Today, AbTech has 13,000 installations in 36 states and seven countries, and its 2008 revenue is expected to be 2,000 percent higher than last year's. Seventy percent of its business is with municipal customers. But private developers and commercial entities are increasingly part of the mix. British grocery giant Tesco recently installed an AbTech system to treat runoff at a new 88-acre facility in Riverside, California. Smaller operators are employing the technology to solve niche problems -- in bus depots and fast-food drive-throughs, to cite two examples. Airports, too: The ones in Newark, New Jersey, and New York's Westchester County are among those that have installed AbTech sponges, which typically need to be replaced every two to four years; used sponges are sent to waste-energy plants and burned as fuel.
Road runoff is one problem. But pollutants from other sources are even more insidious. Hundreds of U.S. water utilities, for example, are dealing with high levels of the chemical perchlorate, a rocket-fuel ingredient that has been found in the lower Colorado River, which provides water for more than 15 million people in the Southwest, and in dozens of ground-water wells throughout California. Though the EPA has yet to set a drinking-water standard for perchlorate, Massachusetts and California have, citing health risks to developing fetuses. The gasoline additive MTBE is another troublesome ground-water pollutant, as is nitrate, a common agricultural contaminant, which at high enough levels in water causes serious illness or death in infants.
A new technology being commercialized by a company called Microvi Biotech literally eats these pollutants up.
Eliminating challenging pollutants from water has traditionally involved using mechanical filters or chemicals. Recently, researchers have experimented with using genetically modified organisms to degrade water pollutants. But until now, all these methods have had at least one major drawback: the production of a secondary waste stream of concentrated pollutants or sludge that must be incinerated or otherwise disposed of. In eliminating one kind of pollution, they create another.
Microvi's founder, Fatemeh Shirazi, has developed what she and others believe is a safer, more efficient, and cleaner method -- using so-called biological reactors that house colonies of natural microorganisms "trained" to feed off particular pollutants in water. Inside the reactor, Shirazi explains, microorganisms are "packaged" in materials and configurations that protect them from the die-off common in other treatment methods. Most remarkably, the system is self-cleaning -- when the microbe population reaches a critical stage, it stops growing and cleans house, with living organisms feeding off dead ones. As a result, there is no fouling and buildup inside the reactor and no waste to dispose of -- all that comes out is clean water.
"It's unique," says Michael Dimitriou, president of the consulting firm WaterInnovations. He discovered Shirazi's work when he was asked to review it for a multinational water company. "It does something that's been tried before but no one could do." Shirazi has developed reactors that target about eight specific pollutants, including PCE, a chemical used in dry-cleaning and other industries, MTBE, perchlorate, and nitrates. The novelty of her technology was recognized with a first prize in the water category at the 2007 California Clean Tech Open competition.
Shirazi earned her Ph.D. in environmental engineering from Oklahoma State University, got her first U.S. patent in 2002, and incorporated Microvi in 2004 in Overland Park, Kansas. With $1.8 million in grants from agencies including the National Institutes of Health, she worked to troubleshoot issues with the technology. Now headquartered in Union City, California, the company has 11 employees and is beginning its first large-scale implementations. In addition to working with public water and wastewater facilities to treat emerging pollutants, Shirazi anticipates a market in treating water discharged by various industries -- including the paper industry, which produces wastewater high in toxic chlorinated phenols, and the food and beverage industry, which discharges water high in organic pollutants and nitrate.
"We are in such a big mess today partly because we never thought about the consequences of discharging water that was full of pollutants," says Shirazi. "It never made sense to me that in the name of cleaning up those pollutants, we've kept coming up with solutions that also have a negative impact on the environment. The idea of using biotechnology -- using concepts from nature -- to do this is very appealing."
Adam Bluestein is a Burlington, Vermont-based freelance writer.
