Thursday, 12 November 2024.
🇧🇷 The Brazilian company Sanepar has been courted by several international groups. In this article we will elaborate on this.
Headquartered in the city of Curitiba in Paraná, Sanepar is a company in the area, among others, of basic sanitation in almost 350 municipalities, corresponding to around 270 sewage treatment plants and 170 water treatment plants.
Through Technical Cooperation Agreements or Memorandums of Understanding (MoU), the company has been developing technical and scientific partnerships with an emphasis on the sector in its areas of operation.
🌎 The company's portal lists dozens of partner institutions, several of which are international: 5 from Germany, 4 from the United States, England, Paraguay, Portugal and Sweden each with 3, 2 from Japan, as well as Argentina, South Korea, the Netherlands, Israel, Mexico, Norway and Poland.
Why so much interest?
In addition to being a publicly traded private-public company, its emphasis on science and technology is clear.
Below we highlight three examples of partnerships in innovative uses of their waste.
(1) Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF)
A few days ago, in November 2024, the British 🇬🇧 company Firefly announced the signing of an MoU with Sanepar. In fact, in April 2024, Sanepar itself had already anticipated the relationship and interest in producing SAF from sewage sludge. And the British technology is disruptive, called hydrothermal liquefaction. This process allows the chemical alteration of sewage waste, breaking it down into materials known as biocrude and biochar. Biocrude is then transformed into SAF and other fuels, while biochar can be used in a variety of other applications, as stated in Firefly's press release.
(2) Renewable Hydrogen
In April 2024, the German 🇩🇪 company Graforce also signed an MoU with Sanepar, aiming at the implementation of a disruptive technological process for the production of renewable hydrogen from biomethane generated in sewage treatment plants. This is a carbon removal technology through methane-pyrolysis, as stated in Graforce's press release.
(3) Organic Fertilizer from Composting
Also in November 2024, according to a press release from Sanepar itself, an MoU was signed with the Japanese 🇯🇵 company Kyowa Kako. The company holds a patent for technology that uses microorganisms in an aerated hyperthermophilic composting process. In other words, dispensing with the use of plant substrates such as sugarcane bagasse or rice husk, through organic, aerated fermentation at temperatures around 90ºC, it transforms sewage sludge and other types of organic waste into sanitized fertilizer for use in agriculture.
About SAF, we recommend reading “SAF, Sustainable Aviation Fuel and the recent Grand Challenge proposed by the United States Government to reduce aviation carbon emissions”
About composting “Brazil, new tax benefits in support of recycling projects and practical case of a company in the field of composting urban waste”
About hydrogen, a series of articles.
But perhaps most importantly, pay attention to patent development:
