Low-cost Sustainable Fibrous Materials as a Disruptive Technology for Water Treatment

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With an annual global market of $8.54 billion, coagulants and flocculants are critical to water treatment but carry a significant economic and environmental burden. To simultaneously deal with the issues of process sustainability, cost, and efficiency, we have designed a new water treatment process that uses super-bridging agents based on cellulose fibers that markedly improve the removal of conventional and emerging contaminants during settling by increasing floc size and density. We showed that pristine cellulose fibers can be used to significantly reduce turbidity during water treatment, thereby reducing the demand for coagulants and flocculants. Moreover, by grafting inexpensive iron (hydr)oxides to recycled cellulose fibers, the resulting Fe-grafted fiber can simultaneously adsorb contaminants, bridge flocs, and increase floc density, whilst reducing chemical usage. The unprecedented size of the superflocs produced using fibers enables easy floc removal by screening, eliminating the need for a settling tank, a large and costly process unit. The overall goal of the research is to demonstrate the scalability of our technology with the aim to convince licensing partners to pursue commercialization. We will focus on demonstrating the safety, scalability and performance of metal-grafted fibers at pilot-scale. This research will generate valuable data to prove the commercial viability of our invention for the global water treatment industry. The work will be undertaken with the support of several municipal and industrial partner organizations. This will allow McGill University and the partner organizations to fully assess the potential of the technology and to proceed accordingly towards commercialization. The reusable fiber-based materials combined with separation via screening will allow global water treatment facilities to reduce their capital and operating costs as well as their environmental and physical footprints. Because of their performance and affordability, our products and the associated screening process have the potential to be commercialized globally. This funding will significantly accelerate our market entry by enabling us to demonstrate the performance of our disruptive technology at scale.