374Water Inc (NASDAQ:SCWO) earlier this week provided an update on its commercial progress and government partnerships in PFAS-related waste destruction.
CEO Chris Gannon highlighted that its AirSCWO technology is capable of destroying biosolids, landfill leachate, and other organic waste contaminated with PFAS, plastics, and pharmaceuticals. Gannon told investors that the system reduces these contaminants to below new EPA limits or to levels undetectable by current technology.
Proactive: Let’s start by reminding everyone a little bit about the company and, more so, about your system that we're going to be talking about.
Chris Gannon: Our company is 374Water. We have a very innovative technology called AirSCWO. That technology is very effective at destroying waste streams—specifically biosolids, landfill leachate, and a whole host of organic industrial waste. Very importantly, those waste streams are contaminated with emerging contaminants such as PFAS, forever chemicals, plastics, and pharmaceuticals.
Our technologies are very effective at destroying those to either below the new EPA standards for parts per trillion or to non-detect levels, meaning that current detection capabilities just do not exist.
And Chris, is there a need for this? We've heard a lot about this not only in the US but right across the world about the importance of technology like this.
Yeah, absolutely. It's an amazingly large market. We calculated it as roughly around $450 billion worldwide. We're really targeting three key market verticals, with a fourth I'll mention. One is the municipal market. In the United States, there are 16,000 wastewater treatment facilities. Internationally, it's much larger.
Then there’s the federal government level, particularly military applications. The industrial market is another key area. Underlying all of these are treatment, storage, and disposal facilities which take in both hazardous and non-hazardous waste. We're actively partnering with those companies now to install our technology onsite and build our waste destruction service capability.
You mentioned military, and that's the news I was talking about a bit earlier. The Defense Innovation Unit and yourselves are working together. Tell me a bit about this.
We've been working with the military and the federal government for quite some time, doing different destruction work in various locations. We're now up in Detroit at a waste destruction service facility, where we're conducting what we're being told are final demonstrations on key waste destruction strategies the federal government is considering.
And that system, as you mentioned, there's some testing going on. The campaign officially will start in August. And then there’s going to be a lot of great data you'll get out of this as well?
Correct, absolutely. We're going to be there for a couple of months. We have six waste streams that we're going to be destroying for them. All of those contain PFAS. So whether it's granular activated carbon used in water treatment, ion exchange resin, and so forth—there's a ton of different wastes that we're looking to destroy.
Lastly, Chris, what’s ahead? I know this is a key focus, but there’s a lot going on as we head toward the fall.
Yeah, we're really excited about the fall and going into next year. We just completed a deployment with the Colorado School of Mines at Peterson Space Force Base. That deployment went very well. We also have upcoming customer purchase orders and deployments. We're preparing to deploy to Orange County Sanitation in California. We’ve sold a unit to them for a year-long deployment.
And then there's our work on the waste destruction service side. We've signed one agreement already and are in negotiations with several others to begin placing these service sites across the US.
Quotes have been lightly edited for style and clarity