Membrion’s Wastewater Treatment and Recovery Process Addresses Manufacturers’ Pain Points Around Metals

Manufacturers struggle to deal with metals in wastewater. These harsh and highly regulated contaminants must be removed before the water can be disposed of or reused, a costly and complex process. It typically involves piggybacking several energy-intensive technologies and multiple pretreatment steps.

Membrion has developed a technology that cuts out the pretreatment stages, saving money and time while enabling manufacturers to address another problem on their radar—a problem that’s gaining attention around the world: water scarcity.

Membrion’s filtration and reclamation system removes dissolved ions like sodium, chlorine, and sulfates, allowing manufacturers to recycle water at previously inaccessible pH ranges and with challenging trace chemicals. (Dissolving and processing metals requires a low pH environment and a lot of chemicals, two intrinsic problems for operators). The system delivers up to 98 percent recovery rates.

“If you generate wastewater, what you care about is being able to properly dispose of it, or you may have ambitions to reuse it, which requires treatment. The question is, how many steps will be required?” says Membrion founder Greg Newbloom.

“Complex wastewaters can get quite expensive to treat because of all the required steps, and the ion removal stage tends to be the more complicated one to manage,” he says.

With traditional systems, that difficult stage typically involves preliminary work to prepare the filtration system for treatment, which may include adjusting pH, removing oxidizers and particles. 

Membrion’s next-generation system works by leveraging electricity to pull ions out of feedwater across membranes and into a concentrate stream.

Membrane filtration is nothing new in the world of wastewater treatment, but two features distinguish this technology from its predecessors. One is the use of electricity to move the ions along; it creates a low-pressure system, which translates to more water recovery.

But the most powerful standout feature, Newbloom says, is what the membranes are made of: ceramic, known to withstand extreme wastewater conditions and key to eliminating the pretreatment stages.  Ceramic membranes are durable enough to handle just about any industrially produced contaminant.

While ceramic membranes have long been used in ultrafiltration, this is their first time at work with desalination because before Membrion’s design, their pore sizes were too large to selectively remove ions.

Meanwhile, manufacturers are called on to address water scarcity in their supply chains. They are watching climate change around them and watching cities react by restricting water use. At some point in time their production capacity will be capped by water availability and without sufficient water they may have to pause operations, Newbloom says. 

“So companies are preparing, aiming to be better stewards of their water and ensuring they can use as much as possible as opposed to treating it like a single-use commodity, especially in water-scarce regions,” he says.

Municipalities where these facilities operate are imposing stricter discharge standards as their costs to treat wastewaters climb, and some industrial facilities, built to comply at a certain regulatory level, are finding as the rules tighten they will need to adapt. In some scenarios they can retrofit their existing equipment; in others they will need to redesign their wastewater treatment infrastructure if they haven’t already.

“We have come up with a retrofit to improve their capabilities and keep up with regulatory changes,” Newbloom says.

Membrion’s modular system is adaptable to different streams depending on concentration of ions and capacity.

The eight-year-old company launched its first commercial-scale facility earlier in 2024, following a long research and development stint.

“Going from nickel-sized membranes in the lab to a real-world system that could handle meaningful quantities of wastewater took five years, followed by three more years to figure out the full capability of membranes at a scale where we can deliver the best value,” Newbloom says.

After completing several pilots on its own, Membrion is now testing the technology in an accelerator focused on sustainability and innovation,  sponsored by Colgate-Palmolive, Anheuser-Busch Inbev, Coca-Cola, and Unilever.

This particular project entails treating a waste stream left from a reverse osmosis unit in order to recover more water, which would otherwise be sent to the sewage system and now go back to the facility’s feed for reuse.

The most successful companies working in the 100+ Accelerator have commercialized technology, so it can be piloted quickly, and results can be assessed for future scale, says Benjamin Yoskovitz, 100+ strategic advisor.

The team fields about 2,000 applications per cohort, whittling their selection down to about 30 participants.

“Membrion stood out because they have commercialized technology for a significant sustainability challenge. Wastewater treatment is a real challenge, faced by many big companies. If something can improve the use of water within manufacturing/production facilities with a strong business case it has immense potential to scale,” Yoskovitz says.

Manufacturers look to reuse their water in different ways, whether to feed it into a cooling tower or support other processes, or to introduce it into their products, like beverage, personal care, and other goods that contain water. Newbloom says after it’s treated it’s often cleaner than processed city water.

Membrion does not sell its systems; it sells a service, charging per gallon of treated water. Cost varies by flow rates and  sulfate concentrations, but the company targets a 20 percent savings over existing processes, which usually come from lower chemical usage and cheaper operating and trucking costs.

Membrion has done about a dozen pilots and participants have learned they pay less than $1,000 a year for electricity.

On the environmental side, a lifecycle analysis shows a 1,000- to 2,000- metric ton-reduction in CO2 emissions a year.

Then there is a byproduct of the process: a highly concentrated, metal-rich stream. Facilities can recycle the metals if they recover enough to make it worthwhile and further cut CO2 emissions.

“We decided to focus on acidic metal wastewater because we can deliver a lot of value over incumbents. We do more traditional desalinization projects too, but there are technical/economic tradeoffs because you do not need as much durability as with harsh environments,” Newbloom says.

With desalination in general, before reverse osmosis, manufacturers  were treating water by boiling it, which is very energy intensive.

“When membranes came along it dramatically reduced their costs, and we are doing the same thing for metal wastewaters. People once had to use really energy-intensive chemical or thermal processes, and now we have a membrane-based alternative,” he says.

Newbloom has a pipeline of installation projects, with expectations to  launch three systems this year and have about 10 systems in operation by the end of 2025.