Page 36 - BusinessWest August 8, 2022

help jump-start the company.
Essentially, she explains, electricity is applied
to an anode and cathode, water flows through the reactor, and contaminants are destroyed by strong oxidants such as free electrons (which break the PFAS bonds), hydroxyl radicals, ozone, and chlorine that are generated inside of the Aclarity reactor. The result is harmless byproducts — essentially water that is free of PFAS and other harmful contaminants.
“They’re nicknamed the ‘forever chemicals’ because they don’t break down in nature. The
bonds in them are so strong that essentially nothing natural breaks them down.”
“Think about a battery,” Schneider said. “You have electrodes in there, and it takes chemical energy and turns it into electrical energy. We do the opposite. We put electrical current into the electrodes, and chemistry occurs. What we’re try- ing to do is break down a lot of different chemi- cals that are found in water. And most of the ones we’re focused on right now are PFAS.”
Aclarity isn’t the only company trying to develop a workable and scalable solution for this type of water pollution, he added. “The first company that can commercialize a product that
can destroy these com- pounds is going to be a big winner. And we think we are in the lead there. We know the technology works, and now we’re just figuring out how to make a product that we can sell to do it.”
Water, Water Everywhere
Schneider said the
original product was just
a small reactor that could
handle a couple of gallons
a minute, which proved
out the technology.
“We used that with
potential customers to
run samples, run water
through it, to show them what we can do,” he said, adding that Aclarity has recently built the next stage, scaling up from a single electrode to 10 electrodes in a reactor, and that is being used to further show potential customers that the system works.
“We’re working right now with landfills; we’re going to be starting a project in Warren at the
end of August with one of these pilot units,” he noted. “Landfill leachate looks like Guinness beer when it comes out — dirty, dark brown. We turn it into something that looks a little more like Coors Light. And we destroy a lot of the stuff that’s in there, organic compounds, things like ammonia and PFAS. Landfill leachate is an ideal applica-
Julie Bliss Mullen co-founded Aclarity to sustainably and cost- effectively clean the world’s most challenging waters.
tion for us because it’s really high concentration and relatively low volumes. That really favors our economics.”
Aclarity is also starting a pilot system in North Carolina at a water-treatment plant, working with an engineering firm there. “The levels of PFAS found in drinking water are generally pretty low, and the existing technologies work well to remove them,” Schneider explained, but not destroy them. So after small volumes of PFAS are sepa- rated from the water using membranes and a
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