Page 35 - BusinessWest August 8, 2022

From left, Aclarity’s Chief Science Officer Orren Schneider, CEO Julie Bliss Mullen, Application Engineer Liz Christ, and Senior Operations Engineer Chris Hull at a customer site in Detroit.
Innovation
Going with the Flow
Aclarity Seeks to Bring Its Unique Water-treatment Technology to the Next Level
TBy Joseph Bednar
hey’re called per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances. But they’re known by a much simpler, and more trou- bling, moniker.
“They’re nicknamed the ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down in nature,” said Orren Schneider,
chief science officer at the Hadley-based startup known as Aclarity. “The bonds in them are so strong that essentially nothing natural breaks them down. Maybe if you hit them with lightning, they’ll break down.”
Lightning isn’t exactly a feasible solution. But Aclarity — which has made waves (no pun intended) in the water industry with a its novel electrochemical approach to combating pollutants — offers a better one.
“We can actually destroy these compounds and break them into their component parts,” Schneider told BusinessWest. “There’s a big
focus at the state level — and also starting at the federal level — on how to get these compounds out of the environment.
“The reason they’re there is they’re incredibly useful in a lot of different consumer and industrial products,” he explained. “Scotch- gard, for instance. They’re also used in firefighting foam to help put out fires. They’re used on pizza boxes and Chinese food containers. So they’re very useful, and those same properties that make them useful make them difficult to break down. Right now, our main focus is, how do we break these down?”
Several years ago, BusinessWest told the early part of the Aclar- ity story, of how CEO Julie Bliss Mullen, as part of her PhD research, discovered an electrochemical technology that could treat water by passing a small electric current through it to destroy contaminants.
It immediately stood out from other solutions on the market due to both the lack of resulting waste products and its versatility. So
in 2017, she co-founded Aclarity, which won the top award at the UMass Innovation Challenge, claiming $26,000 in seed money to
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