is that there’s a lot of science. I think that has an answer to the question. And then you talk about going to one PP T right?

We’re talking parts per trillion, PFS, isn’t just in firefighting foams. It isn’t just in your thousand dollar waterproof ski suit and all these wonderful things where, you know, what makes these compounds again. So good is the fact that you don’t lose your waterproof on your jacket after one season, right? It’s a great, it’s a miracle from the what application it’s trying to solve. But on the other hand, you know, this stuff it’s in the carpets, you know, you have stain resistant carpets, you have children. It’s funny, there’s like 97, maybe even 98, 99% of the world has found that if you test yourself, there’s probably pee FOS in your bloodstream or develops in lands in some of your organs. The question is, is it killing everybody? I don’t know. You know, that’s the unknown,

Antoine Walter:

There might be parts in our blood, but when it comes to finance at the top, I guess not in the same concentration than in our blood, I hope so. I’ve seen that about 10% of drinking water supplies in the U S might be affected by PFS. And I was wondering as soon as you face, those are parts or at least a portion of those 10% part of what you’re dealing every day.

Anthony Dusovic:

The answer to your question is I think it could be more than 10% of, of the water supplies. You know, it’s an interesting, and let me give you some for instances too, you know, you have an, a lot of the, you know, a lot of these things are being banned and will change in the future, but you have a fire on a roadway. Two cars have an accident. There’s a fire. The fire department comes, they spray all this foam down, get rid of the fire, clean up, spray it all down. And it goes into the year storm basins. It goes through your sewer systems and lo and behold, it’s in your water supply, right? Groundwater or surface water reservoirs. What have you? So the question is, you know, you start reading something, is it a trend? Does it, you know, there’s airborne, it can float through the air, excuse me.

So there’s so many ways. So the question is, do we really know? I, you know, I don’t know exactly what percent I think I would argue it’s higher than 10%. So do we, as a company have PFS in our water? Yes. So we’ve obviously been looking at our systems and doing a lot of testing and have noted that there are some systems that have be fast specifically. One system in one of our States had a PFS. We immediately got a mobile unit in place. It was a smaller system, was actually a well system. We immediately got a rental unit, a mobile treatment unit in place. We ran it, we saw the results were working really well. We turned it into a full-time treatment and we solved the problem there. So I’d argue that there’s going to be a lot of it as these regulations, mature and develop and compliance, regulatory sampling takes place. The question is dealing with it.

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Antoine Walter:

How do you actually deal with it? How do you treat it? What do you use?

Anthony Dusovic:

That’s a great question. So basically they are currently, and a lot of the technology people kill me for this, but there’s basically today, there’s three. What we call best available or very common technologies that are proven. There’s granular, activated carbon, there’s ion exchange resins. And there’s basically reverse osmosis. The industry is dealing with it. Those who needed, you know, to do something and using today’s technology that we know works, that is not creating a new problems from the treatment of volume of view. There’s other problems we can talk about later, but are using these, these three technologies now, which technology use is highly dependent on your application and what you’re trying to solve for you may go, you know, granular activated carbon, probably the most common with [inaudible] the second and aro being third. And, you know, the reason our row is most likely third is because it’s got a lot of pressure that’s required.

So if you have a major plant and you need to distribute water to your customers, through their pipes at a certain minimum pressure, which is regulated as well, and you put these massive tanks in place, you’ve got a head loss issue. So you need to deal with that. So you need to create a, of pumping that pumping creates a lot of additional costs and usage of energy and so on and so forth. So it’s about finding the right application for the right problem. Now, these three technologies create their own problems. What do you do with spent the carbon resins, you know, concentrated waste streams from aro we could talk about. So the industry is working really hard to look for a complete destruction type technology. You know, as we, we worked years ago on AOP type processes, we were trying to totally destroy micro pollutants. The question is, what are you converting things into? Are you completely destroying or creating new forms? So, so there’s a lot of research going on in that field now that will be the future. I think if somebody finds the right solution there or when they find the right solution to actually, I think we’re all racing for that solution as well,

Antoine Walter:

It’s going to be a one size fits all, or there will be a solution suited to every type of family of PFS.

Anthony Dusovic:

I think there’ll be different solutions for different families of P phos. Ultimately, if we had to put a system in place today, we’d be looking at putting in granular activated carbon or ion exchange resins in drinking water. For example, if we put in our row, you know, you strip everything out of drinking water, right? If you put our own, you have this ultrapure water in a drinking water plant that could have some negative effects. You know, you’ve got areas that have older pipes pipes with lead. We’ve got a lead and copper rule here in the United States, and you might be stripping out things like minerals that prevent against corrosion and expose lead back into the water stream, for example. So it’s not a, it’s not a one size fits all solution for sure. It’s definitely an engineered solution. And I think that engineered solution really, and companies are working on it as well as we are doing research on happens to be a destruction technology as well.

Antoine Walter:

You mentioned the activated carbon and you mentioned the micro pollutants as well. It’s pretty interesting because if I compare it to, to how it’s dealt in Europe, you have countries which says they want to regulate micro pollutants from the drinking water. So that’s, to that extent, it’s pretty similar to what you’re doing with PFS, but you have other countries like Switzerland, which says, what is it is a cycle at the end of the day. So if you remove it from the wastewater, you also remove it for the environment in between. And then when it comes back to drinking water, you free of those compounds and what they use half of the time might be ozone, but the other half of the time is activated carbon. So it’s, it’s similar technologies. So why would you concentrate on drinking water when it comes to removing PFS what’s wastewater treatment alternative?

Anthony Dusovic:

Well, you’ve just hit on the next big nerve and the next big trend actually. So the safe drinking water act regulates water, the clean water act regulates what you could put back into a body of water. So as drinking water regulations here in the U S are forming, the next question is what happens to your wastewater systems, right? Can we just inject this pee, fast water into there and you create two problems. One is you’re releasing potentially PFS late in water, into your, you know, through your outfalls and back into the rivers lakes stream ground. What have you, the other is, we’ve got a big business here called biosolids, right where we take the sludge and we process it and we turn it into fertilizers and composts and we feed animals with it and we grow farms with it and so on and so forth.

So what happens to sludge that has P foster remaining and it, it gets spread. So you basically never break the cycle. So that is absolutely part of the equation. Why it’s currently being driven by the water side of the business, I believe has to do number one with the regulation, because it’s the safe drinking water act regulation, not the clean water act regulation. I think the other issue is also to try to reduce the use of some of these chemicals. You know, these are forever chemicals, they’re produced industrially, and if we could reduce their usage, obviously you could reduce ultimately what you have to treat too as well. But that’ll be a long time coming because they’ve been in use for, you know, 70, 80 years to some extent. But yeah. So I want to say on the, on the wastewater front, absolutely that’s that is coming

Antoine Walter:

You’re in charge of special projects, right? So PFS today is still a special project at some point, I guess it has to transfer to something which is daily business. If that really comes to be daily business, actually, I mean, it’s, it’s in the name, how do you handle those, those special projects today?

Anthony Dusovic:

It was really an extension of our capital improvement program. So, you know, a regulated utility has to put together, you know, short, medium and long-term capital plans, right? And those capital plans include everything we do, whether it’s fixing pipes, fixing hydrants, replacing, and fixing plants, increasing service territory by extending pipes and so on PFS because it’s such a large program in itself and implications are around all of our utilities. The company decided to take an olive Suez approach, I’ll call it. So it’s not special in the fact that it’s something that’s unique and one-off, it’s special in the effect that it’s a large program that sits side by side with our normal capital process. And we’re not only working in collaboration with typical engineering firms and contractors, we’re working with our Cersei, our research labs around the world. And of course our WTS colleagues who are technology providers and coming up with a Suez solution, if I could say that to address not only our utilities, but the market.

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Antoine Walter:

So does that mean that you are able, as soon as, as, as one of these giants of that word of at Waterworld, are you able to have everything in-house or do you also partner externally? You mentioned the startups, for instance, would it be possible for a startup to come with a very clever take on PFS and then you would be partnering with them?

Anthony Dusovic:

Yeah, I mean, you know, Suez looks at innovation, you know, we look at as, as open innovation, right? We don’t have to believe that we are the only ones who can invent something and it’s got to come out of our lab. I think the world has basically proven that open innovation is the way to really be innovative. So all of the above is an option. You know, Suez has a venture called Suez ventures, which tries to invest in seed level companies and then potentially decide if they want to acquire more fully acquire or, you know, let go of these investments. So I think all those options are available and on the table. So as has got a lot of experience treating water, for example, on the GAC front granular activated carbon front, you know, we’re not a carbon producer provider, but we’re a process expert, same with IEX, we’re not producing our own resin, but we are certainly a, a, a process expert there as well. And aro, you know, when we acquired GE we became one of the biggest aro companies in the world. So we have that technology in house. So I say it’s a bit of all of the above.

Antoine Walter:

And what about the costs? I guess that’s, if you’re adding an ROI step, which is now the extreme case, if I get your rights, but same with an exchange and an activated carbon to a lesser extent, but that has an impact on costs. So does that mean that with your other hats where you’re trying to bring more efficiency, you can compensate your hats, where you are bringing more treatment capacity, or does that mean that at some point there’s going to be a price increase,

Anthony Dusovic:

Two sides of Suez, right? One is the technology provider. You like the fact that you may sell a lot of equipment to utilities over the next few years. I mean, regulation typically drives our industry, right? The other is a regulated utility where we’re the water company and we have a duty to do prudent investment means that you need to make sure that you’re protecting your customer, your rate payer, and making sure they’re not paying more for the service than they should. So I think Suez on both regards, you know, if you come up with a solution that is the best cost solution from the life cycle costs, customer bill side, that certainly is an impact to customer bill. I can’t see how you would, you know, add more treatment and not have an impact to a customer bill. That just, that’s pretty natural in that regard, but how can you minimize that and give them water at the, you know, basically right. Level of compliance, balancing Outbacks, CapEx, you know, total cost of ownership type of thing. So in that regard, yeah, I think Suez is probably well positioned to help find those solutions as well.

Antoine Walter:

How can I understand this special project aspect? Does that mean that you’re gonna develop that actually like an internal startup you, you would be growing the solution? I don’t know if my analogy is right, but it would be growing the solution up to the point where it can be industrialized, Suez, white, and then you would pick another topic.

Anthony Dusovic:

This particular one, I am working on behalf of the utility to help drive and look for solutions that help our rate payer achieve compliance at the best cost to our rate payer and protection for our customer. WTS is on the side of us, basically looking for solutions that may be our goal beyond Suez internal, and could become a business, you know, create a larger business cakes. And those two things, you know, I think they go pretty well hand in hand in that regard. So I don’t know if I’m answering your, but you know, we have a need we have on both fronts, you know, one is a utility. The other is a supplier and maybe we could solve two problems with one. Suez is in a kind of a unique situation among water companies or environmental companies around the world is that we happen to have treatment facilities that we own. So we have the water, we have the operators, we have to data analysis, the water quality folks, and we have technologies. So we marry those two together. We can create winning advantages. You know, you remember the old days where we had to go to, you know, clients and beg them to take a pilot or rent the pilot to them, try to get some results, hope they share. And so on. Well, right here, right now, we’ve got an opportunity, which is a little different than that. So we’re going to try to leverage it

Antoine Walter:

If I’m reframing my question. I think it was kind of crystal ball question. Let’s say we’re five years down the line and you’ve worked so well with the internal stakeholders and external partners that PFS is now considered something that can be part of daily business. What would be the next challenge that you have to pick up in this, a us utility world?

Anthony Dusovic:

I see what you’re saying. So very good question. There’s so many challenges in utilities. One is the amount of infrastructure work that’s required versus the amount of capital that’s available. So that’s a challenge is always looking for better solutions, which are cost-effective and technically effective. I think, you know, if I look at the industry as a whole, let’s say, you know, the big challenge going forward is going to be, and it’s a subject we could talk about, you know, as two podcasts or three, maybe, but it’s really the, the development of the digital utility.

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Antoine Walter:

I think there you’re touching a nerve, but I think if we start discussing the digital utility, I definitely think where we have to risk a doula, a second podcast. I agree. I agree. That’s actually a good idea. Let’s take that one and put it aside. So the digital utility is one aspect, but when you you’re mentioning all of that is its utility and infrastructure in the, in the sense of the networks or in, in the sense of the treatment plans, what is the next big thing?

Anthony Dusovic:

So I think it ties into a little bit of both, but if I focus on the networks, this is kind of where the digital utility does become important. So we won’t focus on the digital piece, but we’ll focus on, you know, we’ve got thousands of miles of pipeline in our own utilities, nevermind how many are in, you know, around the nation and around the world, there are more and more sensors going into these pipelines. There are decisions to be made that we know the characteristics of pipe, the age we’ve got this huge database of pipe. The question is, how do you choose? Where do you put your money to replace the next section of pipe or refurbish? The next asset that provides the best value? Right? I mean, we could look at something and say, Hey, this is the oldest pipe. Let’s replace it back.

That’s not necessarily the answer. Or this is the type of pipe that was very failure prone because it was built in a certain timeframe and it’s at a certain material. We should replace that. That’s part of the answer too, but it’s not the whole answer. So it’s, how do you take all these scenarios and do something that humans on spreadsheets can’t do right now to do all the, what if analysis use machine learning to help make the best decision? So, yeah, networks is absolutely a challenge here in the U S and we’ve been ramping up our efforts on network rehabilitation and renewal for quite awhile plants. You know, some of it is general operations and maintenance and other is what other regulations come down the line. You know, you typically don’t add treatment when you’re basically fully compliant, you’re producing good quality water, and there’s no regulation in place.

Antoine Walter:

You know what, that’s the perfect teaser. So I’m going to stop that, but for now, and then propose it to switch to the rapid fire questions. And I promise you just after we close this episode, we have to find the date because I definitely want to discuss digital utility with you.

Rapid Fire Questions:

Antoine Walter:

Within the rapid fire questions. It’s simple rule, short questions, aiming for short answers. Of course I don’t cut the microphone. So don’t feel restricted if you need to explain a bit what you’re saying, and you’re going to see that the one talking the most is going to be me like always, but my first question would be what is the most exciting project that you’ve been working on and why?

Anthony Dusovic:

There’s two things I need to talk about. One is when I took over and led ozone, we added a three-year plan to nearly double the growth of the company. And we did that. So that was absolutely a fantastic and exciting time in my career. And then I think for most people who work at ozone yet second is when I moved over to, to utility world, I was asked to start up a new business where we provide utility services to the United States military.

It was a business. We knew nothing about we had utility references as a municipal owner, but we knew nothing about the client. And it was really exciting developing a new client base, developing a reputation and getting, and developing some traction with this new customer. So the reason I get excited about those things is I love the growth story. I love the leadership story and I love developing new business. That sounds awesome. I mean, I don’t know how much you can say about what you did with the military, because, you know, I’ve seen all those Hollywood movies. So I knew that maybe 90% of it is secret, but just if you had to pitch it in just one phrase, what was it about? The military has a mission, which we know very well. Our job was to help the military focus on their mission and bringing our expertise into focus on ours, crystal clear. So that’d be good to the next one. What’s your favorite part of your current job? Very good question. So I truly believe that I’m doing my part to help tackle one of the biggest trends and challenges in our industry today. And I like the fact that even though we’re kind of remote, I’m engaging with so many internal and external partners. So next to PFS

Antoine Walter:

And two digital utilities, which we already addressed, what is the trends to watch in our water industry?

Anthony Dusovic:

Well, I did have digital utility on my mind, so we took that one out, but there’s one I’m going to take you in a totally different direction. It’s one that I guess I’m a you know, I’m a, I’m a natural curious person about trends and business in general, not just technologies and so on social impact investing, you know, looking at triple bottom line impacts for me is, is something that is really changed in this country. It might’ve been ahead in Europe, but, you know, moving from the old Milton Friedman concept of shareholder value as the only business driver to value for all stakeholders, that’s huge for me,

Antoine Walter:

That’s really a good one. Never heard that one. So it’s an attentive take and I love it to be honest. What is the thing you care about the most when you’re working on new projects and what is the one you care the less?

Anthony Dusovic:

I think when you take on any new project or business venture, you know, the goal of any project worth doing has to have purpose. It’s got to create value and provide some kind of benefits to stakeholders. So if you’ve got something like that, whether it’s a treatment opportunity, whether it’s a financial model, whatever the case may be, I think it’s worth doing when you talk about things like hate the least. I’m not a big fan of overly heavy and burdensome reporting. If KPIs can’t be simple, they’re not understandable. You can be sure that results ends up the same way.

Antoine Walter:

So I come to the two last ones. Do you have sources to recommend, to keep up with the water and wastewater market trends?

Anthony Dusovic:

Absolutely. If you think about things like business trends, what’s gapping in the mergers and acquisitions space what are companies doing? I think global water intelligence and Bluefield research are two great resources. If you’re thinking technology regulatory here in the U S the American water works association and the water environment Federation, the Aww weigh in where for great resources. And of course, let’s not forget LinkedIn, especially that don’t waste water podcasts.

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Antoine Walter:

That’s a wonderful recommendation. Thanks for that. By the way, you mentioned WEF, did you attend the WEFTEC Everett

Anthony Dusovic:

And it was virtual this year. So we did it all on zooms and then prerecorded messages and things like that. You’ve missed the touch, you know, somebody who likes to be around people and in front of people, and always like talking to people about new things. It was a little bit more difficult, but it’s the world we live in. I’m actually doing a variety of conferences this year. That way, I’ve got one this afternoon and I’ll be joining for a little while, but so it’s, you make the best of the situation you have.

Antoine Walter:

And that leads me to my last question. Would you have someone to recommend that we should definitely invite to this microphone?

Anthony Dusovic:

Absolutely. So if you want to talk about digital utility, I’m happy to do it, but if you want to give the mic to someone else, I we’ve got a fellow in our group named Edward Hackney, H a C K N E Y, who would be a great resource. I’d also like to bring up one more, if you want to talk more about social impact investing, there’s a great friend of mine. Her name is Ursula Bowen, B O E H M. She would be Florida social impact fund. And just to leave you with this thought, there’s about $250 billion in capital in social impact, investing funds currently, it’s a really interesting way to look at things. Well, that sounds really fascinating. So I think I’m going to follow your advice. And of course, I’d like to talk with you about digital utilities, so maybe we’ll have more than one interview, but anyways, Anthony, thanks a lot for your time.

Antoine Walter:

Thanks a lot for all the wisdom that you’ve shared. And as I said, we really, really happy to have a followup episode with you. So I hope we can put that together. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the invitation. And I’m always looking to you know, catch up and talk to folks and it’s always a pleasure to talk to you, even though it’s been many, many years and good luck with your podcast, you’re really doing a great thing for our industry with itself, and hopefully talk soon. Thanks.

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The post Invisible Yet Actually in your Blood: Behind the Scenes of the PFAS Threat appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Transcend is an incredibly innovative company that provides software to automate any vertical asset’s preliminary engineering.

This episode is part of my series on Water Digitization – check it out!

What we covered:

How scratching their own itches, Transcend’s engineers came up with a revolutionary take on early engineering stages

How AI, Process Modeling, Cloud, and many others combine to deliver overnight what previously took weeks

The virtual 5-step process that turns simple inputs into ready-to-ship documentation

How this builds for a win-win between all project stakeholders with more quality time for value-added tasks

  … and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨  

Get the 3 Page Synthesis for free!

How do you turn an industry challenge that you're facing yourself into a stunning business opportunity? The secrets behind "scratching your own itches"

How to automate engineering in 5 steps (Data Validation, Process Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Civil Engineering & Document Generation)

Behind the scenes of a rocket growth: how to get selected among 800 contestants to join a very special growth accelerator (with a stellar track record)

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Resources:

Send your warm regards to Ari Raivetz on his LinkedIn page

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is on Linkedin

Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Full Transcript:

These are computer generated, so expect some typos

Antoine Walter:

Hi, Ari, welcome to the show. I’m really glad to have you on the show today. I have to say I’m pretty excited on my end, by the field where your company is active, but before jumping into that, I’d like to get a bit more about you, your story. So let’s start with maybe the postcard you’re in Princeton right now. So I was going over there.

Ari Raivetz:

It’s good. It’s a bit rainy today. Typical weather for the East coast in October, but it’s usually very green here. So it’s a beautiful place

Antoine Walter:

Having a look at your path so far, I have to say you have quite a non-common path compared to the previous guest of the show because you’re coming from the finance world. So you have a finance background at some point you turn to water. So can you explain as how that’s happened?

Ari Raivetz:

Sure, sure. I started my career in the enterprise software industry, actually in the late nineties, I ran my own business for a year and then I worked in kind of ERP and supply chain software and kind of got my early start in business, trying to understand the way business processes work inside a company and how you can break those down and automate them to make a business more efficient, which is kind of what ERP and supply chain software or about. And then after four or five years in that industry, I went to get my MBA and after business school, I had to pay back my loans. So so I went to work on wall street for bank of America as an equity analyst. I started to get interested in water because I was covering the oil and gas companies when they were first fracking for natural gas and the Barnett shell in Texas and in the federal shell and in Arkansas.

And we took a lot of those companies public and did a lot of equity and debt offerings for them. So one is very big part of that process. And so I started to get interested in it later. I covered the oil refiners and the industrial manufacturers. You can look at my coverage universe at bank of America as pretty much anybody who is destroying the natural world. Who’s destroying the environment. That’s what I covered. So once I paid back those loans, I had to pay back my debt to the planet. So I left bank of America and I went to work for a clean tech private equity fund called RNK capital, which is really a pioneer in the clean tech investing space. They were one of the first investors in carbon credits and one of the first investors in solar projects and wind energy projects. And they had a fund that was focused exclusively on water. And so I was responsible for all the private investments and some of the public investments in that fund. And that was my kind of winding path to water where I’ve spent in the past 15 years.

Antoine Walter:

Would you say that these software automation aspect you had in the very, very early part of your career, then the business aspect and know the water, does that make for your secret sauce? Or is there anything different or supplement that I don’t know yet?

Ari Raivetz:

Yeah, it’s definitely the way I think about businesses is, you know, was framed by those early experiences in terms of, you know, how can you break it down into the different processes and automate as much as you can so that the people can shine because ultimately the people are what drives the success of the business. But if they get stuck in monotonous and repetitive and non-value added work, then they get bogged down and they can’t achieve their maximum potential. So that is definitely kind of been a defining factor for me. And it’s definitely led me on the path to transcend

Antoine Walter:

That path to transcend is a smooth transition to, to the deep dive. But I’d like to understand at which point you thought that there was such a pain that you had to solve with transcendent. I’ll let you explain in a minute what transit is really about, but I’m interested just before in understanding when you clicked, when you realized there is something there and you wants to solve that problem.

Ari Raivetz:

Sure. Yeah. I mean, actually the pain is that pain point is what transcend is about. So one of the investments that I did at RNK was a company in Budapest, Hungary called organic or water and organic sells unique wastewater technology, both services and products that are used to build these beautiful botanical garden wastewater plants. And after three years as an investor in the company, they had just commissioned an 80,000 cubic meter per day reference plant in Budapest. And the founders asked me if I would quit my job and pack up my family and moved to Budapest to run the company. They both had a technical background as engineer and architect, and they felt that, you know, they wanted a business person to help them scale the company. So when I moved to Hungary, the first thing I realized was we had this major bottleneck in our sales process where we had to do all of this preliminary engineering work before we could bid on a job.

And then clients would come back to us and want to change things. They would want to change various aspects of the design or the appearance of the plan. And we were a small startup, I think maybe like 15 people at that time. And, you know, we couldn’t afford to hire an army of engineers and it was taking us hundreds of hours every time we wanted to bid on a project or even evaluate whether it made sense for us to, to bid on a project. So we built a software tool inside of Organica and that software is the transcend design generator today. And that’s kind of how we got there.

Antoine Walter:

So you were scratching your own itches, which is somehow business one Oh one, the best way to get to the actual point and get an actual good business ID.

Ari Raivetz:

I mean, you know, you I’m sure, you know, engineers, and they were extremely skeptical that we could automate that first 20, 30% of the design of a wastewater facility. And it was not easy. It took us two years to develop the software about a year of software development and then a year of QA QC. But by the end of it, you know, all the skeptics began to love it because not only did it have great business impacts, which I can talk about in a minute, but it just made their lives better. You know, they didn’t have to work on all of this monotonous repetitive work in the early stages of a project generating the early drawings and the early design options and redoing work when clients wanted to make changes, but they could solve the really difficult problems. And that was what inspired them as engineers. And so people began to,

Antoine Walter:

I love it. We’ve come to that because I have to say, I’m going to set it already. So let me repeat it. I I’m excited, but I had to look at your website and on your website, there are a couple of quotes from your existing customers. One says we’ve been trying to do something like this for 20 years. And the next one says, this is the Holy grail of software for the water engineering words. So that sounds like incredibly bold statements. It sounds too good to be true. And then the next thing on your website is, wow, it sounds too good to be true. So I thought, yeah, that’s good marketing, and you have to test it by yourself. So I didn’t have the chance to test it by myself, but now I’d like to start really from the roots and to go step by step through your process. So let’s start with your pitch. What is it actually about what is this software as a service that you are

Ari Raivetz:

The transcend design generator automates the first 20, 30% of the engineering of a water or wastewater treatment facility, or really any kind of vertical asset at its core? That’s what the software does. And the idea is that when you start the design of a water wastewater treatment facility in the kind of manual world, you have a set of inputs that you usually get from a client. It’s how dirty the wastewater is, how clean you’d like it to be at the end, the temperature, the flow rate, and then a number of other kind of client specific preferences that are different for each project. And what usually happens is you hand that over to a process engineer and that process engineer evaluates different technologies and different biological or physical chemical processes to determine the best way to treat the water and does some process sizing and simulation. And from there, it goes to a mechanical engineer to an electrical engineer, civil and architectural engineer and engineer. And at the end you have this preliminary engineering package and our software does all of that in the cloud without any human intervention.

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Antoine Walter:

So let’s go step by step through that process if I get it right, it starts with that. You input that in the system. And if I got it right, again, you give you a waste. What’s the data you’re intending outputs and some simple parameters. What do you do with that data? Do you have a way to check if what I input is slightly accurate or how do you do that?

Ari Raivetz:

It’s much more than slightly accurate. I mean, it is a garbage in garbage out process. So the data validation algorithms are one of the most important parts of the software. And we have two layers of data validation. The first layer is just simple kind of checks. Like for example, in biological wastewater, the level of ammonia cannot exceed the total nitrogen. So if somebody were to enter a higher influence pneumonia than a higher influent TKN, it would immediately give them an error message. Similarly, we have ratios of the DOD to Cod, to TKN, to TSS that we use in our validation. The second layer is an algorithmic validation that happens on the server side. And basically we just do a very quick steady state simulation to see, hf there are issues with the inputs that the user put there. And if there are we’ll spit back in our message and tell you what needs to be corrected.

Antoine Walter:

So assuming that I correct my data or that it was correct from the first stake, once you are sure that the data is right, it goes to process engineering, right? Yes.

Ari Raivetz:

So now we’re going to talk about different modules, but in many cases, these processes are happening simultaneously on the servers. But I think when we talk about it, it’s easier to talk about in a kind of more sequential way. So the first step is process engineering and there are algorithms which take the inputs, both the actual water characteristics, as well as the preferences that you have for this project. And they set up a model, they select all the different process units that are needed to treat that wastewater. And then they go through the mathematical calculations to size those units. And after that’s done, it goes to a third party simulator. There are various simulators that are used in the industry, and we’ll go through both steady state and dynamic simulation dynamic is 365 days with diurnal flow patterns. And at the end of that process, you will have the size of each tank in your treatment facility. You will have all the process units and all their characteristics, and you will have the air requirement, how much area you need, how much chemical you need, the kind of core process parameters that drive the operating costs.

Antoine Walter:

So just about this third-party simulator you were mentioning, are we talking of process modeling here? Like Cimbar GPS X or something different? Yeah,

Ari Raivetz:

Exactly. Our bio LAN or Sumo. Those are kind of four of the simulators that are used by the industry. So we can go use any third-party simulator as part of the design process.

Antoine Walter:

Okay. So once this process engineering is done, you can move to the mechanical engineering, I guess.

Ari Raivetz:

Yes. And just to reiterate, this is all happening on web servers without any human intervention, right? So the algorithms have selected the processes. They’ve sized them. They’ve started up the simulator, they’ve iterated in the simulator and they’ve taken the outputs now. And so now we have the outputs from that process engineering phase, just like when a process engineer, hands, their process design over to a mechanical engineer, that process happens on the server. So we have to translate that data from kind of process language to mechanical language. And then here we go through equipment sizing and selection. So we are based on the process that was designed, we are using algorithms to select and size every piece of mechanical equipment in the treatment facility.

Antoine Walter:

So that means that you have to rely on the database on the existing equipment, or how does that work? It’s like a library, which says there’s activated carbon filter or something else. How does that actually work?

Ari Raivetz:

That’s correct. So at our core transcend our software developers who are also engineers, water, engineers, energy engineers, and so on. And so over time, we’ve built up a comprehensive database of all of the different types and sizes of equipment that would go into a water treatment or a wastewater treatment facility. And it is a generic equipment that’s done in the professional enlight versions that are available on our website for a subscription or in an enterprise version. You know, we can use branded equipment based on what that particular client wants and if they have their own database of equipment that they like to use, and we can easily integrate that into the selection, the sizing algorithms there.

Antoine Walter:

So if I was Veolia, for instance, and I come to you and I say, by the way, here, it’s not a filter it’s called an active flu or whatever, what’d you just have to input the parameters and then I can use my proprietary equipment.

Ari Raivetz:

Yeah, that’s correct. Active flow is, I mean, you throw it out there as an example. I mean, that’s a proprietary technology of Veolia. I’m not sure if there’s a generic technology for high right clarification or not. If there was, we would have a generic technology in our database and then if the only was a client and they wanted to customize for their specific equipment, we would replace it with their active flow and we would use their sizing and selection rules to effectively size that act of flow. So,

Antoine Walter:

Okay. And for the generic one on, what do you build on, is it like, you know, there’s the, I’m assuming as boy, I grew up with Suez, so we had this blue Bible called the Duke lemon water handbook and everybody, every engineer would have that Bible, but that Bible actually tells you that the sand filter can be designed from these two days. So did you read through all these Bibles? I know there’s the Nalco Bible. There, there are several ones. Did you read through all of them to create your database? Or how did you proceed?

Ari Raivetz:

I don’t know if that is that as Bible or Devin Bible, a public document. Like, could you get that on the website? You can buy it. Yeah, exactly. So if it’s in the public domain, you know, in, in the U S many engineers use Metcalf and Eddy, which was kind of the original wastewater Bible and the still taught in many universities or whatever is out there in the public domain, that’s what we’re using. And if there’s multiple options, we either have a selection choice in the design process. So, you know, would you like to size based on X or Y or we make a choice based on our feeling of what the proper best practice is, and that’s kind of hardwired into the rules there.

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Antoine Walter:

Okay. So my data was good. You could do some process engineering with it, some mechanical engineering with it, and now, you know exactly which treatment train I have to use to achieve my intended treatment objectives. So what’s the next step.

Ari Raivetz:

So we know a lot more than the treatment train at that point, right? We know every process unit, we know what size it needs to be, the volume it needs to be. We know the air requirement, we know the chemical requirement and we’ve now sized and selected every piece of equipment. So we know the dimensions of that equipment, the material that that equipment’s made out of, and with our algorithms, we also know where the equipment needs to be from a layout point of view in a facility. So we can build the bin model. We can actually build a three-dimensional building information model, think of it as a parametric data structure in the cloud, which represents all of the structures inside of that treatment facility. And this is the civil and architectural design phase of designing a wastewater plant. So we have various kind of modules within this.

You can actually think of it as like a four-part process in the first part, we’re virtually generating spaces or physical spaces to lay out the equipment and the process units that were identified in the prior steps. So now we have a data structure that represents those spaces. Next we’re arranging spaces. They have to be arranged in a certain sequence. They have to be arranged in a way where it’s most space efficient. And you can think about it like this in the very beginning, when Organica at the time of organic one, when the software was first developed, maybe the first designs, if you were designing a person, it would have been like they had their on their head, you know, so you have to build in a rules that say, okay, well, your needs to be in this general area. And that’s what, what these rules do.

And then, you know, over time we’re using evolutionary algorithms, we’re arranging them in a much more efficient way. And once you have all the spaces and they’re all arranged, you have to add elements to those spaces. So you have to add access rails, doors, windows, you know, if there are buildings, you have to have like the thickness of the walls and so on. And once you have that, you can essentially generate a virtual BIM model. And then that BIM model can be opened in any third party software like Revvit or Bentley or any of the other ones out there on the market.

Antoine Walter:

And what is the level of detail that you have in that beam model? Do you go up to, you mentioned that the windows and the doors, so I’m starting to think it’s quite detained, but what is the limit

Ari Raivetz:

And construction firms in the U S will say that we’re doing the first 30% of the design?

Antoine Walter:

Okay. So now to my feeling, it gets really incredible. If I get it right now, you push a button and you get every kind of document you would wish, right?

Ari Raivetz:

Actually you push the button in the beginning. So everything we just described, the process engineering, the mechanical engineering, the civil and architectural design. And by the way, within the mechanical phase, we’re also selecting the instruments. So we have an IO list. We’re selecting on the equipment. We’re looking at the electrical consumption and doing some very kind of early electrical design. So there’s some electrical and controls engineering that’s happening in that mechanical phase as well. But that’s all happened on the cloud when you hit the button the first time, typically, you know, it happens in a few hours, the simulation takes longer. It can take up to eight hours, but typically it’s happening on the servers. Again, just no human intervention, but now you just have a data structure me, say, you know, everything that’s going to be in the plan. You have a virtual BIM model, you have all the equipment data, you have all the process data.

So all you have to go, you know, you can put it together into documents. And so we have a document generator module and make, you know, up to, you know, 15 or more engineering documents. And most importantly, the documents are available in PDF form, but they’re also available in their native form. So you can open up your process or diagram or your P and ID in AutoCAD, and you can edit it in the future. When you add more detail in, you can open up your BIM model and rev it, and then you can start to add the level of detail, the final 70%, you know, that we don’t have in there. And you can open up all of your, your word and Excel documents and use them for cost estimation and add more details over time. And that’s it. When it’s done, it generates those documents that send you an email and you’ll come back a few hours after you hit submit, and you have all those documents there.

Antoine Walter:

I guess that what you just described that you have this, these native documents makes for what you call this head starts that you might have then in the detailed design, because you can already drew on what was existing. Right.

Ari Raivetz:

That’s exactly right. So that was one of the biggest pain points that we’ve heard from clients over time is that, you know, after they do this preliminary engineering, they always end up having to start from scratch. The process is not connected to the detailed engineering side. And so by using our software, you know, you naturally have this database of all the designs you’ve run for every project. You can imagine company like Veolia or Suez would have run, you know, 20 different designs for one project. And so you’d have all 20 listed. And then when you choose the final one that the client wants, you just open it up and you start from there on the details.

Antoine Walter:

That would, I mean, I can give you my testimony here is back in the days when it was working at, in Suez, it’s basically whatever was done in proposal phase and was absolutely good until the client signs. And the second that the client signed, you would throw everything away and you start from scratch again. Now with the real boys, you know, they’re the one that really know what they do

Ari Raivetz:

At the end of the day, the client doesn’t get what they wanted. A lot of times the client doesn’t get what they wanted. I mean, I think one of the reasons we exist as a company is because we want the engineering firms and the technology providers to deliver better outcomes for the utilities. And oftentimes they don’t. And this way, if you’re focused on what the client wants, instead of getting those drawings done so I can get my proposal out, it changes the whole dynamic of the industry, and hopefully helps innovation happen faster projects happen faster, and it gives everyone happier clients. So,

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Antoine Walter:

So far, I think I’ve been a bit too transparent about my enthusiasm. I have to be now a bit the devil’s advocate, one of the limits of your system, are there some processes that you cannot cover some water conditions, which makes it impossible to compute? Did you already find the limit to your system?

Ari Raivetz:

Absolutely. So we always start every call with a potential enterprise client by explaining what we are and what we are not. And you look at this, it’s a software as a service tool. So we’re constantly adding new processing units to it. You know, as of today on October 23rd, it does Greenfield wastewater plants at some point in November, December. And you’re going to see us release a version for brownfield wastewater plants over time. We’re adding process units that allow you to handle industrial flows today. We’re just doing light industrial and municipal flows, but over time we add more and more processing units. So you can handle more and more types of wastewater. It is never going to be able to do the truly custom industrial wastewater jobs. So things like a textile plant where they’re changing the dyes every six hours or a fry site, where, you know, I originally got interested in the water space.

Those are really custom design jobs that have to be done, you know, one-off, and at least today the technology doesn’t exist to use automation for those. But we do believe that over time, as we add more and more process units, we’re going to cover in larger and larger percentage of the total designs that are able to be done for wastewater. We’re also adding a drinking water module next year. So we’re able to handle that as well and mean that just gives you a sense of what it does. I mean, the other aspect from a limitation point of view, isn’t about the kind of types of waste water can handle or the types of water treatment we can do, but it’s about the level of detail that’s in there. So we’re not going down to the nuts and bolts. We’re not doing the pipes in the isometrics. Those are things that are done in detailed engineering. This is about the preliminary engineering.

Antoine Walter:

So who’s your target customer. I would guess it’s the EPC, but could it also be the engineering consultant?

Ari Raivetz:

So when Organica started to use the software, it totally changed the business overnight, went from clients having to wait weeks and weeks to get one designed, to being able to show clients eight different options in a day. And it became a huge competitive advantage for organic go to be able to respond to clients faster, with more detail and more options. It was also a great advantage from the detailed engineering point of view because we had a headstart. So it took less hours to do detailed engineering, and that was better from a cost reduction or a margin point of view for the business. And then from an R and D point of view, every time organic developed a new technology, we were able to quickly integrate that into the design procedure. And we run old designs because you have sales cycles in this industry that are years long with the new improvement and give clients that benefit.

And so that is one kind of customer for us, or are the technology providers, the OEMs, anyone from a Veolia Suez down to a smaller company, like an organic, this is a tool that can make them more efficient, allow them to bid on more projects, do more detail, responding to clients faster, integrate on the innovations faster and reduced Intel engineering costs, a second kind of client and equally important are the engineering firms themselves. And that could be large engineering firms or smaller engineering that would use our professional and DG light tools that are available on our website. Anyone with a credit card can subscribe for those, and this is about making them more efficient so that they deliver better outcomes for their clients. It’s a tool to reduce their non-billable hours tool to allow them to evaluate more options within the same time period. And again, just give clients what they want. And we do also have some asset owners that are interested in using this. These are people that do have in-house engineering firms in house engineering staff, I should say. And they typically outsource a lot of engineering work, but they would like to do some of it. In-house. And so they’re looking at using the software for that as well.

Antoine Walter:

Can you give us a glimpse into your existing customer base or big is it today?

Ari Raivetz:

I don’t share publicly the names of our customers and transcend was starting in December of 2019. So two months after we started, I was spun out from Organica in December of 2019. So two months after we started, COVID hit. And, you know, I’ve been grounded here in Princeton ever since it’s probably the longest I’ve gone without traveling. So I’m essentially a COVID baby born during COVID. And, he’ve had to adapt everything from our sales processes to our hiring processes and everything in between, but we have had a very good first year in 2020, I’d say we’ve exceeded our expectations on the enterprise side. And then we’ve just launched our lighten end processional products, actually just the people weeks ago. So they’ve only become available. So, you know, a few weeks ago for people to register with a credit card and use them. So

Antoine Walter:

Above this aspect of being able to register with a credit card, I just had loop to a, to your various packages. And I really don’t want to sound too salesy, but you know, here in Europe, if you have to pay a good consultant who knows a bit about process design, you would pay him roughly 1,800 per day. That’s roughly the daily costs. And here I see that for, for the same amount. I get the full design of my plant. When of course that guy alone is not going to be able to do a food plan design in one day. So that sounds like a steal. That’s

Ari Raivetz:

Great. Tell your friends,

Antoine Walter:

You know, when, back in my days in, in Suez, sometimes you would approach a project and you know, that’s, you’re not necessarily the preferred vendor there because they used to be, you know, there’s Suez, there’s Veolia. Sometimes the customer has been working with Veolia several times in the past, and you approached him. He has a problem. You might be able to solve that problem, but you’re thinking, is it worth, is it worth it working with that project? Because I will need to take my proposal team to take my engineering team and they will have to work to find something. And a long before we get a chance to get the contract, we will be already spending thousands, tens of thousands. So there was a process in place at two at the time, which was called the go no-go. So at this stage, you meet the customer, you come back home and you explain your CEO, why you as a, as a sales guy, you would go. And,uhe tells you with all the best reasons in the world, why you should not go because the chances to win compared to the risk to give out all this money is it’s not worth it. It’s just not worth it. And then there’s you, and I’m starting to think, you know,uthat’s a revolution for the end user because they are going to get much more ideas from much more people around the table, assuming that everybody hits the bandwagon, but

Ari Raivetz:

That you had done now squarely on the head. So, I mean, that is, you know, our mission as a company is, you know, myself, our COO Steve Davis, Adam tank, our commercial director. We’ve, we’ve all been around this industry for 15 plus years. And the pace of innovation is just, it’s awful. It’s just really slow and we’ll want to change that. So we believe that exactly what you said, that if the end users get more options in rest time, that if you know software like this is used for the preliminary engineering, so that whether the engineering firms, the EPC is the technology providers are forced to provide these options to clients and do more for them in these stages without having to spend all that money and all those resources, it’s totally going to change the game in the industry. We’re going to see more sustainable water infrastructure, you know, everywhere that the software is used.

Ari Raivetz:

That is our mission. As a company, we actually believe this can expand well beyond water, but that’s a discussion for another time, but I really believe that it’s going to change things. Then we talk about our challenge. Our challenge as a company is to transcend the, kind of, let’s say, difficult culture inside these large firms in the industry, like your former place of work. So I have a question for you, which is if you were at Suez and this was there, how do you think it would be received inside the company? You know, how do you think that the culture that’s been built inside these big companies can adapt to using a tool like this and how fast can that change happen? And, you know, what are your thoughts on that?

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Antoine Walter:

Well, that’s a broad and difficult question. I would say. You know, I remember people trying to make like a lot of programming within Excel, Excel, macros, just to try to make even a portion of what you do. So those guys, they, they will be incredibly happy because the burden would just be much lower than don’t have to, to maintain pages and pages of Excel, macro, and then ultimately never really, really, really works and so far and so on. So I would say that those guys would be happy, but on the other end, you know, when you were assu as where you were, when you were this kind of very big boys, you build your reputation and you build your full history on the fact that you are the absolute experts in engineering. And now if you had to rely on a computer to do your job, I would imagine that they would be breaking quite hard to explaining you how much a human is going to always going to be better than any kind of machine. So there must be a bit of both. I don’t want to speak for them. I think that could be a interesting question to raise directly to them actually. But I could see both have things. I’m sure you’re going to be very excellent friends with all the people working on the commercial side, just because their life is going to be so, so much easier, but the engineering departments might be a, a castle you have to, to overtake it.

Ari Raivetz:

Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of cultural challenges with this and it’s very similar to the other part of my career. When I watched ERP and supply chain software get implemented in various consumer products and manufacturing businesses, there were big changes there similar to when CRM got implemented and how sales and marketing organizations reacted to it. So it’s something that, you know, I’ve dealt with a lot in my career, but that’s kind of like, what’s going to define the success of transect is our ability to transcend those cultural challenges inside of companies. And I mean, when it comes to enterprise customers, but we customize the rules based on the rules that their engineers use. So, you know, if those engineers are using a handbook that can be put into code pretty easily, actually. So at least easily for us anyways. So that’s the kind of path that we’re on.

Antoine Walter:

It’s good because it’s not a show. It’s not recording, nobody’s listening. So I can say that. No, but I remember there were some tools that we were using and the guys which had developed the tools were no longer with the company because they’re retired like 20 years ago. And nobody had a clue what those tools were relying on. We just knew that empirically it was working. So that’s the output was giving you something which was realistic, but in between it was like black magic. So I think this is the kind of thing you have to build this trust in your tools so that you can blindly trust them just because you’ve been building them in 2000 plants. So whatever happens in between ease, okay. Even if you have no clue what it is. Yeah.

Ari Raivetz:

I mean, we hear that all the time, all the time, you know, we hear people say, we’ve tried this before. We’ve tried this before two or three times, it can’t be done. We hear people say we have internal tools that we’ve been using for 15 years and nobody knows how they were built. I mean, we hear it in almost every conversation and then we’ll just show them what we have. And, you know, from there it’s more about a discussion of how do we implement this in our company? How do we change behaviors and get people to adopt it? And you’re right. I mean, the commercial people love it, but the engineering teams are typically the gatekeepers. And it was very similar to the experience I had at Organica because the commercial people wanted this. They could never get responses from engineering fast enough ever. They were calling them at all hours.

You know, when is this going to be done? When can I send it to the client or the client changed their mind, they want this. And then the engineers would throw their hands in the air because all I have to redo everything. And when we launched it and we’ve seen this at various mines at transcend, the engineers love it because all of a sudden, they don’t have to deal with that stuff anymore. They can focus on the real problem solving, which is why they got involved in that job or vocation in the first place, you know, and it totally changed the kind of happiness quotient for engineers. And I mean, we saw better retention than ever before because of it. So I think it’s a real game changer in ways that we don’t even think about.

Antoine Walter:

So actually what’s your path forward because you just joined the accelerator elemental accelerator. And if I got it right, being part of that cohort means that your targets is to make a factor 10 on the company within two years. So what’s your path forward to achieve that, which is a huge ambition.

Ari Raivetz:

Yes. And we’re super excited to be part of elemental. It is, you know, more than 800 companies apply and only 15 were selected and wow, it’s super competitive. And she has a group of very passionate people who are really smart and experienced in driving impact. And, you know, I’m a big believer that we can’t fix our climate problems. One project at a time know that we need scalable ways to do things. And I really believe that software can provide that. And I think a lot of the problems that we face are in the design stage in that early stages of project development, when not enough options are considered, new technologies are not considered and this artwork and change that. So, you know, our goal is to start by building it out within the water sector, there’s in the U S alone. You know, we estimate there’s more than 70,000 water and wastewater engineers that could potentially benefit from using the software.

We target them and try to make their lives easier. And then at the same time, you know, we look at expanding this to other industries, other places where critical infrastructure is being designed, inefficiently, whether that’s power, whether that’s building design. And one of the first use cases for the software this year was actually to take parking lots, enter the dimensions of a parking lot and generate drawings to turn it into a COVID testing facility, a rapid COVID testing facility. So there’s all kinds of ways that, you know, we can grow by using this design automation concept in other sectors, even beyond water. So that’s kind of the path forward for us in the future.

Antoine Walter:

And what’s your long-term vision because you know, it’s acquisition time. If you see that the number one in the world is able to buy the number two, in the words, in the water world, you could imagine that anybody can be bought by anybody. And that that’s somehow is your far away background. So what’s your longterm vision for transcend. Are you going to be there the next big boy in five, 10 years time? Or would you say that there might be a chance at some point that one of those big players just says, it’s not possible to have so much value outside of the company and they need you, they need you to be part of, of the group.

Ari Raivetz:

No, I’ve been involved in startups for pretty much my whole career other than my years of bank of America. And you know, the only thing that’s certain about startups is that stuff is uncertain. So never know where things can go. So, you know, I won’t talk about the kind of potential end game paths here, but I do think that we’re at the beginning of a transformation in the engineering and construction industry in both water and in other sectors related to design and critical infrastructure. And we are at the beginning of this transformation because we’ve ignored climate change for way too long. And the problems gotten really bad. And now we have to act and public sentiment in Europe and also in the U S even has changed and people want to act right. I mean, I have two 13 year old daughters, I think about what their life is going to be like, what their kids’ lives is going to be like, and we have to change. And so we want to be part of that transformation. We want to help show what’s possible by using software to kind of scale climate impacting solutions. And that’s really our path forward.

Antoine Walter:

Well, that’s a beautiful mission. I have to say, I have to be cautious of your time. I have to be cautious of the time of the people listening to us. I could be discussing that matter with you for another hour, but I’d suggest to you that we switched to the rapid fire question.

Rapid Fire Questions

Antoine Walter:

So in that section, I just ask you questions that I try to keep short and ideally you can try to keep your answers short as well, but don’t limit yourself. If you have to be a bit longer and to elaborate, I’m not going to cut the microphone. So first question, what is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Ari Raivetz:

So, one of the projects we’re working on is helping kind of a new market entrance into the water space with being able to scale their offering quickly. And I just think that’s a great use case for the software because when you’re introducing a new product, typically firms will set up a whole team and, you know, it’s not always the most economic way to do that. And I think by using our software to do it, you can do it in a very kind of resource light manner. And it gives the project a much better chance of success because their whole rate is so much higher when you have to have a big team involved in kind of a, a new initiative like that. So I’m super excited about that.

Antoine Walter:

So that’s a technology supplier, or

Ari Raivetz:

I don’t want to say, but it’s in the space.

Antoine Walter:

So what’s your favorite part of your current job?

Ari Raivetz:

I just love building the team and that’s really the most exciting part of it for me, you know, seeing how people grow into their different roles as the company grows. I mean, usually, you know, in pre COVID times, I probably got to answer this by saying, it’s sitting with customers cause that’s really what I love, but on the zooms and stuff, it’s just, it’s hard. It’s hard to do that in the same way. So yeah, I mean, but that’s been so far at least, you know, for the past 11 months or so, that’s been the most favorite part for me.

Antoine Walter:

What is the trend to watch out in the water industry?

Ari Raivetz:

Interesting one, I mean, obviously the whole Veolia Suez potential merger, you know, is, you know, has the potential to shake up the industry. I think one of the likely unintended consequences of that if it were to happen is that you’re going to have a huge amount of talent. That’s out there. That’s passionate about water. It’s funny from Philadelphia. People always say that people from Philly stay in Philly, so they lived their whole life there and they never leave. And I think the water industry is the same way. You know, when people get involved in water, they get passionate about it. They never want to leave it. And so I think you’re going to see all this talent, you know, trying to innovate in the industry and hopefully usually mergers kind of stifle innovation. And that’s one of the arguments in antitrust theory. But in reality, all these people out there trying new things, going to startups, I mean, that’s exciting. It could spark a lot of innovation in the industry.

Antoine Walter:

That brings me to a, an unforeseen question, sorry. I said it has to be short and I’m the one making longer. But back in the days when I was in Suez, I had the impression that it was about big groups, that the water treatment was about big groups. And over the past two years, I see so many startups left and right, which are really reshaping this industry. Would you say that I was not giving enough attention or would you also say that there’s a trend to a bit more new bloods in this industry?

Ari Raivetz:

It’s interesting. I mean, historically it’s an industry with massive players on top 20 huge companies and then tons of tiny little companies. Most of them never make it. And if they do make it, they usually get snatched up by one of the big guys. But I mean, I do think that with the amount of consolidation that’s happened, you know, you have the potential for a lot of these startups to grow into their own right, to become major players in the industry. And so, you know, if you were to look at, at the water sector in 2030, you might see some new names in that kind of mid range of the industry who have grown organically, or maybe through some smaller acquisitions on there.

Antoine Walter:

So let me make a up visit with you in 2030. And we have to check that. What Is the thing you care about the most when you’re working on a new project and what is the one you care the less

Ari Raivetz:

Making the customer happy is by far the most important thing in any new project, especially for a new company like transcend, how about the least? I mean, I, I’m a very detail oriented person, so I care about most stuff, but I guess if I would have to say the least, I always feel like it’s more important in the software world to get a product out there for clients than to get the perfect product out there for our client. So the expression that, you know, don’t sacrifice the good in favor of the perfect comes up a lot here, and we will release a product with less features to make sure it’s out there and they can start to see the value because for us, it’s not about the software, it’s about how the business is going to use it. That’s what business process automation is about. And that’s what cultural transformation is about. So we want them to start using it as quickly as possible.

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Antoine Walter:

I think that’s one of these rare occasion where the French language is a bit catchier than the English language in French. We safe face and NewCo parfait, Dawn and perfect have the same sound, the same to say basically done is better than perfect, but

Ari Raivetz:

That’s great. That’s great to brag about being friends. So let me brag a bit.

Antoine Walter:

Do you have sources to recommend, to keep up with the water and wastewater market trends?

Ari Raivetz:

I use LinkedIn a lot for that. I think it’s great and Twitter a little bit less so, but LinkedIn is a great source and following the right people there, I think water online is great. It’s been around for a long time, so they have a lot of good content there. Those are two, two good places that I would recommend.

Antoine Walter:

So talking about these good people you should follow. That’s actually my last question, would you have someone to recommend that we should definitely invite to the same microphone?

Ari Raivetz:

I will suggest that you invite Cambrian innovation, who is another elemental portfolio cohort company in this cohort with us? I think that they, they would be a great guest. They have an interesting technology on the wastewater side and they’ve been around for a long time in the past, a lot of different experiences with kind of getting adoption for that. So that’d be a great guy.

Antoine Walter:

So I make sure to extend an invitation, talking of a great guests. I have to say we had lots of fun recording these interview with you. I’m excited about your offering. So I’m really looking forward to see how that’s going to develop. Thanks a lot for, for your time. And thanks a lot for all the value that you brought us. And where can I recommend our listeners to, to have a look at you? Is it the website of transcends that you LinkedIn?

Ari Raivetz:

Yeah. TranscendH2O.com is the best place. You follow me on LinkedIn follow transcend on LinkedIn while Adam tank on LinkedIn. Who’s our director of digital transformation and,udoes a lot of great stuff on, on LinkedIn. So check us out. Thank you very much for having me today.

Antoine Walter:

I put all the other, the links in there in the episode notes for the one listening to this. So thanks a lot. And let’s meet in 2030.

Ari Raivetz

Sounds good.

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The post Save Time, Boost Value and Wow Customers in a Snap with these 5 Simple (AI) Steps appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

Bluecon International is a company that developed a compact system for decentralized municipal wastewater treatment.

What we covered:

How different the wastewater challenge is from one place to another, and how the smaller a community is, the worse it gets.

How ‘Blueconizing’ water addresses this gap – and what that made-up verb actually means.

The physical-only steps his company packs into shipping containers.

A 360 perspective on the many implementation possibilities such a compact and decentralized solution offers.

… and of course, we concluded with the 𝙧𝙖𝙥𝙞𝙙 𝙛𝙞𝙧𝙚 𝙦𝙪𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨

Get the 3 Page Synthesis for free!

80% of the world's wastewater is not or inadequately treated. Even in developed countries, there are still mixed situations and many open challenges!

The smaller the community, the broader the chances that wastewater treatment (and drinking water production) issues are still pending. That could be addressed through decentralized solutions!

Discover how even the most pressing challenges can be solved in a matter of weeks, and deployed in hours.

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Resources:

Send your warm regards to Paul Van De Grift on his LinkedIn page.

Check BlueCon’s website

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Antoine Walter on LinkedIn

Full Transcript:

These are computer generated, so expect some typos

Antoine Walter:

Hi, Paul, and welcome to the show. I’m glad you accepted the invitation. Let’s start with a postcard. Just tell us where you’re sitting right now.

Paul van de Grift:

Hi, Antoine. Thanks for having me on the show. And I’m sitting in the capital of the Netherlands in Amsterdam, in my own home as many people. So actually, yeah,

Antoine Walter:

When I was looking at your career path, it sounded like there was kind of a line between the Netherlands and Sheila, and you had an amazing journey on that, or you appear to have a nice journey and that’s can you maybe just explain us, what was your path?

Paul van de Grift:

Yes, of course. Well, I studied international business and management because I always had the horizon to be involved in export and import. And later on, I developed a specific interest for the Latin American continent. I then met my wife who was from Chile, and then obviously I started to develop a close relation to Chile and see what team is producing, what they have to offer and see about the connection between those two countries that really want us to get the false to down. So I’m going to be, I made it there.

Antoine Walter:

So you mentioned in our preparation call that by the end of your journey in Chile, you started working quite closer to blue com, which is your actual company, and that’s how you came back to the Netherlands, right?

Paul van de Grift:

Yes, exactly. I was working for the Dutch embassy in Chile, in Santiago, the capital and during my last month, because we decided to go back to the Netherlands because of the fact that we were expecting our second child. And I met the Dutch company Bluecon in December last year while they were on a trip. And just to see if what the market potential for that product was in Chile. And I was accompanying them from the embassy because I was working for the economic department. So I got in touch and I actually traveled together with the owner and founder of the company for four days. And lucky that once I returned to the Netherlands, I joined a local team,

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Antoine Walter:

Actually let’s assume that we would be meeting in Amsterdam in the whole of the Rembrandt tower and had the loop on Wikipedia. And apparently the elevator of the tower take about 40 seconds to reach the top of the tower. So you would have 40 seconds to make me the elevator pitch of blue con. So what would you

Paul van de Grift:

Oh, wow. So this is the famous elevator pitch. The blue cone basically develops the world’s most compact decentralized wastewater treatment system. What it does, it converts domestic wastewater into reusable water. So it creates a huge opportunity for decentralized waste water treatments and to apply clean water from their waste source. So that enables a lot of economic activities for the communities, for the smaller towns where such equipment is installed.

Antoine Walter:

Wonderful. That was really to the point you made it within the time. And I think we now have a better glimpse into what Bluecon is doing. So just before going to the deep dive and going to this decentralized waste water treatment aspect, I’d like to ask you, what’s the special sauce of your company? Well,

Paul van de Grift:

Basically this company is about seven years old and what it did is it was very difficult to do, but it improved an existing technology and made it suitable for the domestic wastewater treatment. So I guess the key or the secret of the company is like developing further, take it to a next level in existing technology that now can be applied for a variety of uses. It’s very specific. It’s, it’s almost a nice market. So there’s a lot of expertise in what they’re doing about know-how and yes, I guess it’s quite a revolutionary system.

Antoine Walter:

So I think we’re going to come now to this revolution because when I was scrolling your websites, I just found that strange verb and, you know my English is not perfect by far nuts. I think that’s my French side, but I’m pretty sure that the word blue colonizing doesn’t exist in the English language. So I will need you to explain me a bit what this stands for.

Paul van de Grift:

Yes, well, of course it will be nice if it blue colonizing as a verb, you know, it would be included in the, in the next, the dictionary, but it’s not, of course, if everything to do with the company named Bluecon was, comes from blue container. The blue container is basically our product. We build wastewater treatment plant inside a container, which makes it very moveable and very small in size. So very compact, right. And blue colonizing is the process that we use in order to clean. In a matter of minutes, the domestic wastewater into reusable water. And I say reusable water, because it could be irrigation water. It could even be drinking water. It could be water, just clean water to this job, let’s say. So we are very flexible in the outputs and the different qualities that is required.

Antoine Walter:

So the full plant is packaged in one container or in multiple containers. How can I visualize that?

Paul van de Grift:

Yeah, so it depends a little bit on the size and the capacity. What blue local did is tried to resolve the well actually the lack of wastewater that’s been treated in the regions. So that means the smaller the town or the community, the less successful traditional wastewater plants are. And this is actually the gap in the markets where blue cones thought, okay, this is something that we really need to resolve. And we need to start thinking outside the box and trying to include different types of technologies and treatment. So it’s containerized. It could be 10, 20 or 40 feet container. And it depends a little bit on the amount of people that live and their average water use local basically focuses on from a few people to 20,000 inhabitants. That’s basically the market.

Antoine Walter:

So you mentioned the multi-steps of the technology. So what exactly are the technologies which you package inside your containers?

Paul van de Grift:

So the technology is actually a technology of proclamation, coagulation and flotation, which means in medicine technology that already access for like a hundred years, right? Basically it means that by applying an electric static electricity in the form of a reactor that destabilizes the negative and then in positive layers, on a molecule level, what happens is that the dirt or the slots get separated from the clean water and in the next phase, all those potential, small sweat spots, they start to stick together and they start to float afterwards. It can be more easily be separated. So this is a technology that also exists in industrial wastewater treatments. However, the percentage of, you know, cleaning up the water bypassing through our reactor is so high that it only needs to be disinfected after, and it can be reused. So it means that we get a extremely good results from passing the dirty water through our reactor, where this physical, chemical process that takes place. So it separates the dirt from the water. It starts to stick together to go, will link together. And by applying a, like a glue and we manage to transport this water through our system, without it being separated again. So the dirt itself that sticks together remains that way and then can easily be removed in the flotation chamber.

Antoine Walter:

So basically you have a pretty short treatment train. So if I understood right, where, what you’ve just explained is you start with a screen, then you have this coagulation flotation, and then you filter it and if needed, then you might even disinfect it, right?

Paul van de Grift:

Yes, exactly. So what happens is that the wastewater gets through first screen, the pre-screen that’s just for the larger particles, not to, you know, the stirrup the system. And then exactly. So after this first step, which consists of three, the dirt part is removed by flotation and it gives such good results that no complicated filters are needed afterwards. It goes through to the last step of the process, which it says that subsection and that is of course, has everything to do with the results we get from our reactor removes the dirt to such a high percentage that no difficult filters are needed, which tells us a lot about the low level of maintenance that’s needed and the low level of cost that’s needed as well.

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Antoine Walter:

So you mentioned it quite shortly, but I like to understand how you fit into the market because, you know, there’s this advanced countries where most of the water is hopefully treated today. And then as much as you go to the middle income and to the low income countries, we see that the rate of wastewater treatment goes pretty much down. I think the numbers are 70% treatment for the developed countries, then 38 and 28% for the middle income countries. And the low income countries have 8% of the waste water, which is treated. So I’m just wondering as blue con with your pretty simple treatment train is in shipping containers. What is the market you are aiming to enter? What is your target?

Paul van de Grift:

Interesting question on 12, but you wouldn’t be surprised as well in Europe, in countries, as in Italy and Spain that are being fined by the European union because they don’t apply the treatment that’s necessary. Okay. A lot of countries are struggling with applying the right technology to apply an effective treatment on a small scale, let’s say so Spain is definitely an interesting market for us, as I say, in Eastern Europe as well. So those are, you know, developed countries that are also trying to find solutions for small scale treatments. So I’m from the Netherlands and in the Netherlands, a centralized large centralized treatment system is actually possible because of the geographical characteristics of the country. It’s flat, and many towns are very close towards each other. They are actually sitting to right next to each other. So what happens in the Netherlands is that we use these large scales, the traditional biological treatment system by combining the wastewater or the two, three, or up to five smaller towns.

But that’s, of course not a reality. If you go to, you know, more mountain areas already in the South of France, that’s a problem in Spain. Portugal is a problem. So you can’t really connect the wastewater of different towns together because of the distance and because of the lack of, you know, possibilities to do so. So in those countries, which is still a Europe, I’m talking about, there’s a lot of needs for these centralized system that actually are as effective as the traditional large scale biological ones. And this is where we say next, actually the whole world is our markets, right. We went to the different growth and we looked at the biological alternatives, but actually in the end and you see it now more days as well, we chose a physical chemical process because on a smaller scale that are actually much more effective than a traditional biological ones.

Antoine Walter:

So does it mean that in those areas where you just mentioned, so Italy, Spain, South of France and Eastern Europe, they just have nothing in some areas and then you are improving it because you go from nothing to a very effective treatment or do they already have something at small scale, which is not suited and you can correct that with your process.

Paul van de Grift:

Yeah. It’s also an interesting and a good question. Actually, we see both, so there’s a lot of need for a treatment on places where there is no treatment yet in Europe, that’s actually being boosted by DDU of saying like, Hey guys said, it’s just not the percentage of treatment you are applying. So the local governments are looking for technologies, but definitely also replacing the, some of the older small-scale traditional ones that are not able to clean the water sufficient or after a couple of years of operation, basically they break down and we have to say here that those systems itself, they are quite good developed systems and they are backed up by a lot of science, but it’s extremely difficult to operate those systems. And the smaller the community gets, the more difficult it gets for the operator, you know, to work with an efficient system. So local does it could replace such a system. It could install itself in a place where there’s no treatments going on, but it could also help a traditional system alleviates. I don’t know if it’s a good thing. This works by applying some sort of a pre-treatment so that the performance of existing plants get better. So we could work with traditional systems or replace them. We are very flexible in that.

Antoine Walter:

Okay. Actually, the places you just mentioned, be it Italy or Spain, Portugal, South of France are also the places where usually you have a kind of water scarcity or always more, what is coarsity, does that mean that with your system, you can also take advantage of that and leverage that the treated wastewater to reuse it for some kind of new purposes.

Paul van de Grift:

Yes, exactly. And this is one of the biggest emphasis of the blue book system. On the one side, it simplifies the current process. So it means that it’s less operational costs, but it’s also easier to operate, which enables it to be installed in smaller communities and towns, or the second biggest is foreign to, so if the system is an actually delivers water of higher quality, and we can meet the quality that is required by the EU regulation or in Asia or in South America by the national regulations. So whenever the reuse of the water is we can reach that level. They did this of course makes it very interesting, like you said, in dry areas. So there’s a waste source there that’s been maybe treated or not, and then wasted into the rivers or sea. And of course, if you, if you are in a dry area with a deficits, then really using that water really creates an extra value.

And that is not only going on in the South of Europe, but also of course, that’s where Latin America comes into play in Sheila, where we talked about that, I have a strong with everything in the Lord side of the capital is going into a process of certification. You know, that there should still becoming bigger every time. And of course, if you can add and flow volume of one or two nets, it creates really a lot of opportunities. So in short, we simplified the process and we deliver water over much better quality that is really suitable for its reuse, whatever the reuse is.

Antoine Walter:

I like to take the process from the start and for the front. It’s a recurring question that I have with my guests on this microphone is what is the awareness of the people, you know, and I hear many different takes of that. And I was wondering, given your targets of this smallest size communities, do they come actively to you and say, we have a problem. Could you have a look and maybe can we solve that together? Or do you target those guys and say, Hey, you are, I know a 2,003,000 population community, somewhere in South Europe or in Latin America. I think you’re not switching the water to the level. You should, maybe we can sort that out. So is it them being proactive or is it you having to push for it?

Paul van de Grift:

Well, that that’s actually going both ways. So we are a Dutch company and we see it as governments or companies from countries abroad. They know that the Dutch water sector is one that really involves a lot of know-how and a lot of new technology in there. There’s a growing number of startups that are providing solutions for a series of challenges in the water sector and for, from preventing natural disasters or flooding to the supply of sweet, usable water. So we could see that in general governments know, and companies abroad know what the added value of the ducks centuries, but on the other hand, not a lot of local governments know that’s what it can actually be three days at low costs up to a quality where it can be reused. So that thing is pretty new. Even if traditional system is operating quite well, it still only treats to water for it to be discharged in the river and not make everybody settle and say, but this technology of course is add something to that.

It’s cleans the water in a way it can be reused. And this is quite a new concept. So this is where we need to go out and spread the message and, you know, do a lot of presentations, but also demonstrations in the countries where we see a lot of potential, which is basically the whole world, right? So we traveled a lot. So can we bring our demo widows demo container to 40 feeds demo container that we have, and we go out there and we showed him because of course with all new technology and that also counts for us, people need to see it need to see how it works. They need to validate the water and the operator needs to see like, okay, how is this, how do I run this machine? So we create a lot of interests by going on a road show. So to speak,

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Antoine Walter:

The rotor is one way, but I guess you’re not bringing the continue to every possible plans you might be treating in the future. So on one end, it could start with the container, but on the other end, maybe sometimes you have to start with a water sample where they just give you a sample and you say, okay, we have to dimension our process. Or is it something which you say is fully standard and your container is off the shelf in the size of 10 foods, 20 foot and 40 foot. And then you’re good to go, or is there kind of fine tuning you need to do every time.

Paul van de Grift:

This is a good question also. So a large part of is standardized and then has to do with the capacity. So we know how to build a container with three it’s, five cubic meter of water per hour and one of 25 an hour. So that’s the first question, what kind of capacity is required. But then the second one is actually needing the necessities of the, of the client. So let’s take, you know, a 10,000 inhabited town. What do they want to do with the water, which determines the configuration of the container? So a part of it is standards, which has to do with the capacity. And a part of it is basically custom made according to the reuse and of course complying with the national rules and regulations on that. And it’s also a very fair thing to say that we can’t take the container and travel all over the world.

But what we’re doing is basically try to organize a demonstration in a country with a lot of interest and then invite a lot of people. So local authorities, national authorities, but also companies to that place of demonstration, where we are like maybe a week or two weeks where everybody can see how this is working. So sometimes you need one successful demonstration, you know, for sort of snowball effect. So to speak. What we’ve also tried, which is interesting is we said, well, you know, it’s so much cheaper. If we just have you come over to the Netherlands to our testing sites, then we’ll show you how it works. So we have this great testing facility, which is at a traditional lots size treatment plants, where we simply installed our container and we use the wastewater source, you know, to do all sorts of testing. And of course the demonstration to customers. Well, the answer that we are receiving from, from people abroad to saying, okay, well, this is Dutch waste water. And in India, you know, our wastewater is different. So we still see it as an added value to if the potential is right to invest as a company in saying like, okay, let’s say over a team, let’s send over ship over the container and let’s do a small tour. You know, when it comes to Ravinia, it could be two or three locations. And then we see a generates the interest that we are hoping for.

Antoine Walter:

So you need the inputs of the water capacity that you need to treat. You need to have the outputs to know to which level you need to treat. And you need the guys to be convinced that your treatment process can solve that. What would be interesting here would be if you could just guide us through your path or maybe your last successful project so that we understand those steps.

Paul van de Grift:

So basically we generate a lot of, of interests by, you know, having created this new technology or actually having improved and existing technology made it suitable for the treatment of wastewater. So we are out there, you know, on, on fairs and social media. So that’s of course the first step. And then when something, for somebody who’s really interested and we work towards a demonstration, right? And after the demonstration, we actually see that the process of going from a demonstration towards a sales is actually quite short after demonstration. That’s the last step for people to say like, okay, convince me that this is working and if it does work, and if I can see it works, and if the water quality is validated by my local authorities, we actually see that purchases come within, within a few weeks already. So then of course for us great, because if we do a demonstration and like Serbia, where we were, and we worked towards a Virtus of five treatment plans, then of course having installed those five working blue collar treatment plans also generates a lot of interests of, you know, towns and communities that are close to one.

So we need to invest a lot of showing who we are, what we have and what we can offer. And then we have to do the demonstration there, which is always a very nice thing for us to do, to show people like, Hey, this is, you know, this is working and it’s working this way and we have your authority here who is actually going to take some samples and validate the water quality. And then afterwards is actually going into quite a quick,

Antoine Walter:

When you say quite quick, how fast is it from the first inquiry to the moment it starts treating water

Paul van de Grift:

After the demonstration for a purchase to happen. As a matter of weeks, demonstration is the last step of convincing people and an order. Well, it takes us a couple of weeks to build one. And it depends a little bit on a configuration, but we are talking about four to six weeks, maybe.

Antoine Walter:

Well, that’s fast. I mean, if you compare it to the traditional concrete tanks area.

Paul van de Grift:

Yeah. So we are very quick and that’s not the only thing. So agents, once it’s built, it’s, you know, it has the right configuration for, for the customer. We go over and we do the installments ourselves, and we take that small with also to train the operator and to train the company, that’s going to do the maintenance so we could do that. But it’s always better if that’s been locally done, installing is like maximum two days. So can you imagine, like after building and we ship it out in a rice in 48 hours later, it’s up and running. So building is much faster, but also the installation, if you’re talking about traditional system, after everything is being built, which leaves a huge footprint, right. In comparison to our system, it also takes at least I would say two months, you know, to get this whole process of bacteria activated through what’s going on. And then when she come back after three months, you can actually see how it’s working. Yeah. What else? It’s 48 hours. And the quality of the water is stable 24 seven. So it doesn’t matter. At one time you come over and take your sample, it would always be the exact same.

Antoine Walter:

So you are assembling in the Netherlands, all the containers.

Paul van de Grift:

Yes. So we are settling in in the Netherlands in Leeds. So we do have a strategy, especially for markets outside Europe, where we want to build and produce on the license, the treatment plans locally. So if the demand is right, of course, for a few, that’s not probably economically a very good idea, but if the demand is right then the distributor that also helps us with the sales and the technical office sales surface, it could also potentially be building those plants locally. And it also means that all the material we use it’s actually available in all parts of the world. So the secret is this more in, you know, how to operate it, the operator of meters, that’s where the secret is the know-how and not so much the material use because of course the advantage of having such good results of treatment is that we don’t all those sophisticated, let’s say filters and systems, you know, to clean the water and to get the particles out or to kill the bacteria. So it’s actually pretty straightforward system and the secrets is in the know-how and basically, well, our desire is to build locally.

Antoine Walter:

Okay. So you mentioned that the secret is in the operation. You also mentioned that you have these two days where you commissioned the plant and you also train the operators, but you also can offer this operation by yourself. So in that case, do we do it remotely, or do you have your distributor onsite helping with the operations? So what are the different cases of operations

Paul van de Grift:

Stop operating? The machine has to be done locally and it’s designed to be done locally. So that’s a starting, we thought, okay. So there’s not a lot of treatment going on in the region. So one of the reasons is that it’s quite difficult to operate a traditional system. So as a starting point, we invented a system that is easy to operate. I would say the operator is one of the easiest, fastest in the world, right? It’s basically keeping clean the area and looking after them prescreen and stress handling, which is of course and important thing to do. So we see in practice that the operator comes from the community or the town itself. And then next to that, there is the maintenance and the maintenance is also pretty straightforward. So we can train the operator from the community to also perform very critical maintenance that’s needs to be done, or our distributor could do that for them.

The machine operates itself. We have, we can follow it life if needed with an internet connection about what’s happening in practice. That’s not really necessary. We see that operators are more than able to operate a system, you know, to feel the ingredients that are needed for the processing time. And the worst thing that could happen, like by lack of water or by lack of applying is that the machine stops until the tank is full again. So it’s pretty self out of maintenance. We can see some paramitas from, from a distance and we can give someone advice if that’s needed in practice, we see it, us actually not needed. So the operators really able to, to operate itself and the local distributor is able to perform the maintenance.

Antoine Walter:

You mentioned the new websites that you also operate in the business sense of the word, the model you can operate under this model, that’s with a multi-year contract. You would sponsor if I may say, so the installation of the container, and then I guess, turn it into a service. I mean, the treatment service, the, how does that work? And what’s the percentage of your installed base, which is working on this contract.

Paul van de Grift:

Yes, definitely. So what we see is that most of the interested parties are actually interested in purchasing the technology and then, you know, apply the treatments and reuse the water in their community. But another option is that the interested parties actually purchasing the plant itself, but it’s paying for the surface of the treatment so we can do a calculation. And it depends on, of course it’s different per country, per capacity, where, for example, a small municipality and base for cubic meter of treated water. So they don’t pay for the water, but they, for the treatment per cubic meter and don’t have to pay for the machine itself. So that remains, you know, we remain as blue gon and the owner of the, of the equipment and our local distributor, or has the role of maintenance or potentially operations as well. So we do offer that way of obtaining the technology as well. Surprisingly, what we see is that the most are intercept effects of on birds and then, and then operated in it themselves

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Antoine Walter:

That works only with the longterm, right? You don’t offer like a rental option where I have a temporary problem somewhere and you would bring your container and solve it for a couple of months and then leave again.

Paul van de Grift:

That seems like it’s also a possibility. I’m just wondering, it’s interesting. You say so. So if we send over the treating plants from the Netherlands would direct contracts with a municipality, then of course, then you should be for a couple of years, at least sort of, we know that we have our return on investment, right? So then we don’t have a situation at all after one year to say, Oh, well, okay. So it works very well, but we don’t want to treat the water anymore. So, so here’s where we are. We try to prevent that. So if it’s a direct type of contact, then we definitely are looking for a longer term contract where moose, or at least seven or 10 years, I’m going to treat, you know, X volume of water. And then we can work out the details. However, it could also be that our local distributor purchases one and rents it out for shorter periods.

So we are actually investigating that right now in Chile, where a Bluecore wastewater treatment plant is actually going to help out existing plants with a lot of problems. For example, in existing traditional biological plants that is built 10 or 15 years ago. And it was then calculated on 1500 inhabitants. How what’d you see in summertime, for example, that goes to place in Chile attracts a thousand or even 1500 more tourists to the town. So you have a system that’s calculated on 15 hundreds, but during a couple of weeks in the year, and it actually has the double amount of people in that town, you know, the holdouts on food, et cetera, that is of course before and after the GoFundMe crisis, let’s say, so how do you work with that? Then? Of course, the system completely collapses. So what our distributor wants to do is actually place a blue goal for like six weeks to help out with the treatments. So that’s the traditional one that’s already installed there. It doesn’t get, you know, into trouble, so to speak. So

Antoine Walter:

Was also surprised in a positive way. Don’t get me wrong by one of the claims of your website, where you say that your system is energy neutral. How do I have to understand that? Does it mean that you are self producing energy within the system, which means it’s fully autonomous or is it a balance between the inputs and the outputs?

Paul van de Grift:

One of the fountains is one of the many advances of the system is, you know, being easy to operate, but it has a low operational cost. And of course the use of electricity is one of the components of cost. So we went in there if we compare ourselves to existing plants, but we also offered the possibility to install solar panels on top of the machine or right next to it, or even work with existing solar panels. What we see a lot in a lot of children, for example, where this all becomes completely energy neutral. So what we do is we actually calculate a bigger size treatment plants because it will only work during the days, of course, and then it’s completely energy neutral and operating during the hours of the day we can provide X, but we also see just like I just mentioned in Chile, where we’re actually working with some solar panels that were already installed for different type of industrial use. And we are using those, you know, to come to this energy neutral level. So there’s a lot of possibilities here to even drop the costs more, make it even more circular in its use. And of course, recycling water and make it able to be reused is already closing the circle. And that’s,

Antoine Walter:

So we’ve mentioned several times that the low-cost aspect of your treatments, so that we get an ID, what would be the cost per treated cubic meter?

Paul van de Grift:

Yeah, so the cost of the treatment really depends on and local electricity costs, but also the local cost of an operator in the size of the capacity needed. Right? So we have to be careful there dropping a number because I don’t know the Tricity costs of each country out of my hair. So if we take guts numbers, we are 33% cheaper in operational costs per cubic meter, but taking the ducks price

Antoine Walter:

Compared to the Dutch benchmark or compared to a specific type of plants.

Paul van de Grift:

Okay, exactly. So ducks, well then the other plants are more or less using the same technology. So it’s easy to have to do the benchmark. And of course, if you an apply in decentralized treatment system, then you do not have the enormous infrastructural investment costs of having a centralized system, which means that you need to transport the water during lots of distances, right? So there’s the treatment costs, but it was also in traditional systems, the cost of getting the water to the centralized treating system, which takes a huge amount of energy. And of course we don’t have to ask, so it depends for country, but we are actually everywhere we go, they’re pretty competitive.

Antoine Walter:

So we’ve been discussing quite extensively, all the advantages of your system. And I really see lots of advantages and sounds very nicely suited to this decentralized waste with the treatment. But I guess you cannot be the solution to everybody and to everyone everywhere. So what are the cases where you would say Lou Khan is not the right fit?

Paul van de Grift:

Well, as I mentioned in Holland, we have quite a good, or actually a very good treatment process going on using large-scale biological systems. And they work very well and we don’t gain to replace them. And on that size, blue gold doesn’t have a chance, you know, of performing better. So what Bluecam did is actually looking at where is the actual problem and the problem is in regional wastewater treatment. So that’s a niche, so to speak where we dive into where we have in fact developed the way better alternative, right? That is actually working. So on a small scale, I don’t think there is a better alternative than physical chemical treatment processes, right? The traditional ones are more expensive that also leave a bigger footprint. And they’re always in the darkest corner outside, let’s say the towns because nobody wants to be near water treatment system, right? So we lose it once we start comparing ourselves to the treatment systems of larger towns. So we are very competitive from, from zero to 20,000 inhabitants. And we start to lose a competitive advantage from the towns that, you know, are middle-sized cities that are bigger than that amount of inheritance.

Antoine Walter:

So you mentioned that you’re targeting a niche with this decentralized treatment, but actually when you look at that niche, it’s impressive how big it is. I mean, not even entering the Chinese equities is because the decentralized treatment in China is just multi-billion niche, but everywhere in the world, when you see that 80% of the waste water still isn’t treated, that makes a lot of potential. How big is Lucan today? How many people are you inside the company?

Paul van de Grift:

Oh, so we are commercially active for, for a year and a half. So we are definitely a startup with five years of investigation and development, right? So we have five people working full-time for blue-collar. However, if we grow in sales numbers doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to grow in Mt of people working for us because our model is really to produce locally and to work with distributors that know the market and that know our product. And that could successfully, you know, introduce this technology in the market. So if we grow in sales five times, I think we would still be with five people in Logan.

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Antoine Walter:

So you’ve got the license or what’s your process.

Paul van de Grift:

Exactly. And even in the Netherlands where we are now assembling them wastewater treatment plants, we use a lot of providers that already preassembled, you know, some of the treatment models that are inside the plants, different suppliers that have a specialty in, you know, one building the reactor, other one building the oxidation module. Ozone is a module that we use for disinfection if need is rights, which comes from a different supplier. So we actually put together the machine and we know we have to know how of the operational meters, but just like I said, if we’ve gone to growth at times in sales, I don’t think it will have a direct effect on that, on the team.

Antoine Walter:

So coming back to this niche aspect, which is this multi-billion niche and your business model office licensing of what you do and this outsourcing and keeping them core insights, what you do, and then all the rest is going to be whether they’re outsourced or are sub-contracted. If now you had a crystal ball and to see a two or five years down the line, where is blue con

Paul van de Grift:

I would say five years. So we are trying to take the whole world basically, right? So we put the barrier pretty high. We know we have, we have an interesting technology and we want to take it to the further development cost of technology and, you know, not be having the huge fat building, a huge factory and look in the Netherlands, so to speak. So we want to focus on our core just as you, as you explained, in terms of what if we could speak in terms of sales. But I have the first desire to be operative in as many counters as we can, which means that we can offer the blue-collar alternative in as many concepts as we can. That’s of course, up to the customer to say, okay, we have a system, Hey, we have a system B one has a initial cost of X.

The other one has operative costs. We just want to be available worldwide first. So we are working a lot on being available in a teen and market in a Spanish markets in Eastern Europe, which means that we are focusing a lot right now on finding the right distributors in the countries that embrace our technology that know the markets. And they can actually deliver also the after sales technical surface. Right. If we have the right parties contracted the right distributors, phones in each country then is when we are ready to make your sales. So we are working very much on our distribution network right now. And if we do that, right, and we are cooperative, so to speak in the majority, if I take Latin America as an example, it maybe be not four or five countries with the biggest potential, then those sales will generate almost by themselves. So to speak

Antoine Walter:

In how many countries do you already have that existing distribution channel and in how many do you intend it to have in two years? Let’s say,

Paul van de Grift:

Yeah. So I think we’re almost having a network in almost 10 counties right now, but the interesting point about your question is, so if you look at Chile, the country is actually longer than the, you know, run over.

Antoine Walter:

It’s going to be my next question. How many distributors do you need to cover chili?

Paul van de Grift:

So then of course having one distributor per country that does the whole sales and have access to the whole markets, it would be amazing. And what you see in practice is that many of those firms, they know the region and they have contacts in the region and they are performing well in their own region. And in region and chili is as big as the size of the Netherlands and Belgium together. Right? And that’s the smallest region in Sheila, probably. So if we want to be operated everywhere in effect, I Chileans and example, it actually means that we need probably four or five distributors that are respecting the territories. So they’re not going to in each other’s territory, but they are absolute specialists and they know exactly what’s going on in the territory. And they’re also able to deliver the quality that we need. So that’s what we, in what, where we are right now.

So we are active in probably eight countries with distributors, but in those countries, we might need excellent stewards as well. And then of course, taking it to the next level into countries, then we are not practicing yet. So for example, in Chile, we have already two distributors who are commercially active for us. We probably need two more. And once that’s been done, my vision goes to the law firm country, which is brew, which is an interesting, because of their drug problem, to the nub of brew, Ecuador and Colombia, which is also a huge economic potential and Columbia, even while having a huge amount of Sweetwater, it’s not distributed well. So there’s also a lot of opportunities there. And the Columbia also probably looking at two or three different distributors, you know, minimum

Antoine Walter:

Very interesting. Actually my last question for this deep dive would be a seasonal question, which I have to ask those days every time, you know, it’s merger and acquisition season, and there is a big consolidation working our industry nowadays. So your path and your growth ambitions for the next years are clear to me, but it’s all happening with you as an independent company. Or do you think that at some point you might be acquired and there is it’s part of the business model to have kind of an exit at some point where a big group just says, Hey, what cross is doing is pretty interesting. I should have that in my portfolio.

Paul van de Grift:

Well, it’s not a strategy to be acquired. I also know that we are an interesting company for a lot of larger firms. I know we are on the radar, but we’re not necessarily aiming for that. What we are aiming for is a short time to market. So we are looking for, you know, partnerships just as I mentioned with, with local companies that could deliver, sell and deliver those outreach plans locally. And if they can do it in a right way, it’s a pretty short time to market there at the same time. I know that we dived into a gap and that we developed a pretty successful process then that we are being followed by larger firms yet. Definitely. I don’t think we’re distracted by it. It is not necessarily a goal, but it could be in the future. Yeah. Who knows?

Antoine Walter:

Yeah, it can. It’s in South the future. That’s the, that’s the beauty of it. Exactly. Paul. That was a very interesting deep for me. It’s fine. We do. Or propose you to switch to the rapid fire questions. Sure.

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Rapid fire questions.

Antoine Walter:

So the rapid for our questions, the principle is pretty simple. I try to keep the questions short and if possible you will have to keep the answers short as well. But as I remind my guests all the time, if there’s something really interesting, I’m not cutting the microphones. So don’t feel restraints. My first question is the following. What is the most exciting project you’ve been working on and why?

Paul van de Grift:

Well, the most exciting projects is the one, the, one of the projects I’m working on right now, which is in Chile with a local avocado producer, where we are trying to calculate the exact added value of having 48,000 liters of water daily available. And what that means for this avocado producer in terms of, you know, XR generated value. So let me elaborate just very shortly on that, but very inefficient fruit uses a lot of water to grow. There’s a huge demand worldwide and not having sufficient water is actually effective. Slows down the supply side, let’s say, so we are working together with a partner in Chile trying to calculate if we have this waste three or four days thousand liters a day, and we turn it into reusable irrigation water. What does it exactly mean for this grower in terms of revenue? And that’s of course interesting because we are now not offering a treatment plant with a certain price. We are actually offering a business model, you know, a global business model where the, we could say, okay, that’s an investment, the volts, but you can generate so much from it. And the return on investment is in, well, it looks like it’s going to be in a year or a half. So that’s, that’s an exciting project I’m working on right now.

Antoine Walter:

So water is on the critical path for this avocado company. And you are supplying water as a service, even if they buy the full system at the end of the day, their interest is not on the wastewater side, it’s on the produced reusable water.

Paul van de Grift:

Exactly. That makes it interesting. What are you going to do with the water that Google provides? And if you use it as irrigation water, and you take this Applegate or business, which is an interesting added value to it, then what does it mean in terms of revenue? So, yeah, that’s definitely interesting to do. And since we are on this community level or small town level, it also means that we are actually creating the development of local economic activities. So not everybody needs to go to the bigger cities for jobs. We can create those jobs in the towns.

Antoine Walter:

I’m sorry, because now it’s me that made it longer. But it’s interesting because it’s a shift of paradigm. You’re really closing that gap. I mean, it’s not just circular economy on the paper, it’s circular economy for real, so interesting one, let me go to the next one, which is, what’s your favorite part of your current job? I want to say here

Paul van de Grift:

Traveling. So I’m in the Netherlands. And of course, if you, if you have to Latin America and Spain and Italy as a markets than traveling as part of the job, which is very nice. So that’s not currently obviously going on, although we are looking forward to go to tequila, we have a demonstration ready, but they’re not a nice part of the job is actually trying to find a workable sales strategy per country. And then you have to imagine that you cannot just copy the successful sales strategy from country to country B you know, you have to take into the considerations, like how does this market work? How does the purchasing process work, who are interested? Why would they reuse water in any way? You know, in a South Australia, it rains every day. So who would be interested in reusing water? So trying to figure out this puzzle and come to a strategy per country. It’s also something I really like about my job.

Antoine Walter:

I feel you for the travel side, because sheeple used to be my, my second home and now it’s must be maybe six months that I didn’t leave really home. So I understand the struggle. What is the trend to watch out for in the water industry?

Paul van de Grift:

Well, we’ve seen a lot of innovations which are very good, which have to do with using less water, right? So if we look at the agricultural sector than smarter irrigation, you know, more crop per drop, for example, initiatives, they’re all based on less use of the resource, which is very, very good because it’s, you know, at least a more efficient use, but what you see now, a trend is okay, less use, but what do we do with the water we do use and how can we return that into the productive cycle or even on a household level. So you see in the Netherlands companies that offer solutions, technological solutions for water reuse and blue gold, of course, it’s one of them, but we also have a lot on the large scale then, you know, data technology who also cuts down UTM costs and time of a wastewater treatment on a large scale. And you see companies that are trying to build a model where water can be reused in your own household. So I think that’s the trend for the, for the water industry.

Antoine Walter:

So the thing you care about the most when you’re working on your projects and what is the one you care less about? Well,

Paul van de Grift:

So the trick is here. What I care about is not just make a successful sale, but make sure that, you know, after installation our treatment plant is actually working for the minimum time 20 years, which is the minimum time that our system works. So we are here for them, you know, for the longterm. And if you want to be successful in the country, you should not just send some technology from the Netherlands towards Chile or Peru. It should really be concerns of how is the customer going to make this into a success. So that’s something I care about. I care about the after sales service, so to speak of having a close contact with the customer and making sure that they are, you know, maximizing everything they can from our treatments as system. There’s not a lot of things I dislike actually. I would have to invent one. I liked the international aspect of my word. I liked the added value. And of course the, you know, the sustainability of our, of our solution, we are sustainable ourselves, but of course our solution make [inaudible] or any other industry or household, it makes it more sustainable. So it’s, that really fits in, in my personal goals as well.

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Antoine Walter:

Do you have sources to recommend, to keep up with the water and wastewater market trends?

Paul van de Grift:

Well, and then lens for water partnership. What are lions? Those are sector wide organizations that know what’s going on in those water sector, as well as they know what’s going on worldwide. So what’s the need worldwide and what do those companies have to offer? So if you would like to keep up with what’s going on in the Netherlands, in terms of technology or, or any other disaster risk reduction, part of the water irrigation initiatives, then, you know, to those sectors organization like NVP, and then as for what the partnership or what our lions are basically providing a lot of information about one, the supply side and the other one, the demand side, like what’s going on world, next problem. Do we need to resolve?

Antoine Walter:

You’ve been an amazing guest and I really had lots of interesting stuff that you told and which enlightened me and which is very interesting to me. So I hope it’s going to be at least as interesting for our listeners. If people want to reach out to you, where can I redirect them?

Paul van de Grift:

Our website is [inaudible], but we are also renewing our website. So a lot of more information will be available there. Info Anthem blue conductor now would be the website and my name [inaudible]. You can also Google me or search me on LinkedIn and you can follow me directly or follow our local international buffet, LinkedIn page. So info and look data. Now, follow our websites and look me up on LinkedIn. And then you can see what’s going on with our company. Of course, contact me also, if you’re, if you’re interested in knowing more about our solutions,

Antoine Walter:

Of course, like always you can find all these links in the notes of the episode so

Paul van de Grift:

Much appreciated on hundred. It was also a very nice opportunity for us to be on this podcast and I found you on LinkedIn. So I think that’s also a great platform. We’ll stay in touch.

Antoine Walter:

Sure. I’m a LinkedIn convinced. So, so thanks a lot, Paul, and I hope you have a lot of sexists in the future, and I hope that you’ll, you’ll have these many distributors and and networks in Latin America, and then growing from there, we’re going to start to see blue con everywhere. So thank you and see you anytime soon in the future.

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The post How to Clear Remote Places’ Problems, Solve Environmental Issues and Revive Wastewater in a Blast? appeared first on (don't) Waste Water.

GF Piping Systems is the global expert for the safe and reliable transportation of water, chemicals, and gas.

This episode is part of my series on Water Digitization – check it out!

What we covered:

We just turned 2’000 downloads with the #podcast, and I still can’t believe it!

I remember that anecdote when I was three weeks into the experiment. 

I was discussing with one of these “influencer gurus”. 

She asked, “so what’s your show about?”

“Water & Wastewater Treatment”

“Well, that sounds niche…”

I smiled and went on.

7.8 billion people rely on water to survive. If that’s a niche, I don’t know what’s not!

Fast forward to last week: we not only passed the 2’000 downloads but also reached 75’000 infographic views on LinkedIn!

I get this is still baby steps compared to beauty influencers on Instagram.

But it’s something, and I’m so glad we achieved this something!

Every step towards better information sharing in the #waterindustry counts! 

Every step towards the preservation of water counts.

So to celebrate together, and summarize one of the main trends my guests have been addressing over the last weeks, I prepared you a special episode:

How to cleverly embrace the digital craze

The rapid-fire questions  are this time for you:

What topics would you like us to address in the coming weeks?

What is the trend we shall explore?

Who should I invite?

I’m thrilled to read your answers! 

Get the 5 Page Synthesis for free!

Wastewater treatment processes can be very inefficient, especially when it comes to energy consumptions. This is where digital will more and more have our industry's back, by supporting process optimization!

But digitization is a long-ball game. We need to invest today in data collection and information gathering, in order to reap the benefits tomorrow.

This is also a financial challenge: rather than investing in expensive extensions and revampings, there is a broad untapped potential to leverage in many plants!

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Full transcript:

20% of the songs available on Spotify were never listened to. Not so long ago, Instagram (then called “Burbn”) enabled you to check in at some locations, earn points to hang out with friends  and – as an afterthought – to take pictures. Oh, and YouTube was built to be a video dating site.

Well there you are! Fully equipped to cool down a digital enthusiast, the next time he proclaims that IOT is the future of water and wastewater treatment. But wait, should you?

In fact, the stories these anecdotes tell are a bit different.

Why would you upload thousands of songs and keep them on your data centers if no one ever calls them? Simply because, you had no way at first to determine which ones would be endlessly listened to.

Sure, an early-adopter of Burbn, checking in at Mount Rushmore while waiting for his YouTube date might hardly recognize what both platforms have become. Yet, his behavior at the time framed those digital behemoths, gaining them billions of subscribers (and dollars) on the way.

Future is always uncertain. However, you can still shape it.

Digital applied to Process Optimization

As water professionals, we know that our processes always have room for improvement – and that’s an understatement.

Take a typical wastewater treatment plant. Aeration tanks burn about 60% of a plant’s energy, essentially to maintain bacterial activity. It is yet very common to use a combination of throttle and break to keep those microscopic workers in their comfort zone.

You know the story: whenever the mixed liquor suspended solids (MLSS) exceed your intended threshold, you turn up your aeration (the infamous and energy gluttonous “turbo mode”). Then, while increasing your sludge extraction to bring your MLSS back down, you might brake a little too hard… and end-up inhibiting your nitrification.

Factor in that whenever you change your sludge extraction ratio that affects other areas of the plant (settling tanks, digesters…) and even if still on helicopter view, you get a sense of operation complexity.

However, focusing on MLSS or nitrite levels tends to forget the root cause of those fluctuations: the incoming organic load.

Every WWTP is equipped nowadays with carbon sensors at the inlet. Yet a pollution spike, “early” detected at the plant inlet, is the wastewater treatment equivalent to your car detecting you might crash, when you’re two foot away from the tree and still driving at 55 mph.

Your plant is not lying in the middle of a desert, treating wastewater it creates. It is instead connected to a sewer, where residence times range from hours to days.

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Sow today to reap tomorrow

The spike in organic load which causes your headache when reaching the plant probably appeared some hours ago somewhere in the sewage network.

Imagine if neither you, nor the original polluter were to accept the passive status quo! Pollution could be reduced at source, while you would prepare your microbial chaps to hold the siege.

Nevertheless, collecting organic load data on sewage networks is not easy as pie. First, the corrosive atmosphere in the sewer doesn’t really make it a go-to place for a happy gathering. Second, complex sensors did not become instantly cheaper just to support your optimization crusade.

This is where data has your back.

It is absolutely doable to build models that use simple indicators (pH, conductivity, temperature…) to extrapolate quality factors (like organic load). It “just” requires you to build a critical mass on data.

This is neither science fiction, nor rocket science as Ari Goldfarb explained in Episode 6 of the “(don’t) Waste Water” podcast. Companies of the likes of Kando or Emagine simply leverage AI and Machine Learning on one end, of-the-shelf sensors on the other to provide helpful insights on sewer and pollution loads.

Operators that used to detect one quality shift per month while wondering why they had to heavily play with the turbo mode, now notice that quality actually shifts 3-4 times per week.

Meanwhile, industrials that had no clue so far they were a pollution source received a welcome revelation that might prevent them from repeating some mistakes in the future.

Here’s a first take-home message: start gathering data today, even if you don’t yet exactly know what for. Don’t go for the fancy: keep it simple and consistent. The models you might feed with it one day thank you in advance – so does your stunt double with grey hair that will have to pay the energy bills by then.

As much as you might agree at this stage with the Idea that there is room for optimization in each plant, I could swear you still wonder how big of a potential this represents. So did I not so long ago.

Revealing the untapped potential of existing plants

While recording Episode 3 of my podcast series, Thomas Debruyne shared some numbers on plants that underwent the digital diagnosis and remedy route Veolia Water Technologies markets under their Aquavista brand.

Two of those might simply blow your mind. A WWTP in Denmark reduced its operating costs by 40% while increasing its hydraulic capacity by 80%!

Just think of it that way: there’s no need to expand a plant if you can reach thus large untapped capacity. Said differently, this last number implies a tremendous saving on investment.

Too good to be true? Jeroen de Lathouver from Waterleau shared similar experience when interviewing on Hakim El Fadil’s “Smart Water Solutions” podcast. So did Jonathan Grant from Emagin on Dave McGimpsey’s.

When you hear the same lines from various non-connected individuals and companies, chances are there is truth lying beneath (and if not yet done, you probably should start listening to podcasts).

A 3-step process

To reap the process optimization benefits, just apply this simple recipe.

First, make sure to collect the right data at the right place. Second, use this entry to run a diagnosis of the plant, and build up a model (aka Digital Twin) that computes the process behavior. Third, run process and control hypotheses on the digital twin to find out which ones deliver the best output, and share those insights with the plant operators.

It is then up to you to launch such an initiative on your own or to get the support of companies of the likes of the ones mentioned before.

WWTPs are actually not the only playground for this methodology. Applying it upstream, within the factories that contribute to the pollution events, might also rank as a value move.

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Digital can also support factories

Industrial operators don’t pollute for the sake of harming the environment while smoking cigars and drinking Brandy. It has much more to do with a lack of understanding of the water cycle within their plant.

As embedded and necessary to their processes as water might be, the core of a factory’s mission still lies in the production of an industrial good. Which means that plant operators have little focus on the water cycle, when they notice at all there is one.

However, acquiring data on process and wastewater streams and using it to run a diagnosis often acts as an eye-opener. As Stephane Gilbert, CEO of Aquassay reported in Episode 5, this exercise allowed to divide downtime on a factory’s reverse osmosis skids by 15… at the only expense of an additional valve.

If water is not everywhere on the radar, operation costs surely are. Factoring in the opportunity of a data driven preventive maintenance should achieve to convince industrial players: it almost builds for a no-downtime guarantee.

For sure, digital is not going to disrupt and replace your plant operators. But it will lighten the load on their shoulders upon making a decision while giving them headspace to take action on all the other tasks a human still accomplishes better than any machine.

Statistics say, you’re watching your smartphone 150 times per day and reacting on an SMS within 4 minutes. Why would you still rely on a single daily analysis and your operator’s gut feeling to run complex water processes? Act on the incongruity today: you’re also allowed to reap the benefits of the digital craze!

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