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Every project supported by Gebert Rüf Stiftung is made accessible with a web presentation that informs about the core data of the project. With this public presentation, the foundation publishes the funding results achieved and contributes to the communication of science to society.

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Oxyle – Clean Wastwater

Editorial

Für den Inhalt der Angaben zeichnet die Projektleitung verantwortlich.

Cooperation

This project, funded by Gebert Rüf Stiftung, is supported by the following project partners: Oxyle AG; SNSF's BRIDGE PoC; Venture Kick; Innosuisse; MSRL lab, IPW institute, and IfB lab at ETH Zurich, as well as the Process Engineering department at Eawag.

Project data

  • Project no: GRS-029/20 
  • Amount of funding: CHF 150'000 
  • Approved: 27.04.2020 
  • Duration: 06.2020 - 02.2022 
  • Area of activity:  InnoBooster, seit 2018

Project management

Project description

We are witnessing an alarming level of contamination of our rivers, lakes, and even our drinking water, with highly toxic and carcinogenic chemicals. Existing water treatments face many drawbacks and do not effectively remove these harmful chemicals. We have developed a novel treatment technology that can completely re- move a wide variety of these problematic pollutants from wastewater. Our technology is sustainable, cost- effective, easy to use, and highly scalable. To take our invention to market, we plan to build a wastewater treatment demonstrator to provide cleaning demonstrations on customer sites and gain their valuable testimonials.

What is special about the project?

Our technology provides an efficient solution to overcome the shortcomings of existing treatments by employing highly reactive radical species that can efficiently degrade any organic contaminant from their vicinity in a non-selective manner. Our novel catalytic material continuously generates large doses of these radicals, insitu, by harnessing energy from multiple clean sources, for efficient water remediation. Our technology delivers additional benefits such as fast reaction times, safe wastewater handling practices, and reusability over multiple treatment cycles.
Apart from providing these significant advantages, our technology also imposes many positive impacts on our society, environment, and climate including, improving the quality of our surface water, protecting health of aquatic species, fighting antibiotic resistance, and reducing CO2 emissions.

Status/Results

We have developed a small scale portable water treatment reactor prototype capable of treating up to 1000 L/d of wastewater. This portable prototype has been successfully used to conduct several paid pilots with municipal and industrial customers to treat their effluents. Through these pilots we have demonstrated our technology's efficiency at eliminating the most persistent and mobile pollutants from wastewater in a cost effective and sustainable manner. During this project, we were able to take our technology from TRL4 to TRL7. In 2020, we founded Oxyle AG, a spin-off providing enhanced removal of persistent pollutants from effluents and allowing our customers to meet the new stringent regulations. In 2021, we closed our seed round and raised over 3.2 million CHF in non-dilutive funding. At present our focus is on working with a manufacturing partner, obtaining certifications, and procuring sales contracts. Our first product will reach market entry status in Q3 of 2023.

Links

Persons involved in the project

Dr. Fajer Mushtaq, project leader
Dr. Silvan Staufert, product development engineer

Last update to this project presentation  18.03.2024