Last week Dr Thomas Fudge, sat down with Jack Lomas, the host of the Future Engineering Club Podcast to have a chat about the exciting work taking place at WASE. The result was a 30-minute episode full to the brim of exciting tech talk and all things wastewater.
“SME food and beverage manufacturers make up around 99.1% of producers across Europe while providing almost 50% of our food”.
This statistic shows us that the majority of the food and drink producers in Europe fall into the SME category. Understanding the specific challenges that these businesses face around waste treatment is a must for Thomas and the team at WASE.
The range of existing options for wastewater treatment are not viable for many of these businesses. Conventional methods bring high upfront costs for onsite treatment through anaerobic digestion or expensive outsourcing, which brings with it additional carbon emissions from transporting the business’s wastewater offsite.
“Wastewater is one of the best resources we have available.”
WASE offers an alternative by providing a modular system that only requires a small footprint, provides a fast set-up and unlocks power generation opportunities. Not only does the WASE system treat wastewater locally, but it generates thermal energy (heat) for use on site, off-setting grid energy usage and lowering carbon emissions.
“WASE’s modular process uses electro-methanogenic reactors containing electrodes with electroactive bacteria, which break down the organic compounds whilst also generating an electrical current. This current can be monitored remotely, and correlates to the microbial health and activity in the reactor. We use machine learning to automate pumps and controls to optimise the waste flow, ensuring the system is never over or under fed – this means we can always know when the microbes are hungry!”
Using WASE’s unique electro-methanogenic reactors, a simple ‘hands off’ approach is delivered on site as the system is constantly being monitored and optimised. This helps deliver a greater energy yield by treating wastewater faster and more efficiently – this means that the food and beverage teams can focus making produce for their customers! WASE’s combination of speed and efficiency helps to create a simpler process for customers and removes many of the barriers that existing anaerobic digestion processes present:
“One customer we spoke to was looking at getting an anaerobic digestion system built on site, which they would have needed to buy more land for. It would have taken 12-18 months to build, and they were looking at adding future production capacity, meaning building an even larger system to meet their 5-year plan. If they had built this pre-covid and taken out the finance they probably would now be in administration.”
Traditional methods of onsite wastewater treatment are clearly a risky option for SME’s due to high costs and inherent system inflexibility. The alternative is outsourcing treatment to agents, which means losing the considerable potential value of their wastewater! However, WASE’s electro-methanogenic process can generate a 10-20% higher methane content than alternative methods and creates a biogas that is up to 80% methane. This higher energy biogas is far easier to integrate into existing systems (typically boilers or CHPs) and provides a great business benefit from the wastewater; lower costs, lower carbon and higher profit margins!
As Dr Thomas Fudge says: “Water is what makes this planet really unique and is one of the most valuable resources on the planet” this really highlights the need to accelerate a circular economy for water, reducing and reusing wherever possible. The WASE solution provides a huge opportunity to remove scope 3 emissions from business operations whilst protecting the planet for future generations.
Find the full podcast below:
If you’d like to find out more, reach out to the team at WASE here.
