TreaTech, a green and virtuous waste treatment solution

Can you give us a quick introduction to TreaTech?

We have developed an innovative technology that treats several waste streams in a sustainable and cost-effective way, particularly waste in liquid form, such as sewage sludge or industrial effluent.

The technology is designed to harness the power of the circular economy, mitigate climate change and support the global energy transition to renewable gases by capturing valuable products that are typically excluded from traditional wastewater treatment solutions.

This technology offers a number of advantages, including the speed with which the process can be converted, its compactness, its ability to eliminate bacteria and viruses and its capacity to process plastic micro-particles and PFAS, those eternal pollutants.

You attended ENGIE at Viva Technology in 2023. How’s it been for you since then? 

The first milestone after Vivatech 2023 was the closing of our first financing round, when we raised 9 million Swiss francs with various partners. This fund-raising round enabled us to complete the team and today there are about fifteen of us. 

Then, our biggest milestone was the design, construction and commissioning of our first industrial pilot at a customer site at the end of last year. So we’ve been operating this installation with industrial waste for a few months now.

We have filed several patents, and we have begun collaborating on R&D with Lab Crigen (one of ENGIE Group’s research centres) and with our American investor, Montrose Environmental Group. 

And, of course, we have continued our business development efforts and now have around fifty customers in our CRM. 

What are you going to present at Vivatech?

Unfortunately, given the size of our prototypes, we can’t bring them to the stand, but we will have visual aids, brochures, videos, etc...

And so that visitors can visualise our equipment, we’ll be bringing along small pieces of high-pressure equipment, to show the type of conditions we work in, as well as samples of waste and by-products collected after treatment, namely water! 

You already know Vivatech because you were there 2 years ago. What are your expectations for this new edition?

We are lucky enough to be welcomed on the ENGIE stand, which will give us the opportunity to do a catch-up with our ENGIE contacts who will be on site. I’m also looking forward to meeting the other start-ups in the ENGIE New Ventures portfolio which will also be on the stand and with which we have interesting synergies, particularly in the field of CO2 recovery.

Vivatech really is a huge event and I’m not necessarily expecting to find suppliers or customers there, but I’m hoping to meet a few investors because we’re in the middle of raising funds. I saw that the show offered a platform where you could connect with certain investors, so I’ll probably be pitching left and right.

You said you were in the middle of raising funds. Is that your next challenge?

Yes, that’s clearly our next challenge! 

Of course, there are always others, like the pilot I told you about, which we have now been operating for a few months and on which we have about 500 hours of operation. For this pilot, we have a whole list of KPIs to validate, including the one of achieving 1,000 hours. 

After that, we really want to try and push the technology further, to process other types of waste that represent a little more of a challenge for us.

We started with what we knew very well, what we master, and now we have to push this unit to its limits, increase throughputs, improve energy efficiency and confront ourselves with new types of waste. 

We have another project with one of our investors based in Saudi Arabia, whose waste, which contains a lot of water, is incinerated today. In Saudi Arabia, water has a different value than here and their government is really pushing them to find more efficient solutions. They are rather interested in gas production, but above all in the fact that our solution can recycle water, which they will be able to re-use on site. 

What question would you have liked me to ask you?

What is TreaTech’s vision of the fight against climate change?

We’re seeing a shift by certain players in the gas sector, with a desire to electrify everything. At the moment, however, some of our industrial customers cannot switch to all-electricity. They need temperatures that neither electricity nor hydrogen can provide. 

We have recently noticed that the NGV network, which was fairly well served in Switzerland, is less and less so. So we’re a little concerned about this sidelining of gas.

Our good fortune is that our main mission is to eliminate waste, even if we turn it into gas thanks to the catalysts we have developed over the years. If tomorrow the world only wants hydrogen or electricity, we’ll burn the gas to make electricity or hydrogen, but that’s not necessarily the best way to achieve the environmental transition. 

We’re asking ourselves a lot of questions about how the future will be. What the next decisions of the European Commission are, which are sometimes taken at a political level that does not always have an overall view of economic realities. In this context, it’s reassuring to know that some major groups like ENGIE, which are leaders in the energy transition, have a more nuanced position. And we’re ready to help them green the gas again.  

Visit the ENGIE stand (J39) at Porte de Versailles in Paris from 11 to 14 June to discover TreaTech and many other innovative solutions that make ENGIE the leader in energy transition.