Canadian ingenuity advancing global wastewater treatment solutions

Wastewater effluents released in lakes, ponds, rivers, streams and oceans contain pollutants and chemicals impacting Canada's water. This pollution affects human health and our ecosystems due to varying water treatment across the country—ranging from no treatment to very sophisticated and thorough solutions. However, even advanced treatments are unable to remove all pollutants and chemicals. In addition, much of this wastewater can't be effectively treated on site with conventional treatment technology and must be trucked off site—a complex and expensive practice with significant long-term risks to industry, communities, human health and the environment.

The National Research Council of Canada (NRC) is committed to addressing: wastewater concerns, pollution in Canadian waters, and improved water and waste water treatment through research and development investments. Recently, the National Research Council of Canada Industrial Research Assistance Program (NRC IRAP) provided advisory services and funding to Axine Water Technologies to help the company to develop high-efficiency, advanced industrial wastewater treatment systems.

These systems can treat highly toxic, concentrated pharmaceutical wastewaters on site instead of being transported to remote specific locations for treatment. Additionally, they offer benefits of greenhouse gas reduction. The technology not only helps solve environmental pollution in Canada, but the company sees export opportunities for a worldwide market.

Based in Vancouver, Axine Water Technologies is addressing this problem with its incredibly talented and entrepreneurial team. From modest beginnings, they have grown from concept to scale-up and commercial deployment with multinational customers. They are supported by a global network of research agencies, suppliers, advisors, partners and investors in one of the world's top cleantech ecosystems.

"On behalf of our entire team at Axine, I would like to express our appreciation for the tremendous support from NRC IRAP, which has and continues to have a material positive impact on Axine's technology, product roadmap, innovation capacity and competitiveness as we scale up. IRAP's funding resources, combined with expert technical input and feedback from the industrial technology advisor team, has made our company stronger. The net result of NRC IRAP's support to Axine is being successfully deployed in applications around the world to address significant global environmental problems as we continue to establish Axine as a Canadian cleantech success story."