Brent Solina

Brent Solina did not set out to fix wastewater. He studied biochemistry and biophysics at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, where his focus was protein folding, the question of how an enzyme gets its shape and its job. The startup itch came on the side, while he was working with an early-stage company called Ecovative Design that grows materials out of mushrooms, and as Brent tells it, watching them meet problems head-on taught him that anybody can do this kind of thing if they are creative enough and push hard enough. He started entering student business-plan competitions around composting and food waste, and that is where he first read about the technology he has now spent more than a decade on.

The technology is the microbial fuel cell, one of the more unusual ideas in water tech, and the cleanest way to understand it is through Brent's own framing, that wastewater treatment is really just liquid composting. A pile of compost gets its oxygen from the air for free, but pushing oxygen into water is hard and expensive, which is why a conventional plant runs huge blowers around the clock to keep its bacteria breathing. A microbial fuel cell sidesteps that entirely. The bugs sit on an electrode called the anode and, as part of eating the waste, push their spent electrons into it, those electrons run along a wire to a second electrode, the cathode, where they meet the oxygen in the open air. Brent calls it an electrochemical snorkel, because the bacteria get to breathe oxygen without the water ever having to be aerated, which means no blowers.

Brent Solina founded MICROrganic Technologies in 2010 to turn that lab idea into a piece of industrial hardware, and the honest story he tells is how unglamorous that work is. He is a biochemist, so he had to teach himself to code the control systems, design the pump rigs, and wrangle the electrochemistry of a battery whose electrolyte is sewage, which behaves nothing like the clean, tightly controlled chemistry a normal battery maker gets to use. He talks about installing an early pilot in Pittsfield in minus 20 Fahrenheit, where he set a 7-minute timer because that was how long he had to make a change before the line froze solid, and calls it trial by fire. The company's product, VIVA, is the result of that grind: a modular system, roughly the size of a refrigerator, that the company says cuts aeration energy by 85 to 90 percent and even generates a little clean DC power on the side.

What makes Brent Solina worth listening to is that he thinks past his own product. He is candid that the technology took years to scale because the cathode had to be physically enormous, the size of equipment that sits in treatment basins acres across, at a time when electrochemistry was, in his words, still largely a dark art outside of specialists. And when you ask him about the biggest unsolved problem in his field, he does not name his own, he points at water reuse, the policy and optics around what people sometimes call toilet to tap. It is outrageous to him, he says, that we spend generations of solid engineering making the water that leaves a treatment plant as clean as it can be, and then we throw it away rather than close the loop. That is the kind of opinion you only get from someone who has spent fifteen years inside the tank.

“If there's one thing you take away, it's that life is electric. When you look at wastewater, don't look at just the oxygen, don't look at just the bugs. You should be seeing lightning bolts flying all around that tank, with VIVA being the extension cord to plug into that.”

He is, in the end, a translator: a scientist who can make a sewage battery sound like the most natural thing in the world, which is most of why a hard, slow technology like the microbial fuel cell has a champion patient enough to keep at it.