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Biolytix

Breakthrough:
The Biolytix wastewater treatment system uses nature to convert raw sewage, food waste, and dirty water into high quality irrigation water. It has completely overturned 150 years of waste water treatment.

Inventor:
Dean Cameron, Australia

Financial reward:
$25 million +

The Story:
Biolytix

For more than 10 years Dean Cameron has been poking his nose into the kinds of places that would make most people shudder – cow pats and rotting animal carcasses. But it’s all been for a good reason as this passionate ecologist has invented a compact waste treatment that can turn raw sewage, wastewater and food waste into high quality irrigation water.

The Biolytix system (which operates on-site and comprises of one tank) is a major advance on conventional systems that are inefficient, need regular and expensive treatment with chemicals and can emit foul odors. They are water- based and mechanically driven systems. Water is not oxygen rich and so large and expensive aerators have to pump oxygen into the water for the organisms.

Mother Nature Knows Best

Cameron was convinced that there must be a better way and so he turned his attention to one of the best problem solvers in the business – Mother Nature. He looked at forest litter decomposition and discovered that the fastest and most efficient decomposition did not occur in rivers, which is what sewage engineers were trying to copy, but in the soil of the river bank. This was no random discovery as water treatment is something of a hobby, even an obsession of Cameron’s - an overhang of his university days. In fact his first date with his partner was to Fraser Island to study the indigenous worm species in the crusts of septic tanks.

The idea that colonized his mind and led to the development of Biolytix started with a home experiment. He was trying to produce methane from household waste but found that the attempt to keep the system aerobic in a drained bed failed, and he ended up with a load of uninvited organisms living in there. He wondered what would happen if he deliberately introduced forest soil organisms into the mix. He expected that they would breakdown and structure the waste. He was right – they did. At the same time he was also studying cow pat and dead animal decomposition, as part of a broader interest in how things break down.

Nature in a Pot

The Biolytix Filter is essentially nature in a pot as Cameron has engineered the riverbank habitat inside his innovation. The top layer mimics the wet soil ecosystem and is made up of course mesh bags containing plastic media and coco peat. Instead of leaving the solid waste in the water as other systems do, it pulls the debris immediately out leaving it exposed and ready for the diverse range of macro-organisms such as earthworms, beetles, and mites to eat up. They don’t just break it down they structure it too by converting it to aerobic humus.

This humus filter is naturally aerated as the organisms that live in it create a labyrinth of tunnels. The wastewater is cleansed as it filters through, and the humus binds and breaks down organic pollutants, chemicals, and toxins. By the time the water reaches the bottom layer it has been well treated and a geofabric layer removes the remaining very fine particles. And it uses 90% less electricity than many other wastewater treatment systems.

Although conceptually a simple idea it’s not just a case of throwing a few worms into a pod and hoping for the best. Cameron studied the rainforest soil critters in minute detail, and to get the very high treatment performance the habitat inside the pod had to be created in such a way that it lasts for a long time. One part of the Biolytix patent is for a lattice structure to support the organic material.

Success

Cameron built his business around the innovation and it sells to many countries around the world. The first commercial product hit the market in 2004 and the production rate at the company’s Queensland factory is around 1500 units a year. It has garnered a giant-sized mantle piece of awards including Australia's most prestigious Science and Innovation Award - The Australian Academy of Technological Sciences and Engineering "Clunies Ross Award. He also picked up the Global Eco-Tech Award at the World Expo, Japan for "contributing significantly to the resolution of global environmental problems"

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