Solving Queenstown's sewage crisis, with algae?

Founder and Managing Director, Soner Bekir, has been featured in Crux - a news company from the South Island of New Zealand. Within the article, Bekir details the current sewage challenges faced by a rapidly increasing population, what our solution could improve and the barriers currently standing to implementing it.

“However It’s not the pace of change of technology in the wastewater industry that is causing problems today, or the ever-increasing environmental standards that raise the expectations of the treatment levels. It is the poor urban planning and the fixed ideas around what wastewater is.”

These issues are becoming more and more prevalent in our interconnected world with an ever-growing population, with more demand being placed on inefficient, archaic systems that exist purely because replacing them with existing, new and interesting technologies would be in the ‘too-hard basket’.

“There are sustainable, small-scale alternatives available and utilities in Europe, Australia and most of the Asia Pacific are testing, evaluating or implementing them. It is the new generation of environmental engineers and water engineers that are typically driving this innovation, but they are fighting against the established engineering knowledge and experience and also against public sentiment.

No one ever got sacked for choosing an established technology.”

A challenge being faced by many emerging technologies in the environmental field is building enough reputation with existing projects to be trusted. It requires companies to take a certain leap of faith and trust the science behind the process.

We are excited to have new ALGAESYS plants in operation to be able to demonstrate just how well our resource recovery solution works in a variety of environments.

For the full Crux article, click here.