Wastewater Solutions with Stanley Janicki

george grombacher 0:01
Stanley genican is the chief revenue officer was Center on Technology did the organization behind the VAR core system taking liquid waste and turning it into clean water, biogas and fertilizer? Welcome to the stove. Welcome to the show, Stanley.

Stanley Janicki 0:15
Thank you really appreciate it. Thanks for having me here.

george grombacher 0:19
Yeah, excited to have you on, tell us a little bit your personal lives more about your work and why you do what you do? Yeah,

Stanley Janicki 0:27
absolutely. So I am an engineer for undergrad and business school for grad school. So I have a bit of the worst of both worlds. I was a computer engineer for undergrad. So people always give me a hard time that like that’s not real engineering, then I get an MBA and people like that’s not a real master’s degree, but you should get a law degree or something. So that are the worst of both worlds here, joined sedrun, originally to do software engineering, and then went into business development and corporate development and fundraising roles. So really have a focus on leading, how can we take this technology for impact, and happy to walk through the technology and how we can do that. But the goal is really around, there are so many waste streams out there. Things that people dispose of people throw away, that actually have very viable nutrients or resources in them. So this concept is paradigm of waste. And I use quotation marks and waste. How do we transform that into upcycling of those products and displace fossil fuel derived commodities, that’s really something I’m very passionate about. And so my personal life, that passion really aligns well with my passion, etc, and my job, etc, which is to have that impact. So they’re really very much intertwined, and focused on the same thing.

george grombacher 1:45
Appreciate that. So when somebody asks you what you do, what do you normally say?

Stanley Janicki 1:51
Depends on who it is.

george grombacher 1:53
Let’s just assume we’re having a beer.

Stanley Janicki 1:56
Let’s we’re having a beer. I work in the fertilizer industry. That’s usually what I start with. And they say what type of fertilizer and I’m usually like, Well, climate smart fertilizers. And then they say, Well, tell me a little more. And I’m like, well, we upcycle fertilizers. And I say, No, do you deal with poop? And I’m like, Yes, we deal with various waste streams, and we upcycle them into fertilizer. So it’s one where people, usually it takes mostly people peel back the onion just a little bit. But yeah, so it’s really on taking various waste streams and producing fertilizer products. Most people don’t realize the nitrogen fertilizers 3% of worldwide greenhouse gases to make the production of ammonia fertilizers 3% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions, there’s no reason for that. They’re taking natural gas. And they’re there to the haber bosch process making nitrogen fertilizer, when there’s tremendous amounts of nitrogen that exists in the environment, in a form that’s plant available. Nitrogen comes in different forms. And plants can metabolize all the different forms. So it has to be in an ammoniacal form, which is NH three, or NH four, or a nitrate form. There’s other forms as well, but they take time to break down in the soil, the air is 70% Nitrogen, but it’s end to only very specific types of plants can actually process that. So being able to capture the nitrogen that exists in nature in a form that plants can consume is a huge thing to displace that fossil fuel derived nitrogen.

george grombacher 3:20
So that is the secret sauce.

Stanley Janicki 3:22
Exactly. Actually, I tell people that there’s really two pieces, two groups of people in the world that we want to disintermediate and one of them is the production of nitrogen fertilizer 3% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. The other is wastewater treatment plants, which is about three to 6% of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions depending upon how you measure it. And what those plants do. I’ll start with the first one takes into molecules, which is not a form that plants can consume, and turns them into NH three molecules via the haber bosch process. 3% of worldwide greenhouse gas in wastewater plants, take NH three molecules and turn them into N two molecules through nitrification denitrification. That seems like there’s a real thing you could do to close that loop. If one person’s undoing the work of another. That’s what we do. We step into wastewater settings, we capture and concentrate those NH three molecules and we produce a viable nitrogen fertilizer.

george grombacher 4:26
Alright, so and two plants cannot consume and three they can

Stanley Janicki 4:31
an h3 So ammonia into there’s various there’s certain types of plants called nitrogen fixing plants that really have nitrogen fixing bacteria and such things like lagoons that can process into things like clover and alfalfa, but generally they’re not. You can’t exclusively have nitrogen for most, so you actually need to add nitrogen to certain other crops like corn.

george grombacher 4:57
So why does a wait what wastewater plant heard it from three to two, was that just an accident? Or they do it I know, it’s very intentional.

Stanley Janicki 5:05
It’s very dilute. And they do it on purpose. And here’s why. In a wastewater setting, the nitrogen is very dilute in the streams. And the problem is, is it’s it’s diluted enough where it’s really difficult to capture and concentrate. But it’s concentrated enough where if they didn’t get rid of it, it would create the most nasty algae blooms, you can imagine on the back of the wastewater plant. So oftentimes, when you see these algae blooms, it’s what’s referred to as eutrophication, nutrient pollution. Too much nutrients and waterways create these algae blooms. So the wastewater plant destroys the nitrogen doesn’t get into the environment in a in a deleterious way, such as that the real secret sauce of our technology is we can capture that very dilute nitrogen, and then concentrate it up into something that’s saleable, and even more importantly, transportable.

george grombacher 5:59
So how hard it is, how hard is it to put your technology in a wastewater plant?

Stanley Janicki 6:05
It’s from a technical standpoint, it’s pretty straightforward. Anytime you’re dealing with public infrastructure, there’s a political process you have to go through. It takes a lot of time, from a political standpoint, from a technical standpoint, we’ve developed the technology it runs, we have a system in Seattle, processing human waste every day, we have systems in the Midwest processing, dairy waste, we process distillery waste streams are very, very viable from a technical standpoint. It’s purely the political process of going through the public process and procurement. For wastewater plants. We’re in the middle of that process in many places. And that’s one where we feel as we continue to grow in that space, we’re going to truly transform the wastewater space for the better of society, right? It’s less expensive than conventional technologies to do when you’re less expensive. And you’re solving an environmental problem. That’s impactful. Because if you can make money from being an environmentalist, everyone will be an environmentalist. That is the truth.

george grombacher 7:06
This is a this is a really, really dumb question. But what I’m going to ask anyway? Or maybe it’s a great question, on planet Earth, within just within the planet, is there new water that is being created all the time? Or is it the same water that it’s just constantly being recycled?

Stanley Janicki 7:28
There are two pieces to this. There’s the freshwater that rains, there’s so out in the ocean, the water will evaporate and will rain, you get great lakes, rain, that kind of stuff. That’s water being recycled. There are chemical processes that happen that are producing new water molecules. So for example, when you run a jetliner, it has hydrocarbons in it. And you’ve seen the the tails on the on the airplane, you’ll see it in the sky, right? And it looks like a cloud warming. What that is, is that is co2. And if you take hydrocarbons, and you combine them with oxygen, you end up with co2 and h2o. The emission is water. So new water is being chemically synthesized on a regular basis.

george grombacher 8:13
Got it? And so when water is flowing out of wastewater facilities, it’s it’s flowing out of out of farms and dairy operations and things like that. How is it? Is it being cleaned? How is is is there a natural process for for sort of doing what the barkhor system does?

Stanley Janicki 8:38
Yeah, absolutely. So there’s, the problem is the natural process is very small scale and slow. Here’s the natural process, a cow goes into a field. And there’s 10 cows in 100 acre field, they go to the bathroom, and the water from their urine and their their manure goes on to the field, the water goes down microbial microbial bacteria will consume the nutrients, put it into the plants, and it will basically be absorbed and the soil will filter and clean that and it will go into the aquifer. The problem is is that that’s referred to as a nonpoint source. When you get the higher populations like we have in the US and other countries bend up with point sources, we end up with a concentrated stream, your wastewater plant, for example, the volume and scale of what’s happening there, you couldn’t put the waste there. There’s not enough acres to put the water on to do that, though, the only way to do is you have to treat it in some enhanced treatment method. So that’s why you can’t do it that way. Right? If you were to go back 20,000 years, there was a natural cycle. But there weren’t that many people, right? We didn’t have Manhattan, right? Those are the sorts of things that as you grow a society, you there’s certain technologies that you need to add to because of these factors of population density and scale. So

george grombacher 10:04
do you have a sense of how many wastewater facilities are operating in the United States or in Manhattan or commonly in a, a re urban environment?

Stanley Janicki 10:13
There’s one on Manhattan. It’s actually most people don’t know this. I know if you’ve been to Manhattan I have I’ve been on the Upper West Side, there’s this beautiful park, that’s like jutting out into the Hudson River. And it’s this big concrete thing. And there’s a beautiful park on top. That’s a wastewater plant. Most people don’t realize that. In the US, there’s about 14,000 wastewater plants, I want to take a step back, people often take a dig like, oh, we shouldn’t use nitrogen fertilizer, because of the environmental impacts. And I agree there are environmental impacts to it. And we are working to mitigate those so we can actually not have to synthesize nitrogen anymore. People don’t realize that half of the human population on Earth is alive today, because of the haber bosch process, that nitrogen fertilizer, after the world population would starve to death without synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. So we need technologies to reduce the emissions and the greenhouse gas emissions of these things. But we still need nitrogen fertilizer, a world where you don’t have nitrogen fertilizer, means you get three and a half billion people, not 7 billion people.

george grombacher 11:25
It is it is essential to the growth in food and everything else.

Stanley Janicki 11:30
But there’s a better way just there’s absolutely a better way. But something it’s also essential to people don’t realize that Russia produced 25% of the world’s nitrogen fertilizer. And so as you add sanctions, and you have belligerent states, there’s real food insecurity problems that arise, especially in poor countries. Because I don’t know if you track the price of nitrogen fertilizer, it was 4x as expensive last year, as it was normally. What happens is, is in countries like this, your strawberries are slightly more expensive. In developing countries, people starve. And so as you can produce technologies that can at a state level or a county level, can recycle nutrients that allow you to be insulated from the prices of commodities, right? Imagine you were recycling everything, you also now will not be exposed to the price of commodities. So being able to produce food, decoupled from energy prices, decoupled from nitrogen fertilizer prices, is something that allows food security in developing countries,

george grombacher 12:34
which is a super powerful thing, obviously. All right. So what is what is the best way to describe the impact of of, of retrofitting or putting your system the VAR core system on to a wastewater plant? Be it in a developing country? or be it in Manhattan? Like what what kind of impact is is that?

Stanley Janicki 12:58
Yeah, first of all, there are regulatory and tax. So biosolids, which is when human wastes in a in a concentrated form is referred to as there’s a lot of regulations around it. And there’s a lot of potential litigious liability as you actually make these products. So we produce what’s referred to as a class AQ biosolid. And that’s the highest grade of biosolid. Basically, it’s a concentrated fertilizer product. That from a regulatory standpoint, it’s very easy to deal with. Many wastewater treatment plants, especially large wastewater plants currently produce a Class B product, which is not a nice product, it has pathogens in it, it has odors, it is wet, it has to be applied on specially permitted fields, it has to be monitored, it’s very expensive to deal with. So immediately, there’s a regulatory impact. And without regulatory impact of the savings to taxpayers, and ratepayers. So immediate from a fiscal standpoint, there’s a savings. From an environmental standpoint, we capture nutrients that the wastewater treatment plant normally has to process that what happens is that all that that effort to turn the NA three molecules into into molecules, that is really not trivial. It’s very difficult to do that with a tremendous amount of energy, we capture those NH three molecules, allowing the wastewater treatment plant to better process the incoming stream for other things in these profits, such as biological oxygen demand, chemical oxygen demand, those sorts of things are able to process better because we’re removing the nitrogen from the system. Additionally, we’re much more compact than conventional processes. So most wastewater plants are on the water, because that’s where they have to discharge to. But when you’re on the water, you generally are real estate constrained. So with a highly efficient real estate footprint, it allows them to install the system. But the biggest piece is really around a financial savings and the environmental savings from allowing them to have higher capture efficiencies of the nutrients and then process the rest of their water better. For example, in the Puget Sound region, which is where our Seattle processing facility is at, which is a somewhat impaired waterway, we’re removing hundreds of 1000s of pounds of nitrogen from that waterway watershed every year. And that allows us to really have a meaningful impact all the while putting reduce or putting downward pressure on the cost of wastewater treatment in the region, where less expensive and conventional premises.

george grombacher 15:27
That’s, that’s, that’s, that’s really cool. It’s exciting. Also sort of hard to quantify, taking 100,000 pounds of meat mass material out of out of a water out of water. It’s amazing. So what does it actually look like?

Stanley Janicki 15:45
So there’s there’s two pieces, though, there’s the total bile salts flow, which is 150,000 tons a year. So we’re taking 150,000 tonnes of waste every year, we’re producing about 150 130,000 tonnes of clean water, that’s just beautiful crystal clear, clean water. The rest of that is the 20,000 tonnes, we actually separated into a concentrated nitrogen fertilizer, and then a concentrated multi nutrient fertilizer with nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium volumetrically. I think I remember this number just to give you a visual EB mud, which is the East Bay Municipal, something District in San Francisco can’t remember the exact name. wastewater plant in San Francisco. If you were to take all the biosolids in one year from that wastewater plant, it’d be about 30%. Up there baseball stadium.

george grombacher 16:44
That’s wild.

Stanley Janicki 16:46
Mmm, imagine a baseball stadium and fill it a third the waveform. Yeah, so that gives you an idea of the volumes. And that’s one wastewater plant in one city. And, and San Francisco has numerous wastewater plants, right. So I use that as a nice visual to show the scale of the problems with dealing with your huge the costs currently involved are huge, with deleterious environmental impact. You step in with the technology that’s less expensive, and solve the environmental problems, both from a nutrient pollution standpoint, and a greenhouse gas emissions standpoint, and you’re less expensive. That’s pretty cool. Totally agree.

george grombacher 17:24
So the opportunity is massive. The challenge is, we want to keep people safe. And we have existing laws. And there’s just we’re doing things the way that we’re doing them currently. So we’re just trying to get people to change how they’re currently doing things.

Stanley Janicki 17:42
Exactly. But I think the key here is, is that lots of people in the wastewater space want to change, they want to get better, because nobody does. Nobody wants to have an old wastewater plant. They want to be the best. What they need is public support. What they don’t need someone just showing up to every city council meeting protesting, because it’s new. And it’s not even that new. We’ve been doing this for years. Right? I was at a city council meeting in Florida, and we’re presenting the thing it’s going to produce like 40 manufacturing jobs in this region, really good jobs is going to have a huge tax base. It’s going to be less expensive for the city. And someone protested, and there was not not a single thing that you can actually measure. I feel like I’m against it. And so what I would ask people if people want to make an impact here, support your local governments to do productive things. Don’t just block things. Right. This idea is not in my backyard. This nimbyism creates all sorts of problems and for us in wastewater. If you say the words biosolids people get freaked out, and it’s just that’s just stop. It’s nothing even that important. And people really get bummed out. So I’d ask if people want to make an impact. Support your local governments to make change don’t block everything.

george grombacher 19:06
are very, very human of us.

Stanley Janicki 19:09
It was really funny, but that’s your like, really?

george grombacher 19:12
You’re not You’re you’re you’re not for this. What? Yeah, like Nope. Thanks. Thank you know. Exactly. Oh, man. Well, Stanley, thank you so much for coming on. Where Where can people learn more about you and and said, Ron, and of our core system? Yeah, absolutely.

Stanley Janicki 19:30
I’m on LinkedIn. You’re welcome to see me there, Stanley Janicki. Our websites@www.sedrun.com You can read about our workhorse system and feel free to reach out we’re at various conferences in the wastewater space and the dairy space and the stillage space and hopefully we can we can connect

george grombacher 19:50
like it. If you enjoyed as much as I did show stealing your appreciation, share it today. share with a friend who also appreciates good ideas go to sedrun.com se d r o mn.com and check out everything that Stanley has been talking about today you can find Stanley Janicki J A Nicki on LinkedIn and I will list all those notes the show. Thanks again Stanley

Stanley Janicki 20:12
product. Thank you so much. Really appreciate the opportunity. Till next time remember,

george grombacher 20:17
do your part by doing your best

george grombacher 16:00
So if I want my iPhone, and my Tesla and my Bitcoin to work, we need to get the metal out of the ground.

Pierre Leveille 16:07
Absolutely. Without it, we cannot do it.

george grombacher 16:13
Why? Why is there a Why has production been going down.

Pierre Leveille 16:21
Because the large mines that are producing most of the copper in the world, the grades are going down slowly they’re going there, they’re arriving near the end of life. So and of life of mines in general means less production. And in the past, at least 15 years, the exploration expenditure for copper were pretty low, because the price of copper was low. And when the price is low, companies are tending to not invest more so much in exploration, which is what we see today. It’s it’s, it’s not the way to look at it. Because nobody 15 years ago was able to predict that there would be a so massive shortage, or it’s so massive demand coming. But in the past five years, or let’s say since the since 10 years, we have seen that more and more coming. And then the by the time you react start exploring and there’s more money than then ever that is putting in put it in expression at the moment for copper at least. And what we see is that the it takes time, it could take up to 2025 years between the time you find a deposit that it gets in production. So but but the year the time is counted. So it’s it’s very important to so you will see company reopening old mines, what it will push also, which is not bad, it will force to two, it will force to find a it will force to find ways of recalibrating customer, you know the metals, that will be more and more important.

george grombacher 18:07
So finding, okay, so for lack of a better term recycling metals that are just sitting around somewhere extremely important. Yeah. And then going and going back to historic minds that maybe for lack of technology, or just lack of will or reasons, but maybe now because there’s such a demand, there’s an appetite to go back to those.

Pierre Leveille 18:33
Yes, but there will be a lot of failures into that for many reasons. But the ones that will be in that will resume mining it’s just going to be a short term temporary solution. No it’s it’s not going to be you need to find deposit that will that will operate 50 years you know at least it’s 25 to 50 years at least and an old mind that you do in production in general it’s less than 10 years.

george grombacher 19:03
Got it. Oh there we go. Up here. People are ready for your difference making tip What do you have for them

Pierre Leveille 19:14
You mean an investment or

george grombacher 19:17
whatever you’re into, you’ve got so much life experience with raising a family and doing business all over the world and having your kids go to school in Africa so a tip on copper or whatever you’re into.

Pierre Leveille 19:34
But there’s two things I like to see and I was telling my children many times and I always said you know don’t focus on what will bring you specifically money don’t think of Getting Rich. Think of doing what you what you like, what you feel your your your your your, you know you have been born to do so use your most you skills, do what you like, do what you wet well, and good things will happen to you. And I can see them grow in their life. And I can tell you that this is what happens. And sometimes you have setback like I had recently. But if we do things properly, if we do things that we like, and we liked that project, we were very passionate about that project, not only me, all my team, and if we do things properly, if we do things correctly, good things will happen. And we will probably get the project back had to go forward or we will find another big project that will be the launch of a new era. So that’s my most important tip in life. Do what you like, do it with your best scale and do it well and good things will happen.

george grombacher 20:49
Pierre Leveille 21:03
Thank you. I was happy to be with you to today.

george grombacher 21:06
Damn, tell us the websites and where where people can connect and find you.

Pierre Leveille 21:13
The it’s Deep South resources.com. So pretty simple.

george grombacher 21:18
Perfect. Well, if you enjoyed this as much as I did show up here your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciate good ideas, go to deep south resources, calm and learn all about what they’re working on and track their progress.

Pierre Leveille 21:32
Thanks. Thanks, have a nice day.

george grombacher 21:36
And until next time, keep fighting the good fight. We’re all in this together.