Innovative Solutions for a Cleaner Future
Our Mission
ZERO DISCHARGE™, LLC was founded in 2019 to research and develop innovative solutions to address existing and emerging wastewater treatment problems present throughout the world.
The Problem
A common problem persistent throughout the world, even in a developed country like the United States, is how to safely and adequately process wastewater derived from human activities. Through ever-advancing industrialization, the use of water for human consumption, commercial and industrial purposes have led to an explosion of wastewater containing an ever-increasing multitude of contaminants. Everything from human waste to discarded pharmaceuticals, organic and inorganic chemical waste and biological pathogens can be found in wastewater. How to address the ever-expanding myriad of water contaminants is a challenge faced by all municipalities and residential dwellings.
Conventional wastewater treatments systems, and municipal wastewater treatment systems in particular, use a combination of filtration and a series of bioreaction processes to bring water to a level of purity deemed acceptable to return the treated water to the environment. There are two significant problems with current treatment systems. The first is the failure to effectively destroy or neutralize all the various contaminants found in wastewater. Much of it is simply filtered out and buried or incinerated, which essentially concentrates the pollutants in another location. The recent focus on PFAS, the “forever” chemical, and the challenges in destroying it is a perfect example of this problem. The second is the limitations of any wastewater treatment facility to handle increasing loads of wastewater due to real estate development. As to the latter problem, some municipalities have to resort to development moratoriums so as not to exceed the capacities of local wastewater treatment systems.
On a smaller scale, conventional septic systems also pose significant problems to the environment. Depending upon the size of a development, an area of land has to be set aside as a septic field to use soil and earth to complete the wastewater treatment process. For many locations, the surrounding land makes the use of septic system technology either infeasible or prohibited. This is particularly the situation when land is developed adjacent to a municipal water source.
Our Solution
ZERO DISCHARGE™ has spent years studying these problems and has come up with several patented innovations to address each problem to bring water back to a pure, consumable state. The basic system combines traditional and conventional wastewater treatment approaches in a novel combination to filter, bioremediate and evaporate water to an essentially pure state. By combining bioremediation with evaporation or distillation, contaminated wastewater can be brought back to an environmentally safe level that effectively separates all the contaminants from the water.
The basic system was further improved to recapture and treat the distilled water via condensation and treatments such as ozonation and chlorination to bring the water back to a potable state. The purified water can be maintained and returned for use in a closed-loop system to dramatically reduce the need for water.
The latest innovation is the creation of a patented scalable autoclave system that can effectively destroy and/or neutralize any known contaminant, chemical or biological, including PFAS. With the use of extremely high heat and pressure, the autoclave degrades and destroys all water contaminants. The evaporator effectively separates the destroyed or neutralized contaminants from the water. Through a secondary closed-loop system, the energy used to perform the autoclave function is constantly reused to reduce the overall energy consumption of the system and achieve a commercially acceptable energy use efficiency.
Opportunity
The system was developed to be modular in construction to offer flexible solutions for a large variety of applications. As an example, for municipalities that use carbon towers to separate PFAS from wastewater, our autoclave module combined with our evaporator module can be used to effectively backflush the carbon towers for continual reuse. The autoclave module destroys the PFAS and the evaporator module completely separates the PFAS remnants from the water. The water can either be recaptured for reuse or be transferred to a conventional wastewater treatment system for final processing.
For areas with contaminated groundwater, a combination of our autoclave module with our evaporator module and condenser module can be used to remove the contaminants and return the purified water back to the ground to maintain groundwater levels.
For large dwelling complexes, such as condominium complexes, our full system can be used as a self-contained wastewater treatment and reuse system. This enables large developments to be constructed on land previously deemed unbuildable due to the absence of a sewer hookup or regulatory development prohibition due to the land’s proximity to environmentally sensitive land masses.
These are but a few of the many possible applications of Zero Discharge’s™ wastewater treatment system innovations.
The patented system is now available for licensing. For all inquiries, please contact our sales office for further information.
