Turning Waste into Resources with Sedron Technologies
Jan 4, 2024
auto_awesome
Sedron Technologies aims to revolutionize waste processing by eliminating disposal costs, eradicating pathogens, and capturing valuable energy and water resources. They work in dairy and animal agriculture, wastewater treatment, and distillery waste. They developed a product that creates electricity and clean drinking water from human biosolids. Sedron collaborates with Generate Capital to build waste processing systems on dairy farms. The podcast explores the dairy industry's structure, environmental challenges, and the importance of incentivizing solutions. It also discusses the market-led theory of change for waste management and explores alternative resources from waste treatment plants and dairy cows.
Sedron Technologies aims to revolutionize waste processing by eliminating disposal costs, destroying pathogens, and capturing valuable energy and recycling water.
Sedron's Varkour system offers a versatile and efficient solution to process various waste streams, recover valuable compounds like ammonia for reuse, and produce clean water and marketable byproducts.
Deep dives
Sedron's Mission to Revolutionize Waste Processing
Sedron Technologies, led by Chief Revenue Officer Stanley Janicki, aims to transform waste streams to eliminate disposal costs, destroy pathogens, and capture valuable energy and recycling water. Their Varkour system specializes in recovering nutrients from liquid waste slurries for beneficial reuse. The company primarily serves three sectors: dairy and animal agriculture, wastewater treatment, and distillery waste. Sedron started as a spin-out of Janicki Industries, an aerospace engineering firm, which later received funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop sanitation solutions. Sedron's focus is on converting liquid waste streams into organic fertilizers, reducing environmental impact and the use of fossil fuels for nitrogen fertilizer production.
Sedron's Approach to Waste Transformation
Sedron's passionate team aims to take what is traditionally seen as waste and transform it into productive and viable byproducts. By utilizing their Varkour system, they can convert various waste streams, including human, dairy, hog, and distillery waste. Unlike traditional technologies that are specific to individual waste streams, Varkour is versatile and can process a wide range of wastes using mechanical vapor recompression. This technology, which combines vapor compression and concentration and recovery processes, efficiently recovers and concentrates valuable compounds like ammonia for reuse while producing clean water and dry, marketable byproducts.
Challenges in Current Waste Management Practices
The current state of waste management, particularly in the dairy industry, faces several challenges. Large dairy farms often rely on anaerobic digesters to process dairy manure, but the subsequent storage of slurry waste in lagoons leads to environmental issues such as ammonia volatilization, methane production, and over-application of nutrients near farms. Traditional methods involve trucking liquid waste long distances, resulting in high costs and nutrient pollution. Additionally, wastewater treatment plants contribute to worldwide greenhouse gas emissions through the nitrification and denitrification process. Sedron's technology offers a solution to these challenges by eliminating lagoons, providing clean water, and producing fertilizers from liquid waste streams.
Sedron's Impact and Future Vision
By upcycling waste streams and displacing fossil fuel-derived products, Sedron aims to have a significant impact on environmental practices. With a focus on the dairy industry, Sedron's technology offers the potential for net-zero dairy farms and the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions. They also provide environmentally sustainable solutions for the municipal biosolids treatment and distillery waste sectors. Sedron envisions a future where waste becomes valuable commodities, such as fertilizers and low-carbon fuels, by building a nationwide and international network of installations to address waste and resource management challenges.
Stanley Janicki is the Chief Revenue Officer at Sedron Technologies. Sedron is on a mission to revolutionize how waste streams can be processed to eliminate disposal costs and destroy pathogens while capturing valuable energy and recycling water. Their Varcor system takes liquid waste slurries and recovers nutrients for beneficial reuse. Their primary go-to-market implementations today are in three areas: dairy and animal agriculture, wastewater treatment and distillery waste.
The company launched in 2014 as a spinout of a business called Janicki Industries which was founded in the 1990s by Stanley's parents. Janicki Industries, primarily focused on aerospace engineering. But in 2011, they were selected by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to develop solutions for sanitation challenges in the developing world. They developed a product that created electricity and clean drinking water based on an input of human biosolids, AKA poop, which they deployed in Senegal. Sedron is featured in a video of Bill Gates famously drinking clean poop water out of the system.
We mentioned Sedron briefly in an earlier episode we recorded with Bill Caesar at Generate Upcycle as the two companies have an active partnership, which Stanley also touches on. We’d like to thank former MCJ podcast guest Steve Simon for introducing us to Stanley. While it's tempting to make poop jokes, Stanley helps shine a light on just how much chemical value there can be in it and waste in general, and how harnessing it can move us away from several challenged environmental practices that have become mainstays of modern society.
In this episode, we cover:
[3:14] Overview of Sedron
[5:15] Sedron's Vapor Recompression and Concentration and Recovery (Varcor) technology
[7:15] Pitfalls of current waste processes
[13:29] Sedron's technologies: the omniprocessor and Varcor
[15:56] Waste processing in the dairy industry
[20:11] Sedron's go-to-market and sales process with dairy farms
[27:42] Janicki Industries, Sedron's parent company, and its origin story
[33:05] Sedron's current status and future plans
Episode recorded on November 28, 2023 (Published on January 4, 2024 )
Enjoyed this episode? Please leave us a review! Share feedback or suggest future topics and guests at info@mcj.vc.