Host: Dave McGimpsey
Guest: Christina Lundbäck | Founder | SurfCleaner
Category: 🤖 Technology
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[8:35] “SurfCleaner is basically a skimmer, but it's a hybrid. We can collect from the water surface all kinds of floating debris, could be sludge, oil, plastics, whatever, and then it goes into the chamber and then it's separated […], so what's floating on the water surface will fill up in the SurfCleaner as well. And then when the SurfCleaner is full, it just automatically reverses the flow and pushes it out in different bags. So it looks like a skimmer, but it's not […] and that's the unique part. There's nothing else like it in the world.”
[10:32] “We have different kinds of […] cleaner […] machines. One of them [is] for oil and diesel, and things like that. And then we have […] another model for floating sludge, because in wastewater treatment plants, it's really difficult to get rid of the floating sludge. It's basically bacteria and the wastewater treatment plants don't want to have that. And then we have another one that we are going to develop further to take care of floating plastics. And we are not going to focus on the ocean […], because that's […] quite difficult to take care of. So why don't we try to focus upstream, close to the industry and make the industry take more responsibility? So we help them to do that.”
[11:57] “If we look at wastewater treatment plants today, you have different basins where the sludge is going to get separated from the water. So usually, it goes down to the bottom. But then you have some bacteria and other things that come up to the surface called floating sludge. And that's what […] you want to get rid of, because […] it will disturb your process in the water cleaning […]. So today, people go in with vacuum trucks [to] try to suck it out. But then you get a lot of water in it as well. And you transport a lot of water. It costs energy and manpower. Or you can just use pressurized water to try to rinse it out. But then you use a lot of freshwater […] and it takes time. Nobody wants to do that job. […] So what we've discovered is that SurfCleaner […] will collect the sludge and then push it out into tanks or […] we transport the sludge with less water content, […] push it back to sort of a treatment chamber where you create biogas. And then you can reuse the sludge, get rid of it and also create biogas that you can use. So it's really energy efficient.”
[13:49] “You can dry [the sludge] as well if you don't want to use it as a biogas, because a lot of these wastewater treatment plants are pretty small. So they don't have access to that. But they can dry the sludge in certain bio tubes that's affordable, […] and then you can also burn it when it's dry, so you can get back some minerals that you need, phosphor for instance.”
[17:58] “The heart has different chambers and you also use different kinds of pressures. […] It's high flows, low pressure, because […] you only have around […] six to seven liters of blood in your heart, but you can pump it around at least 200 or 300 liters together. […] And it's the same with SurfCleaner. It's huge flows in it, but it's low pressure. So that's why it doesn't consume that much energy. So it's different chambers, and it uses natural forces only.”
Rating: 💧💧💧
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 33 min | 🗓️ 01/18/2022
✅ Time saved: 31 min
