Adding clarity to wastewater solutions

Rural Municipality of East St. Paul — If Martin Hildebrand has anything to do with it, people from across the continent who are exploring wastewater treatment options will soon be visiting East St. Paul.

Last week, the founder of Manitoba water solutions company Nexom and other stakeholders celebrated the opening of North America’s first full-scale Cyclor Turbo wastewater treatment demonstration facility.

The project showcases a compact, chemical-free treatment technology that delivers phosphorus and nitrogen removal while significantly reducing infrastructure footprint.

It’s a project that has generated “a huge amount of interest” across North America, said Hildebrand, whose company brought the technology to the community.

“East St. Paul (is) going to be on the wastewater map, if there is such a thing,” he said at a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Thursday.

“If you look at consultants across North America, as well as communities that are looking at doing wastewater upgrades, East St. Paul is going to become a known community in terms of this project. As we do conference presentations and technical symposiums, East St. Paul will be at the forefront.”

Created by French wastewater giant Suez SA, Cyclor Turbo is a form of sequencing batch reactor — a type of activated sludge process for the treatment of wastewater.

Oxygen is bubbled through the mixture of wastewater and activated sludge to reduce the organic matter and reduce pollutants before it’s released into surface water.

Cyclor Turbo removes more nitrogen, total suspended solids and phosphorus with fewer inputs, and requires up to 50 per cent less footprint, than a conventional activated sludge.

Suez granted Nexom the exclusive licence to bring the technology to North America, after representatives from the company approached Hildebrand at a conference in Germany two years ago.

Nexom and Suez collaborated with the RM and consulting firm Stantec on the project in East St. Paul.

“None of us wants algae in our rivers and lakes, so that is ultimately why we do these things and why we try to make them better and better as we go along,” Hildebrand said.

Finding ways to do things better and better has been Nexom’s modus operandi ever since Hildebrand co-founded the company in 1997.

He was working as a civil engineer at Nelson River Construction at the time, and tasked with developing a business that would focus on removing nutrients from wastewater.

It became apparent to Hildebrand and his colleagues there was a need for innovation in the industry, particularly for tech that works in colder climates.

Nutrient removal processes are biological systems and that biological activity slows down when water gets cold, Hildebrand said during an interview with the Free Press the day before the ribbon-cutting ceremony.

“There was a need to basically bring technologies into the market that could remove nutrients at super cold temperatures,” the 55-year-old said, seated in the board room in Nexom’s headquarters near Winnipeg in the RM of Springfield.

“Being in Manitoba was a major boost for us as a business because of the respect that we got because of the climate conditions that we actually did all of our research and development work in,” Hildebrand said. “If we could do this work in Winnipeg, we must be able to do it everywhere else.”

Nexom started by offering its services in Western Canada and broke into the United States about a decade later.

Hildebrand characterizes Nexom’s upward trajectory as slow and steady, with the company growing 10 to 15 per cent annually. As the company became more successful, he said, it kept developing new technologies in-house, as well as offering technologies it acquired through company acquisitions.

The company’s vision is for every drop of wastewater in North America to meet the highest nutrient standards at the lowest possible energy footprint. Offering robust technologies that are sustainable and reliable is of the utmost importance, Hildebrand said.

Today, Nexom is part of Axius Water, a consortium of nine companies (two in Canada, five in the U.S., one each in England and Italy) that work together to provide nutrient removal solutions for municipal and industrial wastewater.

The main shareholders are two investment firms — KKR in New York and XPV Water Partners in Toronto — and a group of employees that includes Hildebrand. (He also serves as chief technology officer at Axius.)

Axius’s annual gross revenue is US$250 million, of which Nexom “is a very significant piece,” Hildebrand said.

Axius employs approximately 500 people, 100 of whom work at Nexom.

Nexom’s employees are the core of the complex biological and chemical treatment systems that all nine companies offer, according to Hildebrand.

They play a significant role in helping the other businesses develop their own technologies and will, on occasion, review some of the more complex projects Axius’ other companies are working on.

“Our top-level experts are sitting in Winnipeg,” Hildebrand said.

Carla Devlin, mayor of East St. Paul, is glad Nexom chose the community as the site for its demonstration facility.

“We are proud to be part of something that is pushing innovation forward in wastewater treatment and we value the opportunity to partner on this important work,” she said at the ribbon-cutting.

The Cyclor Turbo system operates in parallel with East St. Paul’s existing system, allowing the municipality to evaluate the technology in real-world conditions.

“For our community, that means we can see firsthand how it performs, how it could improve efficiency and whether it’s a viable option for future wastewater treatment,” Devlin told the Free Press in an email.

“It gives us the ability to make more informed decisions as we plan for a new facility, ensuring we’re investing in solutions that are both effective and environmentally responsible.”

The opportunity came at no cost to East St. Paul, Devlin added. Hildebrand declined to say how much the upgrade cost and if that cost was shared.

Raised near Winkler and now a Steinbach resident, Hildebrand says he’s proud that Nexom has a strong Manitoba presence while impacting communities around the world.

He’s looking forward to what he and the company’s employees do next.

“You’re only as good as your last job, so you’ve got to keep on doing every job excellently well and have the team aligned with the fact that you can never take your foot off the gas,” he said. “You have to keep going, every day.”

aaron.epp@freepress.mb.ca