A Meppel remedy makes polluted waste water crystal clear

More than 60 liters of chlorine, soap and defoamer: until recently, that’s how many cleaning agents went through per hour at a recycling factory in the north of the Netherlands. This was necessary to wash the plastic from, among other things, discarded sandwich bags and meat products packaging so thoroughly that they can be given a second life as, for example, buckets and garbage bags. Today, however, the factory only needs 8 liters per hour of a product called Fersol, which is made by the Meppel company Ferr-Tech.

Thanks to Fersol, the factory can now wash the plastic cold, and not at 80 degrees as before. Transport costs are lower and less CO2 is emitted, because suppliers’ trucks have to carry fewer bulk containers with cleaning products. In addition, the factory machines wear out less quickly, because less foam ends up in the pumps.

It is all thanks to an invention of a company from Drenthe, only two years old, but already award-winning. ‘CES Innovation Award’ is one of the prizes in the showcases of Ferr-Tech, which has established itself in a former gym on Hesselterlandweg. Thanks to this laurel wreath from the prestigious Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the world’s largest technology shows, co-owner Judith le Fèvre (43) was allowed to travel to Las Vegas early this year for the 2022 edition to promote her environmentally friendly product. for the tens of thousands of visitors to the fair.

Promising resource

Fersol stands for ‘Ferrate(VI) in solution’, explains Le Fèvre in Ferr-Tech’s laboratory, where factories send their polluted waste water to be treated by the Meppel chemistry. A small amount of the violet substance with ferrate(VI), ‘the strongest green oxidant in the world’, is powerful enough to rid wastewater of zinc, iron and other heavy metals.

‘It is 63 percent stronger than chlorine’, says Le Fèvre. ‘It makes wastewater so clean that factories can reuse it. Moreover, chlorine is bad for the environment and health, while ferrate(VI) leaves no negative by-products in the water, so you can dispose of it safely.’

Fersol is an invention of the materials scientist Sina Samimi Sedeh (36), one of Ferr-Tech’s six co-owners. Sedeh, the technology boss of Ferr-Tech, found a solution for the weak spot of ferrate(VI): the extreme instability of the substance. In scientific articles ferrate(VI) has been regarded as a promising means for cleaning heavily polluted wastewater for decades, but the fact that the dust stopped working properly after a few seconds was an insurmountable obstacle until recently. ‘The lack of stability and shelf life and the high price made it impossible to use ferrate(VI) in the industry’, says Sedeh.

After years of doctoring, Sedeh devised an electrochemical process that allowed him to extend the stability of ferrate(VI) from two seconds to two months. How he managed this is a trade secret, but his wife Faezeh Alibabaei, laboratory analyst at Ferr-Tech shows that it works.

She drops a small dose of Fersol into a beaker filled with apple juice-colored liquid. The liquid in the beaker consists of an unappetising wastewater cocktail of zinc, iron, sulfate, phosphate and chlorine. In no time at all, the pollution in the wastewater begins to swirl like flakes in a snow globe. ‘Through the Fersol coagulates (curdles, ed.) the dirt into flakes that sink to the bottom’, comments Le Fèvre. Soon all that remains of the contamination is a brownish sludge on the bottom, while the rest of the wastewater is suddenly crystal clear. ‘Now you can easily separate the pollution from the clean water’, says Le Fèvre. ‘And you can reuse the water afterwards, or discharge it safely.’

Reuse water

At the moment, factories hardly reuse their process water, says Le Fèvre. This is despite the fact that Dutch industry uses almost 400 million cubic meters of water every year, according to figures from Statistics Netherlands, for example to rinse their products or to cool machines. “Meanwhile, the world’s water scarcity is enormous: two-thirds of the world’s population lives in areas where there is a serious water shortage for at least one month a year,” she quotes UNICEF figures.

Ferr-Tech not only helps heavy industry to clean their waste water, but also greenhouse horticulturists, for example. One of the customers is an American ‘hydroponic’ lettuce grower, who grows arugula, romaine and other lettuce varieties on water, without soil, in his greenhouses in Texas, California, Minnesota and Georgia. Hydroponics already consumes much less water than growing lettuce in the soil, but thanks to Fersol, the American company saves a lot more water.

‘Previously, after two crops, the water was so dirty with fungi, phosphates and other contamination that they had to replace their entire basin, which not only costs a lot of water, but is also extremely labour-intensive. Since they use Fersol, they don’t have to change the water.’

Future

The demand for the cleaning agent from Meppel is so great that Ferr-Tech has to pull out all the stops to get enough production capacity in-house. ‘We have just ordered a second production line, which can produce a thousand liters of Fersol per day,’ says Le Fèvre as she walks through the Ferr-Tech factory. ‘In the first quarter of next year, a very large production line will be added, which can make it tenfold.’

“There will probably also come a time when Ferr-Tech grows so fast that we are no longer the right people to lead the company,” says Le Fèvre, a former Randstad manager and lobbyist for the municipality of Overijssel, about herself and her five associates. ‘If the start-up we have helped in the future grows into a large international company, you also have to ask yourself: ‘To what point can I handle it?’ and: ‘To what point do I still like it?’ The company should always go above your own ego.’