Megan Tatum: From MIT Know-how Evaluation, I am Megan Tatum. That is Enterprise Lab, the present that helps enterprise leaders make sense of latest applied sciences popping out of the lab and into {the marketplace}.
Right this moment’s episode is delivered to you in partnership with the Michigan Financial Improvement Company.
Our matter at the moment is launching a expertise startup within the US state of Michigan. Constructing out an revolutionary thought right into a viable product and firm requires data and assets that people won’t have. That is why the Michigan Financial Improvement Company, or the MEDC, has launched an innovation marketing campaign to help expertise entrepreneurs.
Two phrases for you: startup ecosystem.
My visitor is Dr. Denise Kay, the co-founder and CEO at Enspired Options, a Michigan-based startup centered on eradicating artificial eternally chemical compounds known as PFAS from water.
Welcome, Denise.
Dr. Denise Kay: Hello, Megan.
Megan: Hello. Thanks a lot for becoming a member of us. To get us began, Denise, I questioned if we might speak about Enspired Options a bit extra. How did the thought come about, and what does your organization do?
Denise: Nicely, my co-founder, Meng, and I had careers in consulting, advising shoppers on the destiny and toxicity of chemical compounds within the atmosphere. What we did was consider how chemical compounds moved by way of soil, water, and air, and what poisonous impression they could have on people and wildlife. That put us in a very distinctive place to see early on the environmental and well being ramifications of the artifical chemical PFAS in the environment.
Once we discovered of a really novel and chic chemistry that would successfully destroy PFAS, we might foresee the worth in making this chemistry accessible for industrial use and the potential for a major constructive impression on sustaining wholesome water assets for all of us.
Such as you talked about, PFAS is known as a eternally chemical as a result of it’s so resistant to interrupt down. It doesn’t break down naturally within the atmosphere, so it simply circles round and round. This chemistry, which might break that cycle and break the molecule aside, might actually help the well being of all of us.
Finally, Meng and I give up our jobs, and we based Enspired Options. Our goal was to design, manufacture, and promote commercial-scale tools that destroys PFAS in water based mostly on this laboratory bench-scale chemistry that had been found, the purpose being that this poisonous contaminant doesn’t proceed to flow into in our pure assets.
At this level, we’ve got received an award from the EPA and Division of Protection, and confirmed our expertise in over 200 totally different water samples starting from groundwater, floor water, landfill leachate, industrial wastewater, [and] municipal wastewater. It is actually all over the place. What we’re seeing traction in proper now could be buyer purposes managing semiconductor waste. Groundwater and floor water round airports are typically excessive in PFAS. Centralized waste disposal services that acquire and handle PFAS-contaminated liquids. And likewise, even transitioning firetrucks to PFAS-free firefighting foams.
Megan: Unbelievable. That is an enormous breadth of purposes, unimaginable stuff.
Denise: Yeah.
