[Pil-pc-oceania] New wastewater recycling system: transcript of broadcast

[pacific-edge]

ABC transcript follows:

19 February  2007 

NMB Water Recycling System

A domestic on-site sewage treatment system that does it cheaply

Science and Technology:Research
Contact: Dr Tony Taylor, Microbiologist
Australian Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation, PMB 1, Menai, NSW 2234
Contact: Robyn Malone
Australian Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation, PMB 1, Menai, NSW 2234
International Telephone: +61 2 9717 7000
Email: robyn.malone at ansto.gov.au
Website: http://www.ansto.gov.au


TRANSCRIPT:

BLANCH : A waste water recycling treatment that literally eats waste matter,
breathes air and is self-perpetuating has been invented by micro-biologist,
Dr Tony Taylor, from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology
Organisation, known as ANSTO.

Called an NMB, which stands for nano-particulate membrane bio-reactor, the
system can be used in homes and apartment blocks or municipal treatment
plants.

The key to the technology lies with its unique membrane, which can make
sewage and waste water clean enough for reuse and does it cheaply.

But first, Dr Tony Taylor explains what a bio-reactor is and how it works.

DR TONY TAYLOR : A bio-reactor is just a fancy word for a big culture
vessel. When you grow cells in most cases, you'll grow them in a liquid
culture or a submerged culture and the cells will have air bubbled through
the liquid and that will give them the oxygen they need to function.

BLANCH : So, how does yours differ from other similar technologies?

DR TONY TAYLOR : The NMB is actually a solid state culture where the cells
grow on the surface of a membrane in direct contact with air and two
membranes are arranged in parallel with each other and liquid is trickled
down between them and this forms a primitive form of a gill and air passes
passively between the sets of gills and the cells consume the nutrients and
it does the whole job with a much higher availability of oxygen.

BLANCH : So you don't have the expense of having to aerate and all of those
things which you have in these other systems that are grown in liquid?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Yeah, in a sewerage treatment situation, you'll pump air
down underneath the liquid and it'll bubble straight to the top. So then you
have to keep doing this time and time again and it's very expensive, costing
something like about a quarter of a million dollars a year for one sewerage
treatment plant just in the electricity they consume. Whereas with the NMB,
the aeration's passive, all you have to do is pump the liquid up to the top
and let it very slowly trickle down through the membranes.

BLANCH : Well, you're membrane bio-reactor is being patented by ANSTO and
that's how it really does really function so inexpensively then?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Yeah, pumping costs for the liquid are much lower than the
aeration costs in a normal bio-reactor.

BLANCH : And what's it made of?

DR TONY TAYLOR : There's a very big variety of membranes that we've made.
But essentially they're a porous glass, or a porous glass composite with
polymers.

BLANCH : So, what parts compromise the process alongside this membrane to
provide a secondary sewage treatment?

DR TONY TAYLOR : The NMB does the secondary phase. If you want to treat
sewage with it, you'll put a settling tank upstream of it, that's primary
treatment. And then downstream from it, you don't need like in a normal
sewerage treatment plant the secondary effluent is of such a low grade that
you still have to filter it. With our NMB, the quality of the secondary
effluent is much higher and so you don't need filtration, so it's already
ready for either UV or chlorine disinfection.

BLANCH : Well, you describe your membrane bio-reactor as a simple
arrangement of gills which you've mentioned, that uses bacteria to operate
as a lung and a stomach, but I want you to put your micro-biologist hat on
for a moment to tell us about the science that's driving this technology.

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, in the NMB, the availability of oxygen in the
air--there's about 250 milligrams of oxygen per litre of air, whereas in a
submerged culture, the maximum oxygen concentration you can get is around 9
milligrams per litre. So there's about 28 times as much oxygen available and
this means the cells grow many, many times faster and thereby consume the
nutrients much faster.

BLANCH : You suggest that your system is suited to varying sized houses and
apartments and this takes you then right through to municipal treatment
plants. So how is it powered and what costs are there in operating the
system in this manner?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, the adaptability of the system is that first-off it's
extremely simple, which means you don't need a team of engineers and
micro-biologists to monitor it 24/7 as you do in a normal municipal sewerage
treatment plant, so it's ideal for in-house uses. By changing the number of
gills that you arrange, you can make it from a small system, all the way up
to a huge system for a sewerage treatment plant. The powering of it is done
via basically pumping of the liquid. It's one simple pump. So in a in-house
situation, you just have a small pond pump.

BLANCH : Let's talk about the costs in dollars per metre compared with
current membranes' costs.

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, the membranes that we produce in materials cost is
somewhere around $1 a square metre. The other membranes that we were
competing with for what's known as membrane surface liquid culture, a big
long word for saying cells grow on the surface of a membrane, they cost up
to about $500 per square metre and it's this low cost that's enabled us to
scale up to a large and commercially viable size so quickly and easily.

BLANCH : So, how long does the process take to produce clean water?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, depending on the contamination load and the amount of
membranes or area of membranes that you have in operation relative to the
quantity of water, it'll take between 12 and 24 hours.

BLANCH : And when you say it can cut water usage by 60%, how's that
achieved?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, if you take the shower and laundry water from a
house, they constitute between 54 and 63% of the total consumption of water.
Now the NMB is very efficient. We manage to recycle or reuse about 95% of
the water that goes in. This means that we can save up to 60% of the water
by reusing it in the laundry, the cistern or in the yard.

BLANCH : So what smells are emitted during this process? I mean what's it
smell like?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well with the sewerage treatment trials, we were very,
very, well, um, we were astonished because when it was operating at low
temperatures around 20 degrees Celsius, it smelt like a pond or a stream.
But when it was warmer, about 30 degree Celsius, we were expecting an awful
ungodly odour. Instead it smelt like vanilla. When you open up an incubator
that's had sewerage flowing around in it for 5 hours, and you open it up and
you expect to be blown off your feet. And the lovely smell of vanilla was
very, very nice.

When it's a grey water system, it smells like a dirty shower. But these
smells wouldn't be of any issue anyway, because you vent the air--the
effluent air from these systems to above the roof anyway.

BLANCH : So, where can the water be used after treatment?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, if you chlorinate it or treat it with UV, you can
reuse it in the garden, the toilet or the laundry, because we're working on
Class A water that we're producing.

In some States, you can't reuse it in the laundry, but in many States you
can.

BLANCH : And what other uses might there be for this invention, because
there are other uses that are quite wide and varying.

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, it was originally designed for making antibiotics.
The big issue with antibiotics is that you can't make antibiotics in the
cells that produce them, in submerged cultures, that is without genetically
engineering the organisms. With the NMB, the produce very large amounts of
antibiotics, very efficiently, very quickly without the need for genetic
engineering and this we hope we'll be able to bring at least 15, may be 20
brand new totally fundamentally different antibiotics to the market, which
will help us eradicate these super bugs that are a big problem at the
moment.

But we've also managed to prove it was extremely good for producing foods
like citric acid. It had great results for mining, which is used in
bio-leaching. We haven't used it for bio-remediation, that's where you clean
up toxic waste sites, but it probably will work very well for that. And the
other prospect is for use in aquaculture, where all of the same issues that
you have in sewerage treatment are exactly the same, only the solutions are
more dilute.

BLANCH : So Tony, you mentioned just now antibiotics. Is this where the
project started for you?

DR TONY TAYLOR : When I started work at ANSTO, I was working in a group that
was making what's known as nano-particles, little tiny particles containing,
in this case it was anti-cancer agents, which were to be injected in
peoples' blood to have a slow release treatment of cancer agent and was
supposed to target the actual cancer itself.

Now, I started working on antibiotics production, and the whole thing went
from one thing to another and ultimately these gigantic gills have now
nothing to do with little tiny nano-particles. But the whole technology that
it came from, all comes from sol-gel chemistry and the technologies
developed in nuclear science for immobilising nuclear waste. So it all came
a very, very big, round circle, from immobilising plutonium, from
decommissioned warheads, to making antibiotics and cleaning sewerage and
cleaning up the environment.

BLANCH : What period of time does that cover?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Four years.

BLANCH : Okay, you now have a process that is being patented. Where do we
stand now, what's next for it all?

DR TONY TAYLOR : Well, at the moment we're seeking commercialisation and we
have a number of commercial partners who are working with us to develop
various applications of the NMB. We're trying to raise capital, for further
research and further development, and we have just spun off a company from
ANSTO and the company's called Australian Membrane Technologies. So that
actually happened at Christmas. That was my Christmas present.

BLANCH : So, you sit back now and wait for it all to unfold?

DR TONY TAYLOR : No, I work very, very hard in the laboratory with my
assistant trying to meet a very, very big mountain of obligations that I
have.

BLANCH : That were left while you were doing this?

DR TONY TAYLOR : No, these obligations are just ongoing. Everybody seems to
want a piece of the action and like we're working on sewage treatment at the
moment and waste water treatment and a whole pile of other applications in
that, but there's a whole pile of people who want to use it for aquaculture.
The biggest application I think will be ultimately in the bio-technology
fields such as antibiotic production and we're also working on some work
with enzyme production. So the next probably 10 years are going to be
extremely busy for me.

BLANCH : Micro-biologist and inventor of the NMB water recycling system, Dr
Tony Taylor, from the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology
Organisation, in Sydney.