Invisible Threats: PFAS & Clean Water
"PFAS are known as the forever chemical because they don't degrade. They don't degrade in the environment, and they don't degrade in your body."
PFAS chemicals are an emerging environmental threat, yet these toxic "forever chemicals" persist worldwide. In this episode of Liquid Assets, host Ravi Kurani speaks with Julie Bliss Mullen, founder of Aclarity, a startup tackling PFAS contamination. Julie shares her journey from researching PFAS during her PhD to becoming an entrepreneur. She explains how novel electrochemical systems can destroy PFAS compounds at landfills and industrial sites to prevent further pollution. Julie also discusses key lessons around focusing on customers, rapid prototyping, and finding advocates. With evolving regulations driving momentum, companies like Julie's aim to scale up sustainable technologies that eliminate PFAS from water sources. Overall, an inside look at innovative solutions and business models addressing the urgent PFAS crisis.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- Dive into an enlightening conversation that unravels the intricacies of PFAS in water treatment.
- Trail on Aclarity Water's transformative journey, witnessing its evolution from a budding idea to a beacon in water purification.
- Understand the pivotal role of strategic focus in technology and market strategy, a theme that resonates deeply throughout the episode.
- Gain insights into the broader implications of PFAS, emphasizing its environmental and public health urgency, and look ahead at Aclarity's future aspirations.
Listen On:
Watch here:
Meet Julie
Julie's journey with "Forever Chemicals" began during her undergrad at WPI and an internship at the EPA. Her PhD research on innovative water treatment led her to develop the electrochemical technology now central to Aclarity. Driven by a vision for cleaner water, Julie launched Aclarity in 2017 after patenting her PFAS destruction method.
Today, she leads Aclarity in developing systems that destroy PFAS at the source, protecting water through service innovation and sustainable technology.
The Book, Movie, or Show
In our quest to discover the literary influences shaping our guests' visions, two titles stand out in Julie's repertoire.
Who: A Method for Hiring by Geoff Smart & Randy Street
AND
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
'Who' by Geoff Smart and Randy Street, is a compelling dive into the nuances of hiring A-players, essential for any leader or entrepreneur. The second title is 'The Lean Startup' by Eric Ries, a game-changing guide on startup success and innovation. Both books offer invaluable insights into leadership, strategy, and the entrepreneurial spirit. Dive into these reads to get a deeper understanding of the foundations that underpin Julie's approach to water treatment innovation.
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Transcript
00:00
Julie Bliss Mullen
It was really hard. And I spent so much time with advisors and myself and my team, well, we can do this and we can do this. And it's so easy to, like, say, oh, we will do it all. And there were definitely times when were really drinking the cool. I think were just going to do it all. But the lack of focus from a technology standpoint, from a go to market standpoint, everything, it just made it very difficult. I was always focused in PFAS and but I was also typically PFAS and microbes bacteria and viruses. Originally they were packaged in the same product is what I was trying to explore.
00:42
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, where we talk about the intersection of policy, technology, and management, all looking at water today. We have an awesome guest for you today. It's Julie Mulen from Aclarity Water.
00:56
Julie Bliss Mullen
Hi, my name is Julie Bliss Mullen. I'm the founder and CEO of Aclarity. At Aclarity, we develop and deploy proprietary electrochemical systems that destroy PFAS forever.
01:06
Ravi Kurani
I'm going to go ahead and hand the mic over to you, Julie, if you can just kind of tell us who you are, what you're working on, where you live, your background. Let's jump into who is. Julie.
01:15
Julie Bliss Mullen
Thanks, Ravi, for having me. I'm the founder and CEO of a Aclarity. We're based in Massachusetts. I'm actually outside in our sunroom. I just got some new furniture, which is awesome. So hanging out here, live in central Massachusetts with my husband and my two kids. They're almost two and almost four. So really fun ages. Our lab is also in Massachusetts, just south of Boston, so a town called Mansfield. What we do at Aclarity, we develop and deploy and service systems that destroy PFAS and liquid waste. So we go on-site to customers that are owners and operators of landfills, also working with other technology providers that concentrate PFAS. And then we destroy this chemical. We'll talk a whole lot more about PFAS too, so everyone understands what that is. Yeah. And the issue that we're solving right now is really it's PFAS, right? So PFAS stands for per and polyflural alkal substances.
02:11
Julie Bliss Mullen
And I love to quiz people after just kidding, this kind of crazy chemical name for this massive group, 14,000 plus chemicals in this group of PFAS substances, they're typically used in products that resist water and resist oil. So think about raincoats or nonstick pans or teflon pans. They're also in receipts. Recently found out that they're also in toilet paper. They're in contact lenses. They're on furniture. Right? They're everywhere. Everywhere. They're known as the forever chemical, essentially, because they don't degrade. They don't degrade in the environment. They also don't degrade in your body. And so about 98% of people have PFAS in their blood, and it doesn't degrade. And this is a harmful chemical. It's likely carcinogenic, it's toxic, and it causes a lot of health issues, especially in areas where PFAS has been found in the environment. There are a lot of cancer clusters around those areas.
03:11
Julie Bliss Mullen
So it's pretty terrible. And because these are forever chemicals, it's very difficult to break them down. And we've actually found a way to very efficiently and cost effectively break them down in liquid streams.
03:22
Ravi Kurani
That's awesome. Yeah. I definitely want to double click into kind of how you actually destroy PFAS. But let me take a step back and go to what is PFAS? Right? You said it's obviously the forever chemical. It resists water and oil. For the audience out there, did we have PFAS before? Is it 1000 year old chemical that's now coming out? Is it similar to lead? Can you give us the history on PFAS and why it's so bad?
03:48
Julie Bliss Mullen
Yeah, definitely. So PFAS was manufactured in the early to mid 19 hundreds and it's a super chemical, right? It resists water, it resists oil. It has these really great features, right? So it's been used in a lot of industries and although you can probably look this up and debate it, but it hasn't been known publicly that it's been a harmful chemical until the 70s or so publicly. And it's been this massive movement, it's been this massive public movement, sort of a bottom up type of movement to start to remove PFAS from our environment, from drinking water, groundwater, wastewater, soil. And then actually even at the facility, a lot of companies are trying to find alternatives, PFAS alternatives, so they can still have those really nice features that the chemical is able to provide, but not have the really devastating effects that are associated with it.
04:48
Julie Bliss Mullen
From the regulatory standpoint it is regulating PFAS anywhere in the environment is a mess. I mean, it's crazy. And if you were to Google PFAS, just straight out, you'll find a million articles, a million news pieces that come up and every day there's breaking news on the PFAS side. So someone is suing somebody else. The municipalities try to solve the problem because they have high detects of PFAS and it's quite nuts. And states have taken the lead in regulating PFAS and different types of media. And I say in your water and soil mostly, the federal government has proposed regulations around drinking water. Some of the work is kind of trickling down to the Clean Water Act and then more into the states, some discharge permits. And actually most recently, and kind of different from my perspective is the fact that the EPA is trying to classify PFAS chemicals, a handful of chemicals now as hazardous substances, which is really turning the industry upside down.
05:57
Julie Bliss Mullen
Because if all PFAS is everywhere, PFAS in my room. And if that is all not considered hazardous or at least the disposal of that is hazardous, it's going to be really expensive that the trash business is going to be really expensive that triples down to the municipalities because they receive the wastewater from all this nasty trash water that leachate from the landfills. So it's really quite crazy. It's important to regulate it. It's also important to understand the alternatives out there and how it's going to affect people every day.
06:33
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, entirely. And so you had mentioned that it was made in the early 19 hundreds. We made this chemical in raincoats. And where was it primarily used when we first started manufacturing it? In the early 19 hundreds?
06:46
Julie Bliss Mullen
The early 19 hundreds. Well, I can tell you that it's not predominantly used in firefighting phones. So if you go, if your house is on fire if my house was on fire and my kids were inside, I would probably prefer for the firefighters to put the fire out then let it burn. Although, interestingly, I have written papers that show that this firefighting foam actually doesn't work. I should say water from a hose, they have found can be equally as effective as firefighting foam. So that is really good. But it's traditionally been used in firefighting foam. It's really big in the semiconductor industry. There's a lot of PFS very critical to semiconductors and parts within that industry. Pans. Pots and pans, that was one of the early adhesives. Right.
07:43
Ravi Kurani
So we started manufacturing this chemical back in the early 19 hundreds for pots and pans and fire retardants and semiconductors. And then we kind of fast forward today or the 1970s, right, where you said where there was this big bubble up movement of people starting to finally realize, hey, this chemical is carcinogenic. It's not healthy for us. And then you end up to kind of today where the states and the federal government are pushing regulation through the EPA, through the Clean Water Act, through just state governments regulating this both from a water and a soil standpoint. Are we still manufacturing it today? And where does that regulation reach to and from? Are we still using it, manufacturing it in the semiconductor industry? And then the real business model here is somebody like Aclarity that can basically clean the downstream so it doesn't get back into humans or what's kind of the solution where we stand at today, given where we came from, we are.
08:40
Julie Bliss Mullen
Still using it in most industries. As I said, they have found some green alternatives in some industries, although sometimes the alternatives are even more toxic than the ones that they're replacing, which is not great. Can you remind me what was the question? What was the original question?
08:56
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it's kind of like we had this riding this train from the early 19 hundreds of manufacturing it. We figured out there's a problem and now there's states and federal government trying to regulate it. What's the kind of state of PFAS today? Are we still manufacturing it? And if we are, what's the fix? How do we fix this problem? Because we clearly know it is a problem.
09:16
Julie Bliss Mullen
Yeah, right. So that's where I was going. So there are a fair amount of industries who are looking for alternatives and trying to phase it out. Some companies have committed to phasing it out in their products or even on the manufacturing side of actually manufacturing PFAS chemicals. I think that they are so useful in various different industries that they're not ever going to be phased out. And I think that while designing for the environment and really, truly phasing them out and replacing them with greener and better alternatives for humans and for the environment, for animals, et cetera, is great. I do foresee that they're going to be manufactured for quite some time. And I do think that the way to limit exposure is clean the areas where they're wasted, essentially.
10:03
Ravi Kurani
Got it. Yeah, that totally makes sense. Which I guess kind of leads us perfectly into what Aclarity does, given your explanation in the beginning. Right. So you guys focus on landfills right now and other tech providers that are basically cleaning up PFAS. Walk us through how that works. Right. You said where there are large areas of PFAS in a landfill or something, you've seen more prevalence of people that have cancer.
10:29
Julie Bliss Mullen
How does a Aclarity fix this from the landfill standpoint? Actually, I'm getting an echo. Are you getting an echo?
10:36
Ravi Kurani
No, not too much.
10:38
Julie Bliss Mullen
Okay.
10:39
Ravi Kurani
I think we should be able to also clean that out from the post production side of the podcast.
10:44
Julie Bliss Mullen
Okay, that's great. All right, so from the landfill side, when it rains, the rainwater trickles through all that trash, essentially right through the landfill. And then there's something called leachate that comes out. Now, it's pretty nasty, concentrated liquid waste. It looks muddy, it's gross, and it has heavy metals. It has a lot of organics, like solvents and surfactants and lots of just kind of pretty nasty stuff. And a lot of that there's a lot of PFAS that come out, right. That comes out from the landshill. The PFAS is fairly concentrated. I mean, there's a lot of PFAS in there. It's a lot of volume of water that comes out, but it's a lot smaller than, say, New York City is drinking water. We're not talking billions of gallons a day. We're talking tens or 100,000 gallons per day. And what we do is we deploy our equipment.
11:35
Julie Bliss Mullen
The first phases that the first stage of deployment is actually taking our mobile trailers and driving them up, parking them. And inside of a mobile trailer is a full scale system or the full scale reactor that processes this leach aid essentially in a single pass. So we pull it up, we take a hose out, we hook it right up to the storage tanks, and we start pumping the water through. We turn the power on and start pumping the water through, and we destroy the PFAS instantaneously. We typically have a trailer at a customer's site for multiple weeks. Depends on how big the landfill is. How many streams they want us to treat. Parameters that we may change could include the flow rate through the reactors and the electricity. Really, the voltage is what we control. And then we transition to a full scale system. And that's kind of where we are as a company.
12:31
Julie Bliss Mullen
We have these mobile deployments. We are commercializing and just wrapping up the final sector acceptance test, which is so exciting, of our larger permanent system that has eight reactors on the skid. The skid is basically the housing of the reactors. Everything is fully automated. I can sit here on my computer and I can press Start and go and play around with some of the settings or whatnot. So it's really neat. And that's how we destroy PFAS and some other contaminants as well at landfills. And that's the majority of the focus of the company, right? Because from an impact standpoint, almost 50% of PFAS that's in the world ends up in a landfill. So we are trying to go and really destroy PFAS forever, get it out of the cycle. We don't want to go back into the stream, going into the oceans, into the rainwater, to the wastewater treatment plant, just going back into the environment.
13:32
Julie Bliss Mullen
We want to destroy it forever. And we do that permanently at landfills. And when we zoom out, we also have areas of focus, working with some other channel partners and technology providers to build optimal water, treat water, wastewater treatment trains to destroy PFAS in other segments. We'll give you an example. We're working with Denora Water Technologies with a combination of two technologies. It's an ion exchange system which basically captures their little beads, almost like a Brita filter. You can think of it like a Brita filter where PFAS stick onto the beads, and then after they get after all the beads are saturated with PFAS, then what we do is we rinse the beads off. We now have a small volume, still a very large volume, but in general, it's a smaller volume of this liquid waste, has a lot of PFAS, and then run that Brine right through our system, destroy the PFAS, and we have as much time as we need before the next rinse.
14:33
Julie Bliss Mullen
So it's an awesome opportunity to get into markets like municipal drinking water, especially in small groundwater systems. It's just a perfect fit. We're scaling with other partners as well into other industrial sectors and industrial manufacturing, like paper, for example, semiconductor, doing some of the up concentration, if it's not concentrated already, and then doing the destruction on the back end.
14:56
Ravi Kurani
That's super cool. Julie. That's awesome. And when you kind of look at as much as you can share on how your technology works, right, you have this PFAS that's part of the leachate or part of this demora product and the little bubbles that you mentioned, or little beads. What's actually happening in the Aclarity system? Are you creating a sludge or a brine that's like PFAS only and then you're kind of storing that or electrocuting it. What's happening? How do you take the PFAS out of these waste streams?
15:31
Julie Bliss Mullen
Great question. And we essentially zap it, right? Like we electrocute it. You can think of the inside of a reactor as a battery in a way. One side is positive, one side is negative. So they're both electrically charged and the PFAS essentially swim in this water and they stick onto the anode surface. It's the positive side. And we destroy break the carbon fluorine bond, which is the strongest bond known in nature, which is why they call this the forever chemical. In PFAS. They're forever. Chemicals. But we're taking the forever out of forever chemicals, breaking the carbon fluorine bond right at the surface of the anode. And then the rest of the PFAS basically fragments out until it's very basic non hazardous compounds and it just keeps swimming on by once it's broken down. So there are no filters, there's no brine, no concentrate, no reject that's formed, there's no waste in general that we form.
16:22
Julie Bliss Mullen
And we're able to just charge that right out. Another really good thing about this too, I'm just speaking from the technology side and you asked the question so elaborate. We also produce other types of good chemicals, like we call these oxidants, like chlorine and ozone, hydrogen peroxide. So we're disinfecting the water as well. We're removing some other contaminants like ammonia. These are nitrogen compounds. Some other in my world, I call them organic. So they're just organic chemicals that are typically not good to have in water. So we remove a lot of those as well. So while we're degrading PFAS, we're also degrading a lot of other things, which is really very much of an added benefit for customers.
17:04
Ravi Kurani
And if the audience can kind of get an idea of how long this takes right. Can you kind of walk us through what the average landfill size is and how long would it take for you to take all of the landfill and basically convert it via one of your mobile units or one of these now stationary units? How does it work? What is like the timescale that we're.
17:26
Julie Bliss Mullen
Talking about here, though, fortunately and unfortunately, it's forever. It's always going to rain on the landfill and the landfill until it's closed and lined and sealed forever. It will always have even closed landfills have leachate, although small, typically. But every time it rains, it goes through all that trash and now you still have that nasty leachate water. So the average size of a landfill is probably 50,000 gallons per day, which is a decent amount of flow. But it's not unreasonable. Every landfill is different. So I can't really tell you how many skids would be necessary. But it's sort of on the range of ten. It's not crazy. We're not deploying like 100 skids in parallel. It's very manageable to handle the entire flow.
18:18
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, and that makes so much more sense. While you guys are moving to kind of a fuller scale deployment. Because the mobile situation is great, to kind of build a proof of concept, get something out to a landfill ASAP, and then you can go ahead. And because it is a forever issue, every single time it rains, Aclarity basically just lives right next to the landfill.
18:38
Julie Bliss Mullen
We're there permanently. There are some projects, though, that are temporary, in which case we still take our we take our trailer. We have some projects with really neat customers to destroy. Firefighting film. They have lots of firefighting. You'd be surprised. It's not just airports and not just fire academies and whatnot, but there's food and beverage companies who are working with and some others who have big storage tanks. And that's an awesome opportunity for us to take the trailer, park it there, process it all through, and then leave and be done. Right. And now they don't have PFAS to deal with anymore. Yeah, awesome.
19:15
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, that's awesome. That is really cool. I want to kind of go back to your founding story. Why do you care about PFAS? Where did it Aclarity come from? What's the story of Julie starting this company?
19:27
Julie Bliss Mullen
Yeah. So I started learning about PFAS when I was in my undergrad. I went to WPI. It's a technical college in Worcester, Massachusetts, and my first degree is actually in Environmental Policy and Sustainability. I ended up working for or started working for the US. EPA in Boston in 2010 while I was doing my undergrad, and that's how I learned about PFAS. I learned about PFAS at EPA, and back then, they were called PFCs, not PFAS. That was kind of the nomenclature back then. And I was doing a lot of stakeholder engagement on Cape Cod, mostly in New England. Right. So Cape Cod and, you know, some places working on the policy did. I graduated with my degree in Environmental Policy and Sustainability and then stayed on for a little bit more to get a degree in engineering. And then I worked for the US. EPA for a couple of years, and then I decided to go and pursue a PhD, and I got a fellowship to pursue the PhD.
20:29
Julie Bliss Mullen
So I started that in 2014, and I was researching innovative water treatment technologies, and one of the technologies was Electrochemistry, and that is the base technology, really the core technology of Aclarity. I filed the first patent for the company when I was still a student in 2016 and then started taking some business courses. I actually went across campus, took some MBA courses, and definitely had a lot of whispers in my ear that I really had something going on and took first place in the University Pitch Challenge and sent the company out in 2017. So technically didn't finish my PhD, but I did have about three and a half solid years of PhD rigor.
21:09
Ravi Kurani
That's such an inspiring story. And so when you started and you won this pitch competition for the entrepreneurs listening out there, I think it's always exciting to hear kind of those first few steps, how'd you get from zero to one of getting the technology and what lessons do you have? Right? I mean, as entrepreneurs, I think we always stumble and we look back, hindsight 2020, you're like, that's the thing. If I didn't do that, I would have gone so much more quicker or I could have spent less money. Yeah. Two kind of questions there. What was that zero to one journey? And what lessons do you have for the entrepreneurs listening?
21:44
Julie Bliss Mullen
Yeah. So in no particular order, but one is find advocates that you can talk to, talk about your idea, and people who can connect you to especially customers or potential customers at the time. Even if you don't have a prototype, you still should be talking with people who could potentially buy your product or service. So surround yourself with people who will inspire you, who will help you, put you in front of the right people and promote you. And I did that at UMass, especially with their entrepreneurship program. I was very tied in there. I did an accelerator there and did many more accelerators after that. These are programs know really, truly accelerate your company. So that's one. Number two, I touched on this, but really focus on who the customer is and try and find that early product market fit, even if you don't have a prototype.
22:35
Julie Bliss Mullen
And that goes to my number three point, which is especially so I come from the hardware side. Right. But even software, get prototype. Make a prototype, even if it's in duct tape or if it's this most simple code or whatever it is, get a prototype and start testing it. I think that the faster that you can do that, the faster you can show that you have something and you can try and validate it, and you will learn so much going through the process. Or have somebody built it for you. I mean, whether you build it or have somebody else build it for you, or just something super simple. Build it out, test it, show people. I think just doing that and working really hard to gosh, we made a million prototypes. I don't know, I think I have six still. I have one probably in my house.
23:21
Julie Bliss Mullen
I feel like this mad scientist building prototypes. But eventually we had customers pay for us to build prototypes and do testing and whatnot. But it's so important, prove it out. Even the simplest little thing.
23:35
Ravi Kurani
So I guess, tactically speaking, on those two things, one on the customer side and the second on the prototype, what markets were you first looking at? It seems like you guys have kind of zoned initially on this landfill side, but what was the markets you had on your whiteboard, but you ended up not going towards that's question one, and then question two is, I'd love to hear from you. What did that first prototype look like? And also, I think, for the audience, because sometimes we hear that so much. But as an entrepreneur, that's first getting started off, what did that tactically look like?
24:05
Julie Bliss Mullen
I'm laughing at both of those questions. My gosh, starting a company, my head is screwed on a lot tighter. It's really important to go through the whole process and start with extreme naivety. So here we go. My original hypothesis, and I was very hypothesis based, I actually took an entire semester class on hypothesis based customer discovery. And I absolutely recommend that anybody who's even thinking about an idea to commercialize google Steve Blank and take some Le Monch type of classes and call customers and just try and see if you're onto something. So I did that. And my first hypothesis was that people who a home or I guess I had two kind of demographics people who own a home. I was targeting parents and then also builders of new construct, multi unit buildings would be interested in plugging something in terms of a point of entry system where the water comes from the tap to treat tap water, where the water comes in to the building and destroys PFAS.
25:13
Julie Bliss Mullen
And were also doing it for disinfection as well, for bacteria and viruses. I talked to so many people and so many construction workers. I talked to people who dig wells, and I talked to suppliers of pumps and everybody and actually was really onto something and actually worked with a potential channel partner for a couple of years in this space. And they funded a fair amount of our research in the beginning. I ended up doing a pretty deep dive on the economics with this channel partner, watts Water Technologies. I'll say them, they've been amazing. They're awesome. But we did a technology kind of eco sorry, a techno economic analysis, and it's just the margins and selling up through different distributor platforms, it just wasn't going to work out at the time. I do think of something that actually could work in the future, but it's complex.
26:03
Julie Bliss Mullen
And just the margins weren't there. So that's where I started. We pivoted pretty heavily into the industrial sector, focused almost exclusively in PFAS in 2019 and going to 2020, and then I think probably 2020 and on. We've really focused a lot in landfills.
26:22
Ravi Kurani
Got it. And I just want to kind of explore a little bit about what you were saying a second ago. The PFAS side of it came out in 2019, 2020. What were you looking at earlier on? You said kind of other bacterial contaminants. What was the spectrum? And I guess even though you didn't do that yesterday, back in 2019, 2018, it seems like with the Aclarity technology, you have the ability through your basically anode and different materials, getting stuck to that, being able to actually look at other different things.
26:56
Julie Bliss Mullen
It was really hard, and I spent so much time with advisors and myself and my team, well, we can do this and we can do this, and it's so easy to say, we will do it all. And there were definitely times when were really drinking the Koolaid thing and were just going to do it all. But the lack of focus from a technology standpoint, from a go to market standpoint, everything, it just made it very difficult. I was always focused on PFAS, but it was typically PFAS and microbes, bacteria and viruses originally. They were sort of packaged in the same product, is what I was trying to explore. We still degrade very easily. We disinfect, right. We break down bacteria and viruses, but we don't necessarily market that too much, especially in landfill et. They don't really have any guidelines against bacteria and viruses.
27:51
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it makes sense. I guess more of that might come to use more around the drinking water standpoint or potentially like lakes and lagoons, if you were to look at that market. Obviously.
28:01
Julie Bliss Mullen
Absolutely, yes. It is a good benefit, very helpful benefit.
28:05
Ravi Kurani
Two kind of questions I have moving forward is with the work that you're doing, with Aclarity, what does a roadmap look like moving forward? And how does that parlay into the regulatory environment? Because you brought that up at the beginning of, like, the EPA is looking at you also worked at the EPA. Is there anything what's happening there? Right. And how does that kind of roadmap into the future with what Aclarity is doing, tie into that regulation side of things?
28:31
Julie Bliss Mullen
It's a great question. It's super complex. So we've been so focused on the engineering piece and getting equipment that can be field deployed, that's not going to leak, it's not going to cut for big cause of fire. It's like going through this rigor, like real hard rigor with our manufacturer and with our team to get something that's going to work and is going to succeed for long periods of time. So that's been the focus for so long. And don't get me wrong, I'm definitely the historically, I've been the market person, really interested in the market and the go to market strategy. We now have a pretty solid team. I think there's 17 people on the team now, which is super cool. Wow. Yeah, it's awesome. So I have an amazing marketing person and a whole team that just has taken a lot of our original concepts and really brought it to life and brought the rigor around it, which has been really important.
29:27
Julie Bliss Mullen
We're launching our first permanent large scale skid, eight full scale reactors. Maximum flow rate is about 30 gallons per minute in a single pass. Right. Just to destroy PFAS dependent. It definitely depends on the liquid, and it does change, but max is about 30 gallons per minute, and we'll just. Stack. We'll stack them in parallel to handle higher flow rates. Our big goal for this year is to get that skid on site at a customer site. And we actually have a commitment from a customer to put that on site. So we're just in the process of kind of solidifying that and signing the paperwork and getting it on there. But it's permanent. I'll just slide in here too. Our business models is a service model. We've actually trademarked destruction as a service. And we build, owner, and operate and fully staff all of our systems.
30:17
Julie Bliss Mullen
We charge on a cost per gallon and we make it really simple for the customer. We're responsible for all operations and maintenance. We have a performance guarantee. PFAS performance guarantee. So the customer feels comfortable. Right. Something like PFAS destruction is new. No one's really done it before. And so we're trying to take a lot of that risk out from the customer. So anyway, so our big goal for this year is deploying that first skid next year. The goal is to have at least two permanent up and running full scale systems. And we're working with big landfill owners and operators. And the goal is to really work with them as a partner and to scale to all of their landfills to alleviate their PFAS needs and risks.
31:03
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, I actually love that destruction as a service. You're a das provider. I like that. And you guys price per the gallon, which eases the burden. If I was just to think about it, from a capital investment or a capital investment side from the landfill, from them having to procure the capital for the equipment and move it out there, and you guys just say, look, we'll solve your PFAS problem. We're a Das company, we'll just charge you per gallon. That completely makes sense.
31:34
Julie Bliss Mullen
We do it all, which is really great, directly with the landfills and our other customers.
31:41
Ravi Kurani
Sorry, go ahead.
31:42
Julie Bliss Mullen
No, go for it. I thought you had another question and you were just talking about how it relates to regulations. The regulations, yeah. It is so tough. Some of our customers are screaming for a solution right now, in which case we're going on site, doing all the work with them. Some of them are screaming for a solution but aren't going to press the go button until some of the regs are officially coming in. And we do anticipate, everybody anticipates that regs affecting our business. And PFAS really as a whole are going to be coming in throughout 2024, which is in a startup's land. Although we move really fast. It's far away.
32:22
Ravi Kurani
Far away? Yeah, from a startup.
32:23
Julie Bliss Mullen
It's tomorrow. I mean, these are massive equipment installs. We work with really great engineering firms, design firms, to do the whole drawings of what the whole system and even the housing looks like. So they're big projects. So regs coming in 2024 is essentially tomorrow for us. But it's also a little bit scary because the day that the regs come in, we're trying to build up our supply chain, even staff. We just hired our first supply chain person. We're working very closely with our contract manufacturer and trying to make sure we have that plane ready for when that go button hits. We at least have predictable timelines where we can get volumes of these systems out. It's scary, but it's really exciting.
33:14
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, that's super exciting. And you're kind of at this inflection point, both in terms of the ability for your product to work right? Because you have these proof of concepts out there. You've deployed the mobile units and then intersecting right. With regulation coming out in 24, which will just be a forcing function to get more deployments out there. Totally makes yeah. Really exciting time. So we're at almost at time. I have one question that I like to ask all of the guests here at Liquid Assets. Do you have a book or a show or even, like, a Netflix show or a podcast that you listen to that has kind of changed your outlook on the way that you built the business or your life or even Water or PFAS that the audience can grab you?
33:59
Julie Bliss Mullen
Do you think I have a ton of time, Nell, with two young kids and running the business for all these things like I used to. But there are so many good books for founders and just especially founders getting started. I can't even think of the name of the book that I'm trying to reference now. But there are tons of good startup books. I like some of the negotiation books. Those have helped me a lot. I've been listening to the book who. It's all about interviewing because we're doing a ton of interviewing and hiring. That's really helpful. Developing an actual scorecard and a checklist for interviewing and asking these tough questions has been really helpful. So, yeah, maybe not a great answer.
34:46
Ravi Kurani
But definitely the book who. And then I think you mentioned the Lean Startup by Steve Blank earlier.
34:51
Julie Bliss Mullen
Yeah, I did mention the Lean startup.
34:53
Ravi Kurani
Yep. Yeah, those are definitely ping on your I'll put them on your profile when we publish the blog, but definitely julie, thank you so much for coming on Liquid Assets. For all of those of you out there listening, you can find Liquid Assets wherever you get your podcasts, whether it be on Google or on Apple, or you can go to liquidassets.cc. Julie, we've been a pleasure. This has been absolutely amazing. Thanks a ton for coming on the show.
35:17
Julie Bliss Mullen
Really appreciate it. And, yeah, thanks.