The landfill on the southeastern edge of Amherst, Massachusetts, closed in the 1980s, but city officials say it’s still causing iron and manganese to leach into the groundwater. For years, residents have reported orange, contaminated water, so the town is trying out a new water treatment system developed by the start-up Elateq.
Founded in 2020, Elateq uses an electrochemical cell to remove metals, pathogens, organic pollutants, and other contaminants. The system has a specialized carbon material that acts as bipolar electrodes. Cofounder and Chief Science Officer Ljiljana Rajic says fine-tuning the voltages across the electrodes enables the system to carry out reduction and oxidation reactions at the same time.
On one side of the carbon, the electricity generates hydroxyl radicals, which oxidize organic pollutants. On the opposite side, the electricity reduces metals in the water and causes them to get plated onto the cathode. A capacitive deionization process elsewhere in the carbon simultaneously removes salts.
“Those are the three main processes,” Rajic says. “They’re all happening on the same block of carbon, but on different parts of the carbon.”
Rajic says the system is simpler than existing multistep water treatment methods. And using electricity eliminates the need for water treatment chemicals or membranes, reducing the system’s cost and carbon footprint.
In October, the company started up a solar- powered water treatment system in Amherst that processes 150,000 L of water per day. Elateq is also running a pilot system to treat wastewater from a PepsiCo facility in Kolkata, India.
In September, Elateq received a US National Science Foundation grant to scale up a second generation of the technology, which will also remove per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). The company hopes to have it ready by 2029, when public water systems in the US are required to start removing the chemicals.