Turning Waste into Resources with Sedron Technologies

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Jan 4, 2024

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.

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Introduction

00:00 • 2min

Transforming Waste into Productive Byproducts

01:45 • 18min

Dairy farmers' focus on customer satisfaction, environmental sustainability, and financial benefits

20:11 • 3min

Turning Solid Waste into Fertilizer and Clean Water on Dairy Farms

23:19 • 2min

Understanding the Structure of the Dairy Industry and the Importance of Solving Environmental Problems

25:16 • 2min

Developing Waste Management Solutions through Market-Led Theory of Change

27:25 • 11min

Turning Waste into Resources: Size, Scale, and Environmental Impacts

38:13 • 3min

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 )

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*Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant