Turning Wastewater Into Gold - Catalyzing A Water Reuse Revolution
Ravi Kurani
"Water Recycling is one of the ways to make a difference on the Planet with Every Flush"
As global populations expand rapidly, water demand is projected to exceed supply by over 30% in 20 years. Yet today, just 5% of wastewater is recycled worldwide, representing a massive lost opportunity. In this episode of Liquid Assets, Aaron Tartakovsky explains how his startup Epic Cleantec aims to catalyze a “water reuse revolution” to close this gap.
Sitting with host Ravi Kurani, Aaron highlights the antiquated, centralized approach that has dictated water infrastructure design for over 200 years. With global urbanization accelerating and climate impacts intensifying, he makes the case that we need to transition toward more decentralized, distributed systems. Epic deploys advanced filtration systems to capture and treat wastewater within residential and commercial buildings themselves. Listen in to learn how their localized treatment model allows for onsite water recycling rates upwards of 95% for non-potable reuses.
Beyond water provision, Aaron discusses how Epic’s systems also recover nutrients and energy from wastewater through soil amendments and heat capture. Tune in to hear how smart science communication helps combat public perceptions around water reuse. By taking a systems approach to the built environment, Aaron aims to showcase how we can build resilience into our water systems to ensure adequate supply for all, despite the environmental changes ahead.
What you'll hear in this episode:
- How decentralized water reuse systems can recycle over 95% of water within buildings themselves
- The case for transitioning from antiquated centralized infrastructure to distributed models
- How Epic's filtration process works to capture wastewater onsite and purify it for non-potable reuse
- The unexpected benefits: nutrient & soil recovery and heat recapture from drains
- The role of smart science communication to combat negative public perceptions
- How a water reuse approach builds resilience amidst climate pressures
- Why Aaron entered the industry lacking water expertise but found "naive" optimism to be an asset
- How to embrace imposter syndrome and get comfortable not knowing the answers
- How water infrastructure may transform by 2060 if decentralized systems scale
Listen On:
Watch the interview:
Meet Aaron
Aaron Tartakovsky, unlikely co-founder and CEO of water startup Epic Cleantec. Hailing not from science or engineering but federal politics, Aaron took an unconventional route into the water industry. Yet by embracing an outsider’s curiosity, he was able to ask naive questions and see possibilities where others accepted the infeasible status quo. Rather than allow imposter syndrome to set in, he leveraged the grit and tenacity of his refugee family background to challenge conventions.
Guided by the conviction that we must handle water differently amidst population strains, Aaron forged his trail focused on distributed, decentralized systems that reuse resources rather than dispose of them. At Epic Cleantech, he helps deploy on-site water recycling for buildings while combatting public perceptions against reuse. By taking a systems approach that links buildings to cities to global access and resilience, Aaron paints a vision of how our water infrastructure could be transformed within our lifetimes if we dare to change course. Listen as he makes the case for scaling water reuse through the power of optimism, technology, and communication.
The Book, Movie, or Show
In our quest to discover the literary influences shaping our guests' visions, one title that stands out in Aaron's repertoire is Water 4.0
Water 4.0 by David Sedlak is for anyone fascinated by the marvels of engineering that sustain our everyday life. It delves into the often overlooked, yet critically important world of urban water systems — from ancient Roman aqueducts to modern sewage treatment plants. Sedlak compellingly argues that our future well-being hinges on rethinking our relationship with water, prompted by the challenges these systems face. Through a journey across three revolutionary phases of urban water management, he sheds light on the intricate technologies and innovations that could redefine our water systems. This book is not just for engineers or environmentalists but for anyone interested in ensuring the sustainability of one of our most precious resources: clean, abundant water. It's an essential guide to understanding the past, navigating the present, and shaping the future of urban water systems.
Contains affiliate Amazon links.
Transcript
00:00
Aaron Tartakovsky
All water on this planet is recycled water. You know, the water that we are using today is the same water used millions of years ago by the dinosaurs. So we are literally capturing the wastewater from the building, we're treating it, and then we're actually recycling it back into the building for non drinking uses. It is nasty in people's heads. Scientifically, there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, the water that we're producing is clean enough to drink. The number of people who told me with no hesitation that what were trying to do would never happen or that was technically infeasible. I think I'm lucky that I grew up in a household of refugees and immigrants to this country who know what challenges look like, who have been through a lot of adversity.
00:42
Aaron Tartakovsky
And I think that, honestly, one of my secret weapons is that I'm not easily phased.
00:49
Ravi Kurani
Welcome to another episode of Liquid Assets, where we talk about the intersection of policy, management, and technology as it looks at this most amazing thing, water. Today, we have an awesome guest for you. We have Aaron Tartakovsky from Epic Cleantec.
01:05
Aaron Tartakovsky
My name is Aaron Tartakovsky. I am the co founder and CEO of Epic Cleantec, and we are trying to start a water reuse revolution in real estate.
01:14
Ravi Kurani
Aaron, why don't you just go ahead and kind of tell us what you're working on. Let's go ahead and dive right into what Epic Cleantec does, where you guys are located and what you're working on.
01:23
Aaron Tartakovsky
Absolutely. Well, first of all, good to see you again. It's been a few years, obviously, since you and I last spoke. We're on a panel together, actually, I guess, discussing water, which is no surprise, I'm sure. So, Epic Cleantec, we are a water technology company based in San Francisco, and we are deploying water recycling systems into real estate. And so what we're really talking about is large residential buildings, commercial buildings, office buildings, industrial data centers. Any building that is using a lot of water, those are places where we can help. So we are literally capturing the wastewater from the building. And that could be gray water, which is from showers, laundry, bathroom sinks. It can be black water, which includes toilet water, kitchen sinks and dishwashers, rainwater, stormwater, taking all of that water that you would typically send off into the sewer.
02:15
Aaron Tartakovsky
We're treating it, and then we're actually recycling it back into the building for non drinking uses. So think irrigation, cooling, laundry, toilet flushing. By doing this, we can actually help a lot of these buildings to recycle up to 95% of their water. And so framed differently, by bringing us in, these buildings are now pulling in 95% less pristine drinking water from the city supply and instead are reusing that water right on site, right at the source.
02:45
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. That's super great, because I actually had somebody in earlier that was just talking about quantity of water that we have available with, like groundwater, with surface water. So this is actually a perfect kind of dovetail into that I want to kind of go into really quickly. You've said this at the very beginning. Who are the largest users of water? Right? You guys are in the built environment. Where are you guys targeting? You had said data centers, the large commercial. Do you have kind of a pareto of like, these are the five bullet points. These are the five organizations, building types, business types that we basically target.
03:20
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah. Well, as we know, single biggest user is going to be ag. Ag is going to be going to dwarf everyone else. But there's a big mix because you can have a massive food and beverage facility that's using a lot of water in a smaller building. So really it's going to depend on the size of the building. But I will say, typically we do see that something like a cooling tower is oftentimes the single biggest user of water in a real estate project. And so that can be a facility, a food facility that has cooling needs. It can be just a large office building in a hot place that has a large cooling tower, or it can be, as I mentioned, data centers use a huge amount of water to actually cool this critical infrastructure.
04:06
Aaron Tartakovsky
The average data center uses about the same amount of water as 50,000 persons. Wow. And as we know, the world is increasingly data hungry. All of this technology, even this platform that we're using right now, requires data. It's stored in the cloud. That all requires data centers. Data centers are being built at an extremely fast clip. And oftentimes we're building data centers in places that have water scarcity issues, like here in the western United States. So there's a pretty wide definition in terms of who are the biggest water users. But I think that the number I often reference is that buildings globally use about 14% of all of our potable water. Almost no buildings reuse that water. That's the central problem that we're trying to tackle as a company.
04:54
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. And I've heard this question a few times of, like, black water and gray water. Recycling is nasty, right? You said earlier we're not using it for drinking water. But even in your laundry, how does the filtering and cleaning process work for the folks that have that question of is it nasty to take the water from my toilet, recycle it and then use it for my.
05:14
Aaron Tartakovsky
It is nasty in people's heads. Scientifically, there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, the water that we're producing, we're only reusing it for non potable applications just by regulation. But scientifically, this water that we produce is clean enough to drink. In fact, and we can talk more about this, we actually produced a beer from the treated gray water from one of our buildings. We took about 2000 gallons of treated water from a 40 story high rise in downtown San Francisco. This is water from showers, laundry, from bathroom sinks, put it through our purification process, tested it, and once were able to show that this is exceptionally clean drinking quality water, we part of a local brewery. We made this beer. That beer, much to our surprise, went kind of viral.
06:04
Aaron Tartakovsky
I mean, to date, it's clocked about 1.5 billion media impressions just in the last eight months. Now, unfortunately, we are not selling that beer. So there was maybe an opportunity lost there. But look, we're certainly not strangers to the fact that people are uncomfortable with the concept of recycled water. They think that it is lesser, that it is unclean. And I think it's really a perception issue. It's completely a mental perception issue if what we call in the industry the yuck factor. But as I often tell people, all water on this planet is recycled water. The water that we are using today is the same water used millions of years ago by the dinosaurs. It's how I explain this whole world to my nieces as well. But it's those kinds of basic concepts that are increasingly important to convey to folks.
06:57
Aaron Tartakovsky
Because I think I'd like to point out that we trust science and technology to fly our planes, to produce the life saving medications and equipment that we use every mean here in San Francisco to guide the driverless vehicles that are increasingly taking over our roads. I think it's time that we start getting more comfortable with that same level of science and technology being able to produce clean water. But all that being said, I understand that we have to meet people where they are. And frankly, that's a big part of what we do as a company is beyond just the technology is really on the communication front, trying to convey these complex topics into much more easy to understand ways.
07:40
Ravi Kurani
So let's actually double click into that then. From a communication standpoint, what have you found that worked? From a messaging standpoint? I think that's super interesting from a storytelling perspective. And it's brought up a ton, actually, on this podcast that people just all the way from water quality to water quantity, they just don't understand. They don't have their fingers on the pulse. And so a lot of it does break down into communications and messaging. What does that look like from an epic, clean tech perspective?
08:03
Aaron Tartakovsky
How many hours do we have for this?
08:04
Ravi Kurani
Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Maybe we bring this up into a ten hour segment. Yeah. What would you say? What's the summary there?
08:12
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah, look, I'm going to use myself as an example. I entered into the water industry nine years ago, and I previously worked in federal politics. Like the average person, I went about living my life without really ever having to think about water. And again, I'm going to caveat that with saying that this is very much a privilege living in the United States thing to say, because around the world, not everyone lives that same. You know, we live in a plush and friggin society. We have designed our infrastructure to be effectively invisible. We buried under our streets. We put facilities away from population centers. It is very literally out of sight, out of mind, and it's a marvel of modern engineering. Our systems have historically been designed so well that we don't have to think about these things.
08:59
Aaron Tartakovsky
Now, unfortunately, as we know, a lot of this infrastructure was installed 30 to 100 years ago. It needs to be upgraded, it needs to be repaired, needs to be maintained. And that's kind of what we're at this kind of coming to a head right now where all of this infrastructure needs to be fixed. So, kind of coming back to me, coming into this industry, not a topic I really felt a lot about. And once I got deeper into it and I started hearing about the price tag to overhaul all of our water and wastewater infrastructure, the urban population growth that we're grappling with, climate change, basically adding a lot of extremes to all of this conversation, I was pretty surprised and honestly, a little bit embarrassed about how little I knew about it.
09:42
Aaron Tartakovsky
And so I think the way we've approached this as a company is kind of putting ourselves in the shoes of people for whom this is not a topic that they're very familiar with. And again, I think something that's unique about us is that a lot of water technologies, not all, but a lot, sell to municipal utilities. You are selling to a very educated buyer who knows all the acronyms, who knows the industry jargon. We are working with extremely sophisticated building owners and developers and architects and engineers, but they, like general public, have designed their buildings for centuries that we pull water in and we send wastewater out.
10:21
Aaron Tartakovsky
So all of a sudden, when we come in and say, hey, we want to recycle wastewater in your building and put it back up in your pipes, that understandably touches on that yuck factor that we talked about earlier. And so I think everything that we do as a company is just really speaking simply, not using a lot of jargon. And I think there's a lot of interesting science just in terms of the words that you use. Rather than calling it reclaimed water, calling it purified water. Again, exact same thing. But just that little change makes people a lot more comfortable with it. And so I think, again, this is like a whole nother area that we as a company are really fascinated by is the science communication, the science of language to get people comfortable with a topic like water.
11:07
Ravi Kurani
Do you have any more tactical examples on kind of things you've changed? I think that's an amazing example of turning reclaimed into purified. Anything else that comes to kind of top of mind of like, that's a really interesting language change if you just take this one word or a phrase and turn into something else.
11:24
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah, I mean, I think even all the terminology for the various types of building wastewater, we have stormwater, rainwater, gray water, blackwater, AC condensate, foundation, drainage. Again, building folks are more familiar with it. But even still, the amount of times that we deal with people who use gray water, black water, reclaimed water, recycled water, interchangeably, I think is an indication that we need to maybe rethink the terminology a bit. And so oftentimes, we won't even kind of break the data according to those different categories. We'll just say it's all water or it's used water, and then it's the highly purified recycled water. Those types of little changes are really helpful. Or sometimes, rather than even saying gray water, we'll say, this is water from your showers and your laundry. Again, very simple. It cuts right to it.
12:24
Aaron Tartakovsky
It doesn't force people to have to figure out, like, wait, which category is that? Does that fit in here? Does that fit in there? And so there's a lot of different examples like that. I mean, honestly, going even beyond water, one of the things we do as a company is we also produce high quality soil amendments. So we're actually taking the organics out of the wastewater and then turning that into soil products. The industry term for that is biosolid, which is for treated sludge. Again, I think that term is in big need of a rebrand because biosolid doesn't necessarily sound super friendly. So we just say things like upcycled wastewater organics or even organic soil products made from wastewater. Again, just a lot easier for people to understand and meeting them where they're at.
13:10
Aaron Tartakovsky
And I can keep going down the list, but I feel like your listeners are probably tired of me talking about all the fun terms we get to deal with on a daily basis.
13:18
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, no, that's just super interesting examples. I really love that. And there's examples across industries. I've been getting really deep into copywriting, actually, and read the book called the copywriter's manual from, like, 1940s when they did all those magazine ads. Right. They were sending those out in the mailers, and Sugarman, I think, was the guy's name. It's so interesting to see kind of how if you're captivating enough and you speak people's language in the right way and you're solving a core problem.
13:51
Aaron Tartakovsky
You.
13:51
Ravi Kurani
Can sell what you're trying to sell 100%. Yeah, I want to take a quick left turn into something you said earlier. You came from the federal government. You went into water. Let's go back all the way. Let's kind of, like, rewind to the beginning. If you're sitting as Aaron, CEO of Epileptech, and looking back to kind of your. Let's go back to when you were first raised. Is there a particular moment in time that if you look back now as a through line, you're like, hey, this is like the one moment that I started caring about water or this particular thing now impacted or affected the way that I look at the world. Is there anything. Walk us through that storyline. I think it's always interesting hearing how founders got to where they are.
14:30
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah, well, when you started going into the line of questioning, my mother is a psychologist, and I thought were going to be like, let's talk about your mother. She would love that. But, yeah, look, my story, my journey into water is not a straight line at think. You know, when I was little, I wanted to be a veterinarian, so I always had sort of an environmental bend to me. So I used to read books by Jane Goodall was obsessed with Steve Irwin. I wrote a letter to Jane Goodall, actually, when I was young. She never wrote back. My friend, it was an assignment we had to write to one of our heroes. My friend wrote to Wolfgang Puck, and Wolfgang Puck sent some chocolates to him. That's cool. I was like, man, maybe I shouldn't have written to Jane Goodall.
15:16
Aaron Tartakovsky
Should have written to a chef. So veterinarian, then. I actually did want to become a chef. So that was something I was fixated on all through high school. I briefly flirted with becoming a rabbi. I studied history and religious studies. Then I kind of decided I wanted to go into politics. And so my college career was spent making sure that no one ever got a photo of me holding a beer, because I thought that would derail my future political ambitions. And then I did work in federal politics. And the genesis of epic actually started with two of my co founders out of Israel. And they were working with the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation to design. Know there's several billion people around the world don't have access to clean water, reliable sanitation.
16:06
Aaron Tartakovsky
And the Gates foundation challenge was basically designed around this idea that can we do for water wastewater what cell phones did through telecommunications, which is to say telecom, we develop poles and wires. That's how we communicated. Then we eventually went to cell phones, and then many parts of the world were able to skip over that pole and wire phase and go directly to the decentralized forms of telecommunication. Can we do that with water wastewater? So my co founders were designing toilets for the Gates foundation. They were presenting at a conference in California, where in the audience that day was my third co founder, Igor. So, Igor, for full disclosure, is also my father. And my father was trained in the Soviet Union in the aerospace program.
16:49
Aaron Tartakovsky
And he came to this country, moved into the building sciences, and for the last 40 years, been designing high performance buildings. He saw these israeli entrepreneurs wowing the audience with their toilet innovations and said, I wonder if we can scale that up into a building. At that point, I was brought in. I left federal politics to be the middleman between my father's engineering company and this israeli scientific company. And my job was just to figure out if there was a there for what were trying to do. And this is at the end of 2014. And so being new to water, having no technical or engineering background, actually probably pretty horrible engineer. I just spent all my time talking to anyone and everyone who had even a tangential connection to what it is that were trying to do. I spoke to academics.
17:33
Aaron Tartakovsky
I would go to conferences. I mean, I went to farmers markets and would stop by these stalls and ask them, hey, would you use recycled wastewater organics on your crops? And after talking to so many different people, what I started to realize was that not only was what were trying to develop not a bad idea, but in many ways, the industry was moving this way. When you sort of look at the magnitude of the problem, aging infrastructure, urban population growth, the fact that the rate in which we're adding new buildings to our global building stock is like building another New York city every single month now until 2060. We just have to do things differently when it comes to water, wastewater. And so I think my story, as you can see, is a little bit all over the place.
18:18
Aaron Tartakovsky
But I think the fact that I didn't know, what I didn't know is actually part of, I think, our secret sauce as a company. All four of our co founders came from outside of the water sector, and I think were just naive enough to think that we could enter this industry. And it's obviously been a journey. We've been doing this for a while, and we're really starting to get a lot of exciting traction in the last three years, but it was a journey. So I think my background, hopefully, is testament to the fact that there's a lot of backgrounds that qualify someone to come into the water industry. And actually, sometimes being unqualified is the best advantage.
18:54
Ravi Kurani
That's such an inspiring story. I mean, there's so many elements there that are awesome, right? From your mom being a psychologist to your dad being a building engineer, all the way to you not really knowing anything around engineering or water, and then being able to kind of ask those quote unquote dumb questions, right? You don't know what you don't know, and you're figuring that out, which just makes so much sense in actually building out a model that does solve a core problem, because through you exploring this map, you're able to basically find what that solution was.
19:30
Aaron Tartakovsky
That's awesome, man.
19:31
Ravi Kurani
That's really cool.
19:34
Aaron Tartakovsky
It's been an adventure, for sure. And I think it's one of those things where when I was younger, the whole notion of going into business. You're in college, I had all the friends who were really good at math and science, and they're studying econ and finance, and they're the ones who are going to go to Wall street. And I'm like, oh, those are the kids who go to business. I'm going to go to the humanities. I'm going to be a rabbi or politics or this and that. It was only until I got a little bit older that I realized how flawed that thinking was. Know, being a generalist, being someone who's just curious, is honestly sometimes the single best background to get into business. I think you use the word curious. I think that is definitely something I pride myself on.
20:16
Ravi Kurani
Imposter syndrome comes to mind. We've had that conversation a lot in the founder community and even in Silicon Valley, as you probably know, in not being an engineer, not understanding anything in water, when you first kind of entered, how did you combat that? And you said this before, right? That there is room for other founders, for other people to come in and actually explore the water space. For those of you out there listening, and you do have imposter syndrome, or you don't know enough about water, you're not an engineer. How did that feel, Aaron? And what did you do to kind of combat that?
20:46
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah, I mean, I think it's definitely something I felt a lot, especially in the early days, because I'm going to conferences and I'm in rooms with people, and there's a lot of terms being thrown around that I've never heard of. You get around a bunch of technical folks and they start talking about Bod and TSS and cod, it's inevitable that you're going to feel out of your element there. And again, I had people point blank the number of people who told me with no hesitation that what were trying to do would never happen, or that was technically infeasible or the regulations would prevent it. Again, I think I'm lucky that I grew up in a household of refugees and immigrants to this country who know what challenges look like, who have been through a lot of adversity.
21:39
Aaron Tartakovsky
And I think that, honestly, is part of one of my secret weapons is that I'm not easily phased. I'm very mission driven. But I'd say for anyone who is feeling that, I think embrace it. It's important to recognize that you don't know what you don't know, but also to not necessarily take everything at face value. So I think I have a lot of stories about the early days, going into pitch meetings with utilities and using all the wrong terminology and being corrected mid presentation. That's not what that means. That's not what that means. That chart is totally off. But I think almost a decade later, I can confidently say I know a lot more terms now than I did ten years ago. And I think that's the goal.
22:24
Aaron Tartakovsky
As long as we're always making progress and learning and embracing that journey, then it's all fun.
22:31
Ravi Kurani
Yeah. Let's jump into kind of how the Epic Cleantec product works. Walk us through the customer journey from a to b or a to z. Right. You're talking to a data center. You go in there and you probably talk to the facilities manager. Literally walk us through kind of how does it work? What gets installed and what does it also look like? Where do you tie it into the input water line? How do you feed the water back in and then what happens after?
22:57
Aaron Tartakovsky
No, it's a great question. I think that the easiest way to think about what we're doing is that every community, every state has municipal wastewater treatment facilities. Either places that collect all the wastewater from a community are treating it to an acceptable standard, and that water is either reused or it's discharged, nature discharged to the ocean. We're taking a lot of those same principles, those same technologies, and we're basically shrinking them down into a system design and footprint that is designed for buildings. So what the technology looks like is the core piece of the technology, the engine of the system. It's about 8ft tall, 6ft wide. I mean, it basically looks like a large appliance. Our new system is the epic one water system, which you can look up, and as you'll see, it's a very sleek piece of technology.
23:50
Aaron Tartakovsky
I think we're trying to kind of create, like, the iPod of water reuse systems. You're not going to see all the pumps and valves and everything. It's just very clean looking. And that was all by design. Again, a customer who was unfamiliar and uncomfortable with wastewater. So we wanted to make it a little less scary. And so it's just a very sexy looking piece of technology. What we're doing is we're actually tapping into the building's plumbing. So all of those pipes that are collecting the wastewater from your showers, your laundry, your sinks, your toilets, that is normally routed out to the sewer, all we're doing is putting in a three way valve that wastewater is then diverted into the system, and then it's just passing through a series of treatment steps. We're using biological treatment. We're using membranes. These membranes, it's a physical barrier.
24:34
Aaron Tartakovsky
So the water passes through and all the impurities are pulled out and little holes that are one 1000 the diameter of a human hair. The water is cycling through biological treatment, it's going through physical membranes. And then once the water is actually very highly treated, at that point, we then disinfect it and we use things like ultraviolet light, like chlorine in some cases, depending on the application, we even put the water through carbon filters or reverse osmosis. Really, it's just about tailoring the water to what the end use is going to be. And then that water is recycled back up into the building using purple pipes. And for those who don't know, purple pipes is basically the international symbol for recycled water.
25:15
Aaron Tartakovsky
So if you're walking in the park or you ever see a purple pipe somewhere, that means it is recycled or reclaimed water. But the water that's ending up in people's toilets or going into their laundry or going out to the lawn, you would never know where that water originated from. It's going to look, smell, and taste just like your normal tap water. So that's kind of the core technology. I think what's unique about what we do is that we actually produce three outputs from the building water. One, as I mentioned, is recycled water, and that's kind of the main driver of the business. The second one, as I mentioned before, is soil amendments.
25:53
Aaron Tartakovsky
So, actually taking the organics out of the water, putting it through a process we developed with the gates foundation, and turning it into this amazing soil, this carbon rich soil products, we're actually taking all this carbon and putting it right back in the ground where it belongs. And then the third piece is wastewater heat recovery. And really what that means is buildings use a huge amount of energy to heat water up for showers, laundry, dishwashers, all that heat, that energy, we typically send back off into the sewer. So if you're walking on the street on a cold day and you see steam coming up through the grates, that's just energy. That's just heat that we're losing. And by our calculations, were we to recapture all of that wastewater heat in this country, we could power every single electric vehicle on the road.
26:31
Aaron Tartakovsky
So I think to synthesize what we're doing, we are big believers that there is no waste in wastewater, but we're taking this building wastewater and turning it into just these commodities. Clean water, renewable energy, soil amendments, and we're doing it all in a pretty compact little package. But that's the basics of how it works. And again, a lot of this stuff is still going to be unfamiliar. The treatment process and the terminology is unfamiliar to all people. But the simplest explanation is we're taking this dirty water, we're using science technology to turn it into pristine, clean water.
27:10
Ravi Kurani
That's super cool. I have actually a few questions, and I want to unpack the three outputs that you have, which are super interesting. The first around the clean water, the purple pipes going back into the recycled water, or what did you call it earlier, the purified water. First question is, do you have to change out these membranes? Is there, like, from a business model perspective, is there a bit of a subscription service or some sort of a service angle that you have on making sure that you called it the epic one is actually epic one water.
27:42
Aaron Tartakovsky
Epic one water.
27:43
Ravi Kurani
One water is maintained and managed. How does that work?
27:47
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah, no, it's a great question. So all of these systems, generally, by regulation, are going to require that you have certified water wastewater operator who is responsible for the system. It doesn't mean that they're in there every day and that they have to be in there every week, but it's basically there on the wall that's responsible for the ongoing operations and maintenance. And again, the reason for that is that even though the technologies aren't that complex, there is a special set of education that you need when dealing with wastewater, because you're dealing with biology, you're dealing with chemistry. It's slightly more complex than some other building systems. So the way our business model works is that there's sort of three tranches. I mean, I think one is, when we're brought into a project, this is not an off the shelf item.
28:36
Aaron Tartakovsky
So there has to be some degree of integration with the architects, the engineers, the contractors. So sort of there's a bit of a design consulting sort of engagement, and sometimes that's packaged in with the actual sale of the system. But we're providing that support, helping design the system. We then provide the actual technology. And then the third piece, which is kind of on the service side, is that we actually have water wastewater operators on our team that operate these systems into perpetuity. So that's convenient or a multi year contract. And we are responsible for making sure that the system is working as intended. It's producing pristine water, and that all of the different regulatory requirements are being checked. And again, you don't have to work with us for that. You can go out and hire own operators.
29:26
Aaron Tartakovsky
But what we've found, and again, this is a theme you'll hear me kind of talk about a lot. But water and wastewater, given that it's relatively new territory for a lot of folks, it can be daunting. And so what we are doing is kind of simplifying the entire water use approach. And that's why we built this one stop shop approach as a company where we can literally help with everything from the initial concept and exploration phase. Does this work for my project all the way to we're going to run this system for the next ten years. And what that ensures is that there's just one responsible party making sure that these systems are delivered and operated correctly. And so that's kind of the business model for us. You asked about the membranes. The membranes themselves need to be replaced maybe once every 710 years.
30:13
Ravi Kurani
Okay?
30:13
Aaron Tartakovsky
They're not a high ticket item. They're very robust. And again, building wastewater compared to a lot of industry compared to a dairy or oil production or meat processing. Our wastewater is a lot simpler. And so I think for these membranes, it's like swimming in the shallow end versus some of the tougher to deal with wastewaters.
30:37
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, it makes sense. Let's move to the second output you had mentioned is nutrients for kind of agriculture for the plants that you have. I kind of envision after you're finished drinking a keurig or a coffee filter, like the coffee comes out in this little bucket. Do you just pull this thing out and you can dump it in your garden? Do you guys go and pick it up? Does it automatically get pushed out to what does water, the kind of gardening, how does that part of it work?
31:05
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah, no, it's excellent question again, we don't do the soil recovery in every single project. We only do that on what are called blackwater projects, where we have a lot of organics, when we're actually tapping into toilets and kitchen sinks and dishwashers, anywhere where you have a higher organic content, but it's literally a piece of equipment, takes about one parking spot. And really what it is just a fancy filter. So we are literally pulling the solids, we're sifting them out of the water. We are compressing them, and then they are put in special odor patrol containers that we, as a company, we come pick up. So we will actually come to these buildings. We will collect a full bin and swap it in for an empty one.
31:49
Aaron Tartakovsky
I mean, very similar to folks who are going to come pick up your trash, your recycling, your compost. We are bringing these solids to our own Epic Cleantec facilities or maybe sometimes partnering with an existing composting facility. And we are doing our magic. I mean, we are basically taking these solids. It could be coming from five different buildings. We process it together, and then the output is this, again, super carbon rich soil material that we can do a lot of different things with. It can go into parks, it can go into gardens. And some of the projects we work on, they have a lot of landscaping on the project. We can actually use their own products, the soil produced from their own wastewater right on site.
32:32
Aaron Tartakovsky
And then we have some really exciting ideas for some direct to consumer products where you could have a potted plant in your home that was made from upcycled wastewater organics. But again, part of us simplifying everything for our customers is that we handle all of that, because, candidly, a lot of these buildings, you have a nice high rise apartment building. They don't necessarily also want a fertilizer factory in their basement. So we take that off site.
33:03
Ravi Kurani
Yeah, that's super interesting. Let's go to the third part, which is the wastewater. Sorry, the waste heat reclamation. And it's so funny, I had never even thought of the fact that you're taking a warm shower, you're washing a dishwasher, and all that hot water just goes down the drain. What does that look like in terms of capturing that? You just have, like, a heat pump that captures that water and then turns a turbine to put energy back in a battery, or what does that energy reclamation or recapturing the heat actually look like?
33:35
Aaron Tartakovsky
So we are using heat exchangers, and again, I talked about it a little bit, but all of this energy that we're using to heat water up, it sometimes makes up a pretty good percentage of the building's overall energy usage. And what we found is we're collecting these, we're collecting this wastewater, this heated wastewater in our tanks. That water is coming in at 80 degrees. Let's say what we're doing is we're taking that 80 degrees, we're using heat exchangers, and we're just transferring that energy to the city water. So again, we're still bringing in drinking water from the city for all of these different, what are called potable applications. That's going to be everything from your kitchen sinks, your showers, anywhere where you're going to have direct kind of contact with the water, you're still bringing in city water.
34:26
Aaron Tartakovsky
So let's say you're going to take a shower, you turn on the shower, that's pulling in that city water. That city water is generally about 55 degrees. What we're doing is basically saying, okay, let's just take the heat from this wastewater that's going to coming into our tanks anyways. We'll use heat exchangers to just preheat that city water and that cold city water coming in. And just by preheating the water a few degrees, we can produce huge energy savings in the building's hot water energy needs. In some projects we're looking at, we're able to reduce their hot water energy needs by upwards of 35%, which represents a few percentage points of the building's entire energy footprint.
35:03
Aaron Tartakovsky
And if you're talking about a big building, I mean, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars on utility savings every single year just by basically repurposing the heat that they're already producing.
35:17
Ravi Kurani
Let's combine that figure. You said 30% heat decrease in the building. Putting all this together, what kind of savings do you have? From a water standpoint, I think you had mentioned 95% at the beginning of the call.
35:30
Aaron Tartakovsky
Yeah, it can be up to 95%. Again, some buildings it'll be 30. Some buildings it'll be 90. There's a big range. But I think generally what we're trying to do is produce an ROI for our projects of just a few years, meaning you invest that upfront capital into bringing us in after a few years. If you compare that to, if you had just done a conventional setup where you're just pulling water in and sending wastewater out, it's going to pay for itself relatively quickly. And our goal is under seven years. But in some cases, it's even faster.
36:03
Aaron Tartakovsky
We have some projects where it's going to pay for itself on year one, and partly because every one of these large projects, especially if they're new construction, beyond actually building the building and getting it up and running, every single project is paying what are called impact fees, and those are water connection fees, sewer connection fees. And basically what the utility is doing is saying, we have this infrastructure we've already built. You're going to be drawing a million gallons a year and then sending x amount of gallons into our sewer system. So we're going to charge you this amount of dollars to be able to accommodate this added capacity.
36:45
Aaron Tartakovsky
What we're able to do is come in with these buildings and say, well, actually, we're going to be using 50% less water and setting 50% less wastewater by recycling our water on site, and then we get corresponding reductions in those impact fees. So not only are we saving the money up, but we're also saving them on an ongoing basis, because, again, your monthly water and sewer bills, they're going to be reduced. You're using less water and you're sending less wastewater into the sewer. So I think you can kind of point to a lot of different places where we're able to reduce that cost.
37:13
Aaron Tartakovsky
And then, of course, the other piece is helping them to achieve their sustainability certifications, getting them lead points, whatever the metric is that they're using, we can generally help them get pretty far along in really demonstrating that they're doing more than most buildings when it comes to their sustainability credentials.
37:32
Ravi Kurani
I want to pull on something you said earlier when you were going through your founder story. You had said that the technology was initially conceived while your other two co founders were at the Gates foundation, and this word decentralization popped up, right? They were trying to do what they did for toilets. What you saw with cell phones being able to leapfrog development, if you were to kind of look at vision, right? I think you said earlier that a New York City is built every single month up until the year 2060. If I'm correct, what does your worldview look like with Epic Cleantec? What are you guys trying to do? If you just were to fast forward come 2060, what's the optimistic worldview of Aaron in his mind, of kind of what the world looks like?
38:18
Aaron Tartakovsky
It's a great question. That's like a question from my psychologist. Mom, what does Aaron look like in 2060? Yeah, look, I think one of our goals as a company is to get us closer to a reality where communities everywhere have access to clean water, reliable sanitation. What we know is that the way we've designed our cities for the last 250 years, when it comes to water and wastewater, which is largely based on the centralized paradigm, which is to say all buildings and homes are connected to a central network, but it's connected to a centric facility, that approach is just not going to scale with the rate at which our population is growing, at which industry is growing. So we need to do things differently.
39:03
Aaron Tartakovsky
So our goal is to do for the water and wastewater industry, I mean, we use the analogy of telecom, but I think another example is energy. I think for a long time, our energy was again focused on the centralized model of coal plants or nuclear plants or hydro plants at the centralized level that are creating energy and sending it out to a big grid. But then about 20 years ago, we really started transitioning to a more distributed model, where we had rooftop solar, we had wind farms, we had hydro, all of these different approaches, which were not a replacement of centralized infrastructure, but basically allowed us to diversify our energy supply portfolio.
39:39
Aaron Tartakovsky
So we had decentralized and centralized working together, which not only increased our capacity, allowed us to do it faster, and it gave us more resilience when we have shocks to the system and we're seeing more of those shocks in the form of fires and insane winter storms, all of the different things that we see on the news all the time. So I think our goal is to help transition the water industry. Kind of have them. We want to help accelerate water's solar movement, do for the water industry what solar did for energy. And we think that's going to allow us to accelerate more communities around the world having access to clean water and sanitation.
40:21
Aaron Tartakovsky
And I think my goal is to make a very significant dent into the tragic figure about the amount of people who don't have access to clean water and sanitation around the world. And honestly, when I look at the contributions we want to make as a company. I don't necessarily think we are the only ones who are going to be out there doing this, but if we can help catalyze that movement, what we like to call the water reuse revolution here at epic, if we can get cities to kind of rethink how they are designed and to say, oh, look, San Francisco, they have dozens of projects that are recycling their own water, and that makes that city stronger and more resilient to shocks, that would be a huge success for me.
41:07
Aaron Tartakovsky
And I think that's what we are in the early stages of doing here at the company. But I think even in our young tenure, we've done a pretty good job.
41:16
Ravi Kurani
Inspiring. That's awesome. The last question I ask all of our guests, do you have a particular book or movie or tv show that has given you the overview effect, changed your way, that you look at the world, or it could be related to water?
41:35
Aaron Tartakovsky
Well, I mentioned at the outset that I wanted to become a rabbi. So I get, should I say the Torah?
41:40
Ravi Kurani
You could totally.
41:41
Aaron Tartakovsky
No, a. That is an important book in my life. That's a good question because I bounce around a lot when I'm reading different things, but I think I'll be kind of boring and go to a water industry book. But a book that I really like is called water 4.0. It is by Professor David Sedlak from UC Berkeley. And what I really like about the book is it gives a very good overview of the history of our water and wastewater infrastructure. It talks about water 1.0. When we started to transport water, there was sort of the beginning of centralized infrastructure. Water 2.0 is when we actually started treating some of that wastewater. Water 3.0 is when we actually started drinking and treating the drinking water and then putting in even more of the centralized destruction.
42:35
Aaron Tartakovsky
And water 4.0 is the moment that we're in now where we are revisiting the entire paradigm. We are doing things like moving from a solely centralized model to a decentralized model. We are doing things like creating new sources of water, whether that's atmospheric water generation, whether that's desalination, whether that's new forms of water purification, where we're taking what is called sewage and turning it into drinking water. But then another piece I know this is a piece you're really familiar with, is the whole notion of smart water, of taking all of this technology that we have available to us today in terms of software, and applying that to what has traditionally been a pretty antiquated industry.
43:17
Aaron Tartakovsky
I think I heard the term years ago at a conference that the water industry is still run by the clipboard army, which is to say, folks who are going and looking at a water meter, writing it down on a piece of paper, taking that back to an office and manually inputting that into a computer. We have smart devices that you can clip onto a meter now. We have smart devices that can integrate all of the different sensors and give us real time knowledge as to what water quality is against something you are very familiar with. So taking all of this technology that is worse seems sweeping the rest of the world and bringing that to the water industry. So that was a very long answer to a simple question.
43:51
Aaron Tartakovsky
But water 4.0 is a book that really helped me when I entered the industry, and it's actually a book that every single new person who joins our team is given on their first day.
44:01
Ravi Kurani
Awesome. I'll definitely put that on your profile when we launch this episode live. Aaron, thanks a ton for coming on liquid assets. I'm for all of you, those, for all of those of you out there, you can find us wherever you listen to your podcast, whether that be Spotify, Google or apple. Aaron, thanks again.