An Epic Raise for Wastewater Management

Wastewater treatment as an industry holds a huge opportunity to reduce water usage. (Image: Atenagroup)

Epic CleanTec, a startup decentralizing wastewater treatment, just raised a $2.6M seed round. Epic CleanTec helps buildings reduce water demand by up to 90%, saving building owners hundreds of thousands of dollars annually on their water and sewer bills.

Why does this matter?

• Population growth, urbanization, and economic development are contributors to an increase in wastewater generation. By 2050, 70% of the world’s population expected to live in cities and water shortages could affect 5B people. An increase in water demand will require new approaches to wastewater collection and management.
• 80% of wastewater flows back into the ecosystem without being treated or reused, resulting in 1.8B people drinking contaminated water. Additionally, billions of people are affected by a lack of clean water.
• Current centralized wastewater management systems can not keep up with growing cities — they are deteriorating and rely on expensive, energy-intensive processes. On top of that, they don’t do much to recover nutrients and organics they collect.

What’s next?

• It was announced that: “Epic’s systems have already been included in the designs for several planned high-rise development projects throughout the West Coast, with the first coming online at the end of 2020.”
• Deploying Epic CleanTec’s technology will save buildings money, conserve water, and create more sustainable, resilient cities.
• Epic CleanTec sees this as an opportunity to “shift the industry towards a more distributed, circular approach in which our wastewater resources — water, nutrients, energy, and carbon — are recovered and reused.”
• Buildings that use Epic CleanTec for wastewater management will divert wastewater and sewage through city-level systems. If enough buildings shift towards decentralized solutions, cities can avoid costs to renovate or replace infrastructure.
• By integrating a circular economy, both water and organics will be recycled. Turning organic waste into nutrient-rich soil will lower greenhouse emissions, as it will no longer be going to landfill.

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