Megan Tatum: From MIT Expertise Overview, 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}.
At the moment’s episode is delivered to you in partnership with the Michigan Financial Improvement Company.
Our matter in the present day is launching a expertise startup within the US state of Michigan. Constructing out an modern concept right into a viable product and firm requires data and assets that people may not 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 targeted on eradicating artificial ceaselessly chemical substances referred to 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 may speak about Enspired Options a bit extra. How did the concept come about, and what does your organization do?
Denise: Effectively, my co-founder, Meng, and I had careers in consulting, advising shoppers on the destiny and toxicity of chemical substances within the setting. What we did was consider how chemical substances moved by soil, water, and air, and what poisonous affect they may have on people and wildlife. That put us in a extremely distinctive place to see early on the environmental and well being ramifications of the artifical chemical PFAS in our surroundings.
After we discovered of a really novel and chic chemistry that might successfully destroy PFAS, we may foresee the worth in making this chemistry obtainable for industrial use and the potential for a big optimistic affect on sustaining wholesome water assets for all of us.
Such as you talked about, PFAS is known as a ceaselessly chemical as a result of it’s so resistant to interrupt down. It doesn’t break down naturally within the setting, so it simply circles round and round. This chemistry, which might break that cycle and break the molecule aside, may actually help the well being of all of us.
In the end, Meng and I stop our jobs, and we based Enspired Options. Our goal was to design, manufacture, and promote commercial-scale gear that destroys PFAS in water primarily based on this laboratory bench-scale chemistry that had been found, the aim 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 completely 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’s buyer functions managing semiconductor waste. Groundwater and floor water round airports are usually excessive in PFAS. Centralized waste disposal services that acquire and handle PFAS-contaminated liquids. And in addition, even transitioning firetrucks to PFAS-free firefighting foams.
Megan: Implausible. That is an enormous breadth of functions, unimaginable stuff.
Denise: Yeah.
