Manaf Farhan

Manaf Farhan did not stumble into water. Manaf is from Jordan and came to the United States for college, studying engineering at the University of Notre Dame, and then switched from civil to environmental engineering for graduate school because he was already drawn to wastewater treatment and sustainability. His dissertation was in anaerobic digestion, which is the process of letting bacteria break down organic waste without oxygen, and after that he spent about a year and a half doing nothing but comparing how different anaerobic reactors actually perform. So by the time he started EMG International with his brother in 1996, he was not selling a hunch, he had already studied the field down to the reactor design.

EMG International builds what Manaf Farhan calls an Anaerobic Fluidized Bed Digester, or AFBD, and the easiest way to picture it is a tall vertical tank where wastewater flows upward through a bed of sand-sized particles that bacteria live on. Because the bacteria cling to those particles instead of floating freely, the reactor holds an enormous working population of them, somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 milligrams per litre against the 3,000 to 5,000 you would get in a conventional system, so you get roughly twenty times the biomass doing the work in a far smaller footprint. More bacteria packed into less space means a more stable process and a tank that fits where a manufacturer actually has room.

Here is why that matters to the people writing the cheques. When you treat that waste anaerobically instead of the usual oxygen-hungry way, you produce far less sludge to haul away and you capture biogas, the methane the bacteria give off, which Manaf Farhan's systems burn in a combined heat and power unit to make electricity and recover waste heat on site. The result is a plant that runs net energy positive, producing about 3 to 4 times the energy it consumes, which is the whole pitch of treating wastewater in a, as he puts it, net grid positive way. For a soda bottler or a cheese plant, the dirty water stops being a surcharge they pay the municipality and starts being a fuel they burn, and that is the line Manaf Farhan keeps coming back to: industrial wastewater used to be a liability, and his job is to turn it into an asset.

Manaf Farhan's real obstacle, though, is not chemistry, it is trust. The wastewater industry is old and slow to change, and he says the thing EMG fights the most is acceptance, because a plant manager would often rather pay the surcharge and skip the headache than believe their effluent can be treated reliably on site. His answer is almost stubbornly concrete: he proved the very first system at a cheese plant back in 2004, built largely by his own hands with his brother because the customer would only pay once it worked, and that digester is still running today. These days he closes skeptics by opening his laptop in the meeting and logging straight into a live plant to show them the flows, the pH and the electricity being generated second by second, because in his words people have to see it to believe it.

That patience has compounded. EMG spent its first years as a hard sell, won customers one proven installation at a time, and by 2020 had built enough of a track record that the Canadian power company TransAlta took a 30% stake in the business, betting on industrial wastewater as a source of renewable energy. Manaf Farhan now runs the company from outside Philadelphia while his brother Yasar leads the engineering and build side, and his read on where the whole water industry is heading is the same thesis he has lived for thirty years: sustainability and automation are what the next decade or two of water innovation will be about.

“In the past, industries have looked at wastewater as a tax or as a liability. With our technology, you can actually now convert that liability into an asset.”

Manaf Farhan is, in the end, the rare founder who studied the science before he sold it and then spent a quarter-century proving it one plant at a time, which is most of why a power company eventually came knocking.