A REVOLUTIONARY TECHNOLOGY FOR WATER PURIFICATION

BluAct stands for Blue Action, a brand-new approach in water purification,
with a strong commitment to make safe drinking water available worldwide.

About Us

BluAct Technologies is an award winning spin-off company of ETH Zurich, Switzerland, which has discovered new science revolutionizing the purification of water. BluAct Technologies is committed to implement its water purification technologies throughout the world to bring safe, efficiently purified water to all populations.

BluAct water filtration science builds on the remarkable ability of its proprietary compositions of food amyloid fibrils - such as those thermally processed from ordinary milk - and activated carbon, to attract and hold virtually all contaminants found in both potable water supplies and industrial wastewater. The media function by exhibiting strong adsorption to all contaminants, removing them from the water and holding them for disposal. The nature of the BluAct composition resists clogging and eliminates the need for flushing the media.

BluAct offers several technologies for water treatment which rely on combinations of food protein nanofibrils and activated carbon granules. These treatment processes use BluAct's newly uncovered science to remove extremely high ratios of undesirable and/or harmful contaminants. Researchers have long sought a method which efficiently removes all types of pollutants from water. BluAct now provides the right answer - an answer that outdoes and makes obsolete all past methods of purification of water.

BluAct's superior filtration products can be used effectively either as an integral step in the creation of potable water for human consumption, or as one step in the absolute elimination of undesirable polluting elements of wastewater. BluAct filtration renders all water, from any source, immediately potable and safe for human consumption.

The beauty and advantage of BluAct's totally fresh approach is two-fold:

  1. BluAct granular media will remove virtually all toxins and contaminants, including all metals such as lead, mercury, arsenic, and even nuclear elements from drinking water - most of them with efficiencies far in excess of 99%.
  2. BluAct granular and membrane media can also be used to recover valuable metals such as platinum, gold, silver, and copper, etc. from industrial wastewater.

Unlike the inefficiency, waste, and high energy requirements necessary for traditional methods of water filtration, BluAct's new technology pulls contaminants from water at astonishingly high ratios without wasting process water, and without affecting the beneficial mineral composition of water.. And the energy required to push water through the BluAct media is no higher than the normal system pressure of a typical municipal water supply. By comparison, it should be noted, the reverse osmosis water filtration method requires post-processed water mineral composition re-adjustment, expends great amounts of energy to force water through extremely fine membranes, and great percentages of water are wasted in use for flushing these membranes - resulting in the loss of otherwise usable precious water.

OUR PRIORITIES

Efficient

Heavy-metal ions, radioactive materials, organic pollutants, bacteria and even viruses, can be removed from water at unprecedented efficiencies.

Affordable

BluAct technologies eliminate from water a large spectrum of contaminants at considerably lower cost than most current purification technologies.

Sustainable

BluAct uses food grade raw materials. No secondary pollution is caused and water is entirely processed, without any waste. BluAct technologies can work with minimum energy requirement with virtually no impact on the environment.

Benefits of BluAct

  • No Energy and pressure required, low operation cost
  • High efficiency for multiple pollutant removal: inorganic, organic & biological pollutants
  • Sustainable raw materials
  • Non-specific adsorption of different pollutants (in contrast to Ion exchange resins)
  • Recovery of valuable metals
  • Easy to scale up and scale down upto 100 m3/h
  • Color and odour removal
  • No need to remineralize the water (in contrast to reverse osmosis)
  • Ions to macrometer size particles removal

Scientific Background

Please have a look to the scientific background at the core of our technologies

How does it work

BluAct scientists have discovered that food proteins, such as those found in milk, can be converted into protein fibrils -also known as amyloid fibrils- capable to bind and remove pollutants from water at unprecedented efficiencies. The technologies developed by BluAct are rooted into cutting edge science communicated in high profile publications and accessible worldwide to the interested knowledgeable reader.

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Technical Performance

The technical performance of a water purification technology is dependent on a multitude of factors, such as capacity of pollutants removal, efficiency, operating flux, running and capital costs, consumed energy and operating pressure as well as water recovery efficiency. The interplay between all these factors and how these drive a modern and sustainable approach to water purification have been tackled comprehensively in scientific literature (Chem. Soc. Rev., 2019, 48, 463).

A widely diffused approach to assess a technology performance on removal of contaminants is to comply with certifications, which are standardized protocols evaluating the functioning of a technology. A common and widely accepted certification for heavy metal ions, for example, is the NSF 53, but other certifications also exist such as Comité Européen de Normalisation (CEN) standards, DIN/EN, DVGW..etc.

BluAct Technologies, obviously complies with all these certifications and largely meets NSF 53 standards in the greatest majority of heavy metals, such as Arsenic (III and V forms), Lead, Mercury, etc...

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Minimum amount of liters which can be treated for various heavy metals according to NSF 53 standards.

Beyond NSF Certification

The question is then: does NSF certification suffice to make a technology good enough in water purification? The answer, unfortunately, is NO.

NSF certifications use protocols that are stringent, but often, do not cope with real cases of pollution worldwide. Take mercury for example, NSF 53 certification requires that a feeding concentration of 6 ppb (parts per billions) of Mercury ends up to 2 ppb in treated water, that is the WHO accepted threshold for drinking water. This corresponds to a mere efficiency of 67%. In the case of Lead instead, the efficiency required by NSF is higher and of the order of 93%. Yet, in the case of Flint crisis (Michigan USA), where contamination reached values beyond thousands of ppb, this criterion would not be stringent enough to guarantee drinking water.

Or consider now Arsenic, the most frequent natural pollutant in groundwater. NSF certification requires that a feeding concentration of 50 ppb Arsenic is purified down to 10 ppb, the WHO accepted threshold for drinking water contaminated by Arsenic. This corresponds to an efficiency of 80%. Countries such as India, China, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bangladesh, Peru, Burkina Faso and many more, may have in their groundwater values of Arsenic reaching 800, sometimes 1000 ppb. It is clear that the NSF protocols would fail to guarantee drinking water in these regions. Even assuming the same efficiency requested by NSF, the final concentration in the treated water would remain of the order of 15 to 20 times above the WHO limit!

BluAct Technologies enables treating water heavily contaminated by Arsenic, Lead, Mercury, Chromium, Aluminium and many other heavy metals, with an unprecedented efficiency, way beyond NSF standards. The wide spectrum of accessible heavy metals extends to other compounds, such as organic pesticides, contaminants and even to halogens, such as Fluoride.

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BluAct puts its unique technologies at the service of people around the world and is serving in a number of countries with extreme levels of pollution (e.g. >800 ppb As), bringing back to people safe drinking water, there where other technologies have failed….

Revolutionary we said? Indeed!

Watch The Video

Swiss agency for Development and cooperation case study

Swiss agency for Development and cooperation( SDC) summarized the effectiveness of our technology for the purification of water in Peru. We appreciate the support from SDC and SABAVIDA for conducting the pilot and plant studies. These plant studies prove that our technology works for large scale water treatment and is a big stepping stone towards our goal to install our products globally.

Watch SDC case study

Contact Us

Let's have a conversation, We are all yours

Address

Dufaux-strasse 57,
8152, glattpark, Zurich-Opfikon,
Switzerland.

Phone

0041 763456017

Email Address

info@bluact.com

sreenath@bluact.com