Within a 40-foot baby blue shipping container tucked along the sprawling campus of Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewer District’s South Shore Water Reclamation Facility in Oak Creek, Paige Peters leads a small team looking to revolutionize the way municipalities around the country handle wastewater treatment.
Peters is the founder and chief technology officer of Milwaukee-based Rapid Radicals, a startup working on perfecting a decentralized wastewater treatment system that can treat water in less than 30 minutes – 16 times faster than conventional treatment.
Rapid Radicals has been gaining national attention, winning the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest in June and earning a federal Small Business Innovation Research grant in the same month. Since its inception in 2016, the company has received $1.5 million in grant funding. MMSD has continued to submit letters in support of Rapid Radicals as the company has scaled.
“Technology is the easiest part of solving a problem,” Peters said. “This is a really, really wickedly complex problem and engineers can sit around all day and come up with solutions and none of it matters if it doesn’t fit the needs of the communities.”
When wastewater enters Rapid Radicals’ treatment system, it is sent into a clarifier for chemically enhanced primary treatment to remove solids, organic materials and nutrients. The clarified water then passes into a chemical oxidation contact chamber to disinfect pathogens, remove soluble organic materials and oxidize micropollutants. Any residual oxidant is then removed, and clean water can be released back into the ecosystem.
The name Rapid Radicals comes from how quickly the technology produces hydroxyl radicals, which are the strongest oxidants known to science. The compound non-selectively breaks down contaminants.
The benefits of Rapid Radicals’ technology are its speed, scaled-down size when compared to a full water treatment plant, and the fact that the system can be placed directly at sewer overflow sites to quickly address backups. Experts in the field of water technology say this technology is contributing to the company’s success.
Rapid Radicals’ proven technology coupled with a built-in customer base in water utilities and industrial users is a winning combination, said Dean Amhaus, president and chief executive officer of The Water Council.
“As far as Rapid Radicals, it’s always going to come down to if it’s a good technology,” Amhaus said. “If it doesn’t measure up to that, it doesn’t matter what your business plan is. No matter who you are, you have to have a good technology.”
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Paige Peters, founder and chief technology officer of Rapid Radicals, takes a water sample from one of the oxidation chambers used in her wastewater treatment system.[/caption]
The origin of Rapid Radicals
The idea behind the technology was inspired by Peters’ co-inventor, Daniel Zitomer, a civil and environmental engineering professor at Marquette University and director of the school’s Water Quality Center. Zitomer is the lead technical advisor to Peters and the Rapid Radicals team. He was also an undergraduate advisor to Peters.
In 2010 and 2011, the summer seasons were plagued by severe storms. Zitomer’s home in Shorewood suffered a basement backup in 2010. Around this same time, MMSD had announced the goal of having zero sewer overflows and zero basement backups by 2035. The idea of a technology that can be placed at a sewer overflow site to treat water, to MMSD standards, was born. Zitomer proposed a high-rate water treatment system that works 20 times faster than at a full-sized water treatment plant.
“We’ve been solving 2050 problems with 1980s solutions since 1980,” Peters said. “There needs to be a new approach.”
She’s added a handful of team members who’ve helped her launch Rapid Radicals into a full-on business, including Dylan Waldhuetter as chief executive officer and Will Schanen as chief operating officer and environmental economist. The trio shares a passion for water sustainability and met through their shared work.
“I started by doing customer discovery and just looking at the market – stakeholders, anyone involved in it – and (learning) what are the pains and how can this tech meet (them)? That’s where I really learned about the wastewater industry,” Schanen said. “It was really a feet-to-the-fire moment.”
Waldhuetter, who describes himself as a product of Milwaukee’s water startup scene, said he was drawn to joining the Rapid Radicals team because of Peters’ unique ability to not only build a complex technology, but also to explain it to the average person.
“I think one of the coolest things that Paige is doing is that it’s kind of (born) out of that cultural identity, and it can really be an example of how the different stakeholders in this region foster technology development to solve world water problems,” Waldhuetter said.
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The Rapid Radicals decentralized wastewater treatment system.[/caption]
The current pilot system
Right now, the Oak Creek pilot system has a flow rate of 5 gallons per minute. A sewer overflow event is measured in millions of gallons per day. The next pilot system Peters will build, by the end of this year, will be up to 100 gallons per minute. So far, about $300,000 has been spent on building out the next pilot.
“The next pilot will be the fourth scale at which I’ve tested the technology,” said Peters. “At that point we can pretty confidently say, ‘OK, I can do this at 100 gallons per minute. We need 100 million gallons per day? I can do that.’ I know what my scaling factors are at that point.”
The biggest challenge Peters has faced as she scales up is finding equipment in the right size. Any pipe related to wastewater has to have a 2-inch opening because wastewater contains solids. This means pumps must also be able to accommodate that 2-inch size, which makes it difficult to find parts that accommodate the size of the pilot system equipment. The team has had to rely on their engineering skills and creativity to make their own parts.
“It’s hard to do pilot stuff with wastewater because you have to be able to deal with the stuff found in wastewater. You have to be able to pump it, but you have to be able to do that at a smaller scale,” Peters said. “I’m doing it scrappy and I’m doing it myself.”
The next pilot system will be located near Hawthorn Glen Park in Milwaukee. There’s a nearby lift station with the capacity to pump 135 million gallons of water per day. The site has also been targeted by MMSD as a future site for high-rate water treatment.
“Our plan is to leverage these pilot systems to go to other municipalities with similar problems and demonstrate the success of the technology to sort of de-risk full-scale implementations with those pilots as a path to full-scale implementation,” Waldhuetter said.
The current pilot system in Oak Creek will stay put and be used by the Army Corps of Engineers for a project focused on potable water reuse.
As Peters forges ahead on her effort to commercialize her technology, she’s also leaving another lasting impact within the world of water technology.
“We’re also pleased to see more women pursuing careers in the water industry,” Amhaus said. “We, still, as an industry have very, very little diversity. People don’t think about this as a career path. And then there’s somebody like Paige who has the technology, has been able to demonstrate her expertise and is confident enough to say, ‘Hey, listen. I’m going to go and start a company.’ I think people are quite positive about Rapid Radicals and where they’re headed.”
