Public Funding for Sweetgen Limited

Many industries such as food production, breweries and agriculture produce large amount of effluents that contain organic contaminants which need to be removed before disposal. This requires lengthy and time intensive processes with a large cost (£12 billion worldwide for the relevant industries). Approximately 3 -- 5% of electricity produced is used to clean water. We have developed a catalytic composite material that can utilise air in order to clean industrial wastewater by consuming the organic material within this water. The principle is analogous to a catalyst for automotive exhaust cleaning. Compared to current technologies based on microbes, our material is insensitive to the external conditions, such as temperature, pH and composition, does not require any energy input or incubation times and can continuously be operated without any regeneration step. It is therefore an excellent solution to decrease the cost of water treatment for effluents not suited for other waste-to-energy technologies. Our composite materials and product design will simplify current wastewater processes making them more flexible, resilient, efficient and safe. The energy saved for wastewater cleaning has the potential to save millions of tons of CO2 from getting into the atmosphere, thus helping to mitigate climate change. During this project we will optimise the material and investigate its processing into innovative products.

Wastewater represents a potent source of energy which currently is underutilised. Industries such as food and beverage production, breweries, wineries or biofuel producers currently expend around USD15 billion worldwide for wastewater treatment, where energy and toxic chemicals and/or slow biological processes need to be used. This wastewater contains biosourced contaminants which could be used as a fuel to generate renewable electricity at almost no cost. We have developed a technology that can harvest this energy and at the same time decrease the contamination. The benefit of this technology is both generation of affordable electricity and money savings from lower water treatment costs. Unlike biological processes our electrochemical system does not contain microbes, which are sensitive to the water conditions, need close process control and expert knowledge. It is basically a “plug and play” process. Another benefit over current biological solutions is that it requires only 1% of the space of a biogas facility, so even companies with little space can implement it. The total renewable electricity produced and the energy saved for wastewater cleaning has the potential to save millions of tons of CO2, thus helping to mitigate climate change.