The impact of rising water temperatures and increased nutrient runoff are worsening devastating algae blooms. Municipal, industrial, and agricultural wastewater dischargers are struggling to address these effects and meet tightening regulatory limits due to a lack of cost effective and sustainable solutions. Existing technologies are costly, increase energy and chemical consumption, and elevate GHG emissions. The wastewater industry spends about $5 billion annually on upgrades to reduce harmful nutrient discharges.
Revolutionizing wastewater treatment with algae to create clean water and sustainable biofuels.
The same algae that produce the harmful blooms in nutrient-rich waters present a unique opportunity to efficiently harvest the nutrients from effluents, while photosynthetically producing an energy-rich biomass that captures atmospheric CO2 and can be converted to biofuels.
NorthX funding will support Algafilm’s development of a novel algae biofilm technology that intensifies algae productivity, reducing the required treatment system footprint by a factor of four or more, while maintaining lowest in class treatment costs. This combination of a smaller footprint and lower cost has the potential to transform wastewater treatment plants into energy–positive, carbon–negative resource management centers, helping municipal and industrial operations move to a net zero future.
