Skip to main content

By Oleh Wowkodaw, President & CEO, Blue Eden CleanTech Inc. 

Blue Eden and partners address the shortage in supply of critical and strategic resources needed for the green economy by facilitating reuse of critical resources, including metals, chemicals, energy, and water from waste. 

Global Need for Strategic Resources 

Access to important strategic resources, including minerals, metals, chemicals and other materials is critical for advancing renewable energy and the green economy. These include metals like copper (Cu), zinc (Zn), lead (Pb), rarer precious and valuable elements like gold (Au), silver (Ag), lithium (Li), vanadium (V), cobalt (Co), platinum group metals (PGMs), and rare earth elements (REEs). 

Although conventional mining is still the primary source for these critical resources for the foreseeable future, conventional mining processes are generally environmentally destructive, emit significant amounts of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and consume large amounts of energy and water. Furthermore, locating new primary resources is a difficult and risky proposition, deposits are rare, and their development requires significant capital and lengthy approval processes. In addition, they are often found in areas of political uncertainly or instability. 

Demand for chemicals and energy is still largely supplied by the petrochemical sector, and this is only increasing and adding to environmental challenges including increasingly also to problems around plastic waste. By 2060, over one billion tons of plastics are expected to be produced globally to eventually become part of our waste problem. 

Biogenic waste from agriculture, forestry, livestock operations, food processing, as well as from municipal sources, represent additional growing waste management challenges. 

Finally, water, a key and universally needed resource for many industries, is becoming increasingly scarce and valuable. Rising demand for water from expanding populations and industries are creating intense competition for this limited resource, straining natural aquifers and municipal water systems. In Alberta and elsewhere, this is becoming a limiting factor for industrial growth. 

Currently, only about 68% of wastewater in North America is treated, and mostly for disposal. A mere 8.2% is treated for reuse, due to cost and complexity in its treatment. 

Blue Eden offers solutions to our growing waste problems and to our problems around supply of critical resources by converting waste into value. 

Blue Eden CleanTech Solutions, a six-year-old Alberta-based company, is deeply rooted in the resource development sector, including conventional petroleum, natural gas, and metal mining. The company recognizes the interconnected challenges around waste management, water scarcity, and resource extraction, and has made a commitment to addressing these issues, starting in Alberta and expanding into other Canadian and international jurisdictions. 

Blue Eden, in a collaboration with Calgary-based Scovan Inc. and Germany-based research institute Fraunhofer Umsicht, are committed to implementing a joint solution to the growing problem around waste management, waste processing, and extraction of value from waste. The collaboration is an excellent combination of Blue Eden’s vision of a waste-to-value future supporting circularity with Scovan’s excellent and comprehensive engineering capabilities, and their deep culture of innovation and implementation, and Fraunhofer’s extensive global track record for developing innovative and new technology solutions in the green resource recovery space. Our collaboration is ready for the next steps, to jointly implement a flexible, scalable, and environmentally responsible solution platform to address waste, in liquid and solid form, from organic to inorganic sources, including complex mixed waste, to help alleviate critical supply shortages of important strategic resources by unlocking these from waste. 

Our Core Solution Platform 

At the heart of Blue Eden’s solutions is its electro-chemical treatment platform for wastewater. This versatile platform supports water conservation, by combining efficient wastewater treatment with water reuse and recycling, and finally facilitating responsible discharge. Its ClearBlue and PureBlue systems use minimal chemicals and rely primarily on electric power, which can come from renewable sources, to treat wastewater in modular, decentralized, centralized, and scalable systems. An added feature benefit of its solution, currently at pilot stage, is the ability to capture and repurpose hydrogen produced during wastewater treatment. Our electro-chemical solution is the enabling water treatment platform for the solid waste processing solution. 

Within this portfolio of its flexible and adaptable platform, Blue Eden is also developing processes to extract valuable metals and materials from waste and process water, including wastewater associated with battery recycling, and from formation and produced water from subsurface oil and gas, mining, and geothermal operations. 

Solid Waste Processing Platforms 

Available through Blue Eden’s European collaborating partner are two solid waste processing platforms, currently in the commercial development stage. These operate on thermo-chemical and thermo-catalytic principles. 

The thermo-chemical process can handle large volumes of complex and mixed waste, including electronic waste, electrical equipment, automotive shredder waste, windmill blades, and solar panels. It recovers critical metals, valuable chemicals, high-aromatic oils, gases, fibrous materials, energy, and water. 

The thermo-catalytic process is applied to biogenic waste, converting organic waste to bio-oil, chemicals, gases (including green hydrogen and ammonia), high quality biochar with significant value for its carbon credit potential, and water. 

Both processes offer unique and proprietary capabilities, and can process mixed heterogeneous waste, efficiently, with low energy consumption, low production of harmful chemical by-products, as modular and decentralized systems. The commercial development of these combined complex waste-to-value processing platforms are a key initiative of the Canadian-European collaboration. 

Environmental and Industrial Impact 

Blue Eden plans to build a first-of-its-kind comprehensive waste to value processing platform based on these technologies in North America, to help industry operate more efficiently, with lower emissions and energy consumption. These platforms will facilitate recycling and reuse of water, and will unlock strategic resources, such as metals, chemicals, and other materials from waste. The shift away from traditional “once-through” usage models for resources towards circularity offers a sustainable alternative for resource-intensive industries and for a resource hungry world. 

Blue Eden is currently initiating the pre-feasibility phase of two comprehensive waste to value platform development initiatives, one in Alberta, and the other in Eastern Canada with Scovan. It is also evaluating other opportunities for similar developments elsewhere. Blue Eden and its collaborating partners are excited to be part of a solution implementation plan to address global waste, and the recovery of critical resources from waste. 

Originally published in IGNITE V9.