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A Faster, Cheaper, and Greener Process for Treating Residential Septic Wastewater Now Enables Infinite Water Reuse

THE CHALLENGE

For our planet’s survival, water must

be an abundant resource. A sustainable

solution must be both economical and

environmentally green, one that can

eradicate dangerous contaminants

in residential wastewater and make it

safe for reuse. Further, it’s essential to

be able to recapture wastewater runoff

and prevent environmental pollution

of the Earth’s water.

THE RESULT

Using an innovative new biotechnol-

ogy process of electro-oxidation and

electro-molecular maceration, Sanzfield

invented a compact system that

sanitizes water for reuse in a matter

of hours as opposed to days, using

minimal energy and no chemicals.

COMPANY: Sanzfield Technologies

FOUNDED: 2014

INDUSTRY: Domestic Wastewater

RESULTS, OUTCOMES, AND ACHIEVEMENTS

Sanitizes wastewater in hours rather than days as with conventional processes.

Recaptures and sanitizes up to 40% of residential wastewater runoff for reuse.

Destroys E.coli and other harmful microorganisms quickly and permanently.

Inexpensive process operates on low voltage (29V).

In pilot at five sites in Mexico, Canada, and California.

Change the way the world treats

water and positively impact a billion

lives within the next 10 years.

— Sanzfield Technologies' mission

It can’t be done, especially with so little power. That was

the assessment of a respected professor at a leading

university when he was told about a revolutionary new

wastewater sanitation process that didn’t involve the

traditional biological process. A breakthrough by Sanzfield

Technologies, a Canadian-based startup, the innovation

involves exponential biotechnologies enabling a dual

process they named “electro-oxidation” and “electro-

molecular maceration.”

Using millions of tiny, negatively-charged oxygen bubbles, SanzAir attacks the positively-charged, carbon-based organic content in waste-water from toilets, showers, and washing machines that goes into septic tanks, sanitizing it for reuse. The process, which can take days, weeks, and even longer for simpler, traditional septic systems using biological processes, is reduced to four to six hours using SanzAir electro-oxida-tion and is powered by only 24 volts of electricity.

The second part of the process, electro-molecular maceration (EMM) occuring in the SanzMicro unit, takes care of the microorganisms found in wastewater—from more common forms of bacteria to the more dangerous, including E.coli, Giardia, Cryptosporidium, and even Legionnaires’ disease, that conventional filtration systems can’t handle. Using SanzAir and SanzMicro, a recent test on a wastewater sample consisting of 2.4 billion E.coli bacteria showed the bacteria was completely eradicated in an astonishing five minutes using the SanzMicro process, with no regrowth.

“The one thing that we do better than anybody else is kill bacteria. Usually when you kill the E.coli, you look in the microscope and count the bodies to determine how effective you’ve been,” said Bob Brill, President and Co-founder of Sanzfield Technologies. “With our EMM process, you don’t even have bodies to count because the super oxidation also takes care of the remains. This test was another break-through for us because we had no idea we could eradicate large amounts bacteria so quickly. As a result, we expect our processes to spawn a whole new product for us, which will have applications beyond residential wastewater.”

A Moonshot for Water—A Pressing Global Problem

The impact of Sanzfield’s wastewater innovations on the Earth’s dwindling water supply will be nothing short of exponential, actually changing the way we think about and use water. When water can be

used again and again, a precious resource will become an abundant, virtually limitless one. Water sanitation and reuse will become the norm for 99 percent of all water applications.

The timing of Sanzfield’s breakthrough couldn’t be better. Over one-quarter of America’s homes are off the sewage grid and rely on septic systems. Over 33 percent of new homes are being built with septic systems. Used by 60 million Americans every day, the majority of these septic systems are based on old-fashioned, gravity flow biological technology that is beginning to fail at an alarming rate—10 percent according to the EPA, and up to 70 percent in some critical regions. As a result of these failures, 40 percent of untreated water in the form of runoff is entering the water table, lakes and streams, and into the oceans, polluting coastlines and imperiling the ocean’s ecosystem.

“The goal of the competition was to challenge

startups to find new ideas to solve California’s

water crisis because the state was in the midst

of what would become a historic five-year

drought.”

— Bob Brill, President and Co-founder of Sanzfield Technologies

The Sanzfield Journey

Sanzfield co-founder David Jones has been working on water technology for over 30 years. Based in Canada, he has led one-of-a-kind projects involving water applications around the world, including Asia, Malaysia, and China, ranging from fish farming to olympic-size swimming pools, using conventional water treatment materials. Along the way, though, he was developing his own ideas about how to make the process better, and spent six years at Hong Kong Polytechnic University where he focused on developing the ability to kill bacteria.

Over a lifetime of experience Jones found all of the traditional processes for cleaning water—chlorination, ultra-violet (UV) radiation, micro-filtration, and ozone—inadequate. With chlorination, for example, either too little is used and not effective or too much is used killing flora

and fauna downstream. UV, on the other hand, stops the bacteria from replicating, but doesn’t kill it, so the bacteria regrows a day or two later. Micro-filtration biological systems are expensive and fail to remove all of the pollutants. And finally, ozone treatments are too expensive and dangerous to be used practically for residential systems.

Jones had been a client of Brill’s for over 20 years, so when the subject of Jones’ retirement came up, Brill suggested they find a way instead to bring that lifetime expertise to the market. Early investors provided the financial backing to build their technology and prove their results. In 2014, the co-founders launched Sanzfield Technologies and wrote on the main whiteboard their mission: “Change the way the world treats water and positively impact a billion lives within the next 10 years.”

Brill picks up the story. “I knew money alone wasn’t going to get our process to market. It just so happened that in 2015 I saw there was going to be a Water Challenge competition that was being sponsored by the California Governor’s Office, Singularity University (SU), and Mexico City-based Rotoplas, one of the world’s leading water technology companies with an extensive portfolio of water storage, conduction, treatment, and WaaS (Water As A Service) offerings. The goal of the competition was to challenge startups to find new ideas to solve California’s water crisis because the state was in the midst of what would become a historic five-year drought.”

“I have a great appreciation for what SU is

doing and understood that by competing in the

Water Challenge, we would be among a global,

like-minded community striving to solve the

water problem—people who could appreciate

our revolutionary approach and who could help

us make the connections we would need to

continue development and help bring our

solution to market.”

— Bob Brill

The 2015 California Water Challenge— A “Watershed” Event for Sanzfield

Brill knew about SU from the work of Dr. Peter Diaman-dis, co-founder of Singularity University, XPRIZE, SpaceX, and best-selling author of the books Bold and Abundance, which speak to the use of exponential technologies to solve the world’s most pressing problems in such areas as food, water, health, and the environment.

“I have a great appreciation for what SU is doing and understood that by competing in the Water Challenge, we would be among a global, like-minded community striving to solve the water problem—people who could appreciate our revolutionary approach and who could help us make the connections we would need to continue development and help bring our solution to market,” said Brill.

While Sanzfield finished second in the Challenge, the judging for its small-footprint, less-expensive, less- complex, and more effective process was very positive. The company came to the attention of one of the judges, Carlos (Charly) Rojas Aboumrad, the Chief New Business Officer at Rotoplas. A conversation began.

“I’m always looking for companies and ideas that address the little spaces in the water business that the more tradi-tional centralized infrastructure doesn’t cover, the ones that are decentralized to the individual home in their approach,” said Aboumrad. “Technology plays a big role in decentral-ized, small-unit systems such as Sanzfield’s since it increas-es the degree of control that is possible and, in turn, raises the level of performance for water reuse. I’d been through many of SU’s Summits and Rotoplas’ entire management team had been to Singularity events, and so we understood what the right exponential approach could do to solve the water abundance issue, which is our mission at Rotoplas.”

“We loved the SU design department... It was

really inspiring for us to see that we could

move forward quickly on developing the

product. We learned so much from them.”

— Bob Brill

Incubation—The Next Step for Sanzfield

The top performers at the Water Challenge were invited to attend SU Ventures’ Incubator at its Silicon Valley head-quarters in California. During the intensive 10-week program, participants worked directly with SU faculty, global water experts, and Rotoplas to further validate their ideas, build teams, and design and prototype their solutions.

“We loved the SU design department and had a eureka moment when we spent time with them designing a compo-nent of our product,” said Brill. “It was great, fantastic really, because we were able to put it on the CAD machine and then 3D print the part. It was really inspiring for us to see that we could move forward quickly on developing the product. We learned so much from them.”

During the Incubator, the Sanzfield co-founders also had a key meeting with Rotoplas regarding their future. “We spent a full day with the Rotoplas team and they brought a chemical engineer and the head of their new innovation division,” explained Brill. “When we showed them more of what we were working on their jaws dropped. They told us it was the best meeting they had ever had for new business and it was then that we mutually decided to see how we could work together to bring our solution to market. They invited us to Mexico to see their lab, manufacturing, and operations, and we invited them to our Annacis Island Research facility, a state-of-the-art, LEED Platinum wastewater research center outside Vancouver.”

Brill continued, “At the time we had an offer from a local group to invest $2 million in us for 25 percent of the company. But the Rotoplas team made it clear that besides being prepared to make a financial investment, they also had huge global manufacturing and business platform capabilities. As it turns out, without Rotoplas, I don’t think we would have gotten out of the gate. We’d been struggling on our own for years.”

A Joint Venture with Rotoplas in Place, Sanzfield Readies Water Solution for Market

In 2017, Rotoplas completed an investment in Sanzfield forming a joint venture now known as Sanzfield USA, a business unit of Rotoplas. To ensure they were employing exponential thinking and methods to bring their revolutionary products to market, the joint team came to SU for a Business Model Workshop.

The SU Business Model Workshop helps large organizations turn a new product or service built on exponential technologies into a successful future business by preparing it to scale outside the core business with a focus on operating nimbly, iterating rapidly, and pursuing the future with a sense of urgency.

During the workshop, Sanzfield and Rotoplas created a develop-ment plan to commercialize the SanzAir and SanzMicro products. They researched and negotiated pilot programs in Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. to prove the efficacy of the technology in real-world usage, demonstrate compliance with local water regulations, and gather the data for required certifications necessary in some counties. They spent a month in customer conversations, validating their go-to-market approach with housing developers as well as traditional designers and installers of septic systems. The new products and business were announced at the WWETT (Water & Wastewater Equipment, Treatment, and Transport) show in Indiana in February 2018.

“The SU Business Model Workshop provided us with insights into the go-to-market strategy in terms of regulation and approval of the product,” said Ernesto Rodriguez Leal, Head of Innovation at Grupo Rotoplas. “The team was able to contact high-level individ-uals from government and regulatory boards in the U.S., as well as research centers to do intensive studies of the technology to validate it and provide the data to get fast approvals. SU’s program was very valuable because we were able to identify the right customer set and understand what their expectations were as well as how they expect installations to be conducted.”

“A lot of good came out of the Business Model Workshop we did with SU and Rotoplas,” concluded Brill. “We talked with developers who were off the grid from sewer systems about what they needed and got some great feedback to support our go-to-market plans. Rotoplas is going to manufacture, distribute, sell and service our products. They’ve helped us secure pilots with Stanford University and others to do testing. As a result of the introduction SU helped us make with Rotoplas, we expect to see exponential sales going forward and have met all the right people to help us grow our business.”

“SU’s program was very valuable

because we were able to identify

the right customer set and un-

derstand what their expectations

were as well as how they expect

installations to be conducted.”

— Ernesto Rodriguez Leal, Head of Innovation

at Grupo Rotoplas

SU PROGRAMS

CA Water Challenge, 2015

SU Ventures Incubator, 2016

Business Model Workshop, 2017

EXPONENTIAL TECHNOLOGIES

Biotechnology (Electro-oxidation,

Electro-molecular maceration)

Sensors

Machine Learning/Artificial Intelligence,

IoT (in the future)

TRANSFORMATIVE PRACTICES

Design Thinking

Exponential Organizations

GLOBAL GRAND CHALLENGES

Water

Environment

SU and Sanzfield Technologies At-a-Glance

About Singularity University

Singularity University (SU) is a global learning and innovation community using exponential technologies to tackle the world’s biggest challenges and build an abundant future for all. SU’s collaborative platform empowers individuals and organizations across the globe to learn, connect, and innovate breakthrough solutions using accelerating technologies like artificial intelligence, robotics, and digital biology. A certified benefit corporation headquartered at NASA Research Park in Silicon Valley, SU was founded in 2008 by renowned innovators Ray Kurzweil and Peter H. Diamandis with program funding from leading organizations including Google, Deloitte, and UNICEF. To learn more, visit SU.org, join us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter @SingularityU, and download the SingularityU Hub mobile app.

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