Interview with Ted Merrell and Ian Petrocco

Transcript

Sheldon Young
Welcome to the No Footprints podcast, brought to you by Alfa Laval. I’m Sheldon Young.

Jason Moreau
And I am Jason Moreau.

Sheldon Young
And we’re here to talk about impact and to share the efforts and people behind making sustainability real. Jason, we’re back.

Jason Moreau
Back.

Sheldon Young
Back. It’s a new year.

It’s officially a new year. I know we’ve had episodes in 26 already. These are February episodes, but from a recording perspective, this is our first 26 recording.

Jason Moreau
Correct. And we are on the eve of snowmageddon.

Sheldon Young
Yeah. Yeah, apparently some kind of mageddon. I’m not sure if it’s just snow, ice, you know, cats and dogs, dogs and cats, frogs.

I have no idea what we’re getting.

Jason Moreau
Could get biblical. Yeah, we don’t know.

Sheldon Young
And we could get lots of, not to joke about it, it’s a very serious thing, and I hope everyone is safe. And I remember, you know, I’m having flashback memories to last winter when we had a water crisis here in Richmond during a winter storm, right? And so I do hope everyone is safe.

This is like a countrywide storm. It’s a big one. And so I hope everyone is safe.

And this will come out of, you know, a couple weeks after the storm. So again, hope everything is okay after that. But it has been a lot of talk around here.

And you know, the stores are empty and there’s no bread, things like that.

Jason Moreau
Very typical Richmond behavior, correct?

Sheldon Young
That’s typical everywhere. I think everyone goes and grabs a bunch of stuff. That’s what they do.

But I just want everyone to hunker down and be okay. But anyway, so let’s talk what kind of story you got for me, Jason. Give me the sustainability story.

First one you’ve had pop up in your brain in 26.

Jason Moreau
I have a fungi story, fun guy.

Sheldon Young
I’m a fun guy. Jason.

Jason Moreau
So I know that’s why I brought this story. I thought for you at the story a different fungi. We’re talking micro proteins.

Oh, and specifically the fungus Vusarium venenatum.

Sheldon Young
It sounds like a Harry Potter spell.

Jason Moreau
I know that’s what I thought. It’s a it’s apparently a really good strain for alternative proteins. Okay, because of natural texture and flavor very closely resembles meat.

However, the the fungus has a couple things that make it not quite so good, which is thick cell walls, which makes it harder for humans to digest the nutrients. Okay, and apparently it’s it’s a bit lazy in terms of its ability to grow. So basically large amounts of resources needed for to grow it and produce it.

Okay. So the story is that I think it was out of China. They messed around with CRISPR technology.

Okay, and essentially edited two genes of this fungus one to make the cell walls thinner thereby allowing better digestion by us humans and they also tweaked it and turned it into like the Captain America version of itself where it actually has a better metabolism, which means it needs less resources to actually grow and do its thing. And so the new strain actually requires 44% less sugar to produce the same amount of protein and it did so 88% faster.

Sheldon Young
Wow.

Jason Moreau
So I thought it was a great sustainability story. Not just because you know, some recent episodes we were talking alternative proteins, but just sustainability like, you know, there’s just always these steps. These always these refinements that happen and oh, does these explorations in terms of okay, great.

Like we we hit this new level of sustainability, right? But what if we what if we could do just a little bit better, right? And now all of a sudden less resources better end result in terms of nutrition and in terms of just efficiency for producing the alternative protein.

So I thought it was a cool story.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, that is an interesting story again because like you always talk about okay, how do you one of the big challenges that this industry has is, you know parody of price and parody of efficiency and all the things. How do you do more with less and you keep stretching the gap and making the gap bigger in terms of efficiency and the amount of resources required then, you know, it just becomes a more competitive option. It becomes a more feasible option and at some point it becomes a cheaper option and you know that moves the industry forward again, I think with sustainability based things a lot of people get stuck on what something is right now and they don’t think about what it could be.

It’s like anything it’s like in any technology electric cars or whatever it is, right all of those things, you know, people always start with oh, yeah, well, it’s they’re too expensive solar panels are too expensive. We are they were in 1980, you know, then you will then yeah, so then now you have to just say, you know now it’s not it’s the cost is much lower and like anything else smart people work on these problems and they move the needle to make things more competitive and the learning curve the technology curve catches up and all of a sudden. Oh all the benefits that were once barriers are now there.

Yep. Yeah for sure. My story is also kind of in a similar vein similar space in the plant protein space.

So I what I saw is well, you know, everyone knows the the the plant protein company Beyond Meat, right? If you know anything about your seeing any of the plant proteins Beyond Meat was one of the big two them and impossible were the two biggest ones. Well Beyond Meat had just launched a protein plant protein based sports beverage.

So what they’re doing is because you know, there’s a bunch of pushback on from some people on the product. Oh, it’s it’s got so many things that it’s not good for you. Okay, where else can we put our protein protein is that they’re in the protein business and yes, they make like a burger and sausage and all the stuff that goes with it and but now they said, okay, look, we need to think of other ways to leverage this resource we have which is plant protein.

And so yeah, it’s one of those ones got a lot of electrodes are making it. It’s currently in like there are in R&D. It’s a what they call it.

It’s a small scale pilot.

Jason Moreau
Maybe I guess so like a little like rollout maybe just in like specific locations kind of thing.

Sheldon Young
It is something like that. I think it’s they’re testing like a 10 gram of protein in a 20 gram of protein one as choices both of them have like fiber antioxidants as well and come in a couple different flavors. I think it’s really that GLP one boom.

That’s that’s happening currently protein is in it, right? And so how do we provide more more products that are not I guess a animal meat based that you’ll give options and you know in a beverage people like to have a beverage and why not have one that’s full of full of a plant protein. So I thought was interesting pivot and again because I think we’ve if you watch the news, a lot of these companies have had some financial Challenges and finding new ways to pivot is is interesting.

So I thought was kind of cool.

Jason Moreau
Yeah, it seems pretty smart. I mean like you were saying you have the product. Let’s let’s see if we put it in a in a different form factor different container like that.

They get another hit. So that’s pretty cool.

Sheldon Young
Absolutely. And you said the word smart Jason smart brings me to our guest.

Jason Moreau
Ah, yeah, I agree. Yes.

Sheldon Young
Yeah. So today we have actually two guests today. This is our first double interview.

I think it is it is like we have two people. Yeah, I think we had a pair of folks from a company called Merrell Brothers and and I’ve know I’ve worked with them in Alfa Laval here for quite a few years off and on in the water wastewater space and they’re been a very strong partner and someone we worked with and they use our equipment some of their their operations, but they’re also some of the kindest hardworking collaborative partners that we have and they’re also thinkers. They’re innovators.

They’re people that step into this world. That’s a pretty some, you know, it’s it’s a lot of I’m going to spoil it a little bit here. It’s like municipal waste and industrial waste.

No, not the most exciting place for a lot of people to poke their heads, but they love it and they’re great at it and they have ways to add value and that’s what I love about it. It’s about up cycling. It’s about reducing impact and it’s also smart business and we’re going to hear that entire story from the people from Merrell Brothers.

I am super excited. So what do you say we stop talking and let them start talking?

Jason Moreau
Let’s do it.

Sheldon Young
I like it. Welcome to the new Footprints podcast. Our guests today are Ted Merrell and Ian Petrocco from Merrell Brothers.

Ted is co-founder and co-board chairman of the company and Ian is a construction project manager at the organization and Merrell specializes in a beneficial reuse management of biological waste streams. They’re also technological innovators in the field. Today.

We’re going to talk about how they make sustainability real and touch upon an exciting partnership. That’s sure to change how cities think about the value of their waste streams. It’s my pleasure to welcome Ted and Ian to the no Footprints podcast.

Welcome.

Ian Petrocco
Thanks for having us.

Ted Merrell
Thank you, Sheldon.

Sheldon Young
You’re very welcome. Excited to have I’ve known at least I know you Ted for a while and worked with Merrell Brothers for a good number of years through through our group and I’m excited to have you on because I love what you guys do and I’m going to let you tell the world though what you do. So if you could start a little bit telling about yourself and then about what Merrell Brothers does in the world.

Ted Merrell
Well, thank you. So really Merrell Brothers consists of originally consisted of two people which was myself and my brother Terry. We were born and raised in Central Indiana on a hog farm.

We so because we had a lot of hogs. We had a lot of manure and our dad used to used to pay us instead of paying us a wage to help him raise his hogs. He would basically let us pick each of us pick a sow that when the farrowing time came we get to pick a sow and our payment would be however many pigs that sow had that became our pigs.

So we became really good at trying to be livestock judges because we had to pick the sow before she had pigs. We couldn’t wait till after but you might pick a sow that had six pigs or a sow that had 12 pigs and you got 12 you got you made twice as much money working that time. So that’s kind of how it started and our dad was was amazing.

In fact, he just just passed away about a week ago. So a lot of a lot of memories come flooding back for that. But one of the things that we were both so appreciative about our dad was he taught us a work ethic and he taught us a lot about economics.

So even at a very young age, you know, we would we would buy the feed off of him in the bucket and we knew how much a bucket weighed and we were calculating the cost of that feed and and then we had the pigs that we got earned as our payment for working and and then we got to get the true feeling of what the open market was like because we would have to sell it at the same markets he did and so it was just a great lesson in economics for us. And and so for for when we both got old enough then to I was out graduating from college and my brother Terry was graduating from high school at the same time and I can still remember the conversation where dad said you can you can farm with me or you can kind of branch out on your own and and of course we were two young aggressive guys and we we wanted to hit the ground running. And so we we branched out on our own and started raising pigs all over the place.

It was about a hundred mile round trip just to feed hogs every day and forth with a lot of hogs came a lot of hog manure. And so we we bought our first commercial sized manure applicator and that’s kind of how how the company started. Once we had that that that big applicator it gave the impression that we were a commercial applier and so other hog farmers who didn’t particularly like hauling manure reached out to us and we started doing that and said you know what this might be a business opportunity here.

So one thing led to another we bought more and more application equipment and then we bought semis and tankers to haul it further away to apply the nutrients and fields that normally didn’t get manures and things and so it was just that’s just kind of how everything started and we were blessed to bring on some key people into our company after we got more and more equipment we wanted to manage it as best we could. We were we were strong in labor but low in capital. So we would run our applicators 24 hours a day.

We had day crews and night crews and so we would get the most we could out of those pieces of equipment. We shut them off check the oil and fire back up keep running. So that’s kind of how the initial history started and then we rolled into municipalities.

We realized that the wastewater treatment plants produced a nutrient-rich product kind of like livestock manures and since we do a lot about farming that was a just a natural for us to start providing those services for municipalities as well.

Sheldon Young
Wow. So you’re saying you don’t work very hard. I get it.

Okay. What a story. I mean, it’s just fascinating to hear that.

I mean just good old ingenuity and go get to it this for sure for sure. And just a quick to hop over to you quick. How did you become involved with Merrell and what’s your role currently?

Ian Petrocco
So actually I moved down to Florida from Colorado in 2017 and Merrell Bros was the first job that I got when I was here as a truck driver at the time started out as a truck driver worked on for a while and while I was doing that I finished up a bachelor’s degree in construction management and I graduated right about the same time we were starting the construction on our new pelletizing facility in Florida.

So they took a chance on me and brought me over to kind of be Ted’s right hand man on the project and kind of took advantage of opportunities as they were presented to me and did the best I could and slowly progressed through the company and just haven’t taken my foot off the gas sense and just keep moving along.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, I would say that’s having worked in Maryland and met a lot of your people you guys do so well by your people and the people that are leading in your company usually started at the bottom and work their way through prove themselves and are now, you know, doing great things and it’s from a sustainability point of view, I know we don’t talk about the people side of sustainability much but good roles, good progression, good growth is part of a sustainable business. And you guys personify that at least for everything that I’ve ever seen and what has been working with you. So for sure, so you mentioned a pelletizing business.

What is pelletizing and how does that work and what’s it for?

Ted Merrell
Sure, so what Ian was referring to there is that we’ve been in the business for 42, 43 years, something like that, which is long enough to either know better or to be better, one or the other. So one of our goals has been always kind of look at everything we do and we’re blessed with people within our company who, as you just mentioned, they kind of started out doing, you know, the grassroots kind of things and so they’ve been there, done that and then as they roll into management positions and start to figure out how to analyze things and lead teams and stuff, it’s a great background for, you know, why can’t we do this better? You know, why can’t we do it, you know, different? And so for us, what we’ve seen in the wastewater industry over the 40-some years is that, and we were just as guilty and in our beginning years as well, you’re either providing a service or you’re trying to move forward.

And we just provided a service for a long time and we did it very well, obviously, but probably 15 years ago or so, we had developed this bucket list of things that, you know, if we ever get a chance, we’d like to try to do it this way. And so that really was kind of the offshoot that allowed us to start up our research and development sector of our company where myself and my brother, Terry, especially that I have been involved with a lot of times, we finally said, you know what? It’s time.

We need to try to do some of these things different to make an impact on the industry. And, you know, our industry has not done a very good job of being proactive, I guess, in kind of supporting the value of the products. A lot of times, utilities will produce a product that’s good enough to meet the regulations, you know, it’s good from that standpoint, but yet it falls short in its ability to be super attractive to people, which then obviously would create more demand.

So, for us, the pelletization piece came in as how can we take a good product and make it better and eliminate any of those deterrents that might keep somebody from wanting to buy it. And we’ve got lots of examples of that, but, you know, one of the most impactful to me is, you know, we advertise it a lot of trade shows and things and we took an entire pallet of pelletized biosolids to a trade show in Florida because our milling and bagging facility that Ian was so instrumental in helping get off the ground had just opened up a month or two before that. So, we took this skid of 32-pound bags of pelletized biosolids to the trade show thinking that, you know, this will be, you know, kind of a just a prompt, I guess, or, you know, something you’d have in your booth for people to ask questions about and lo and behold, as soon as we got it in the booth and started, people started coming by, they kept asking us, hey, are you giving those away?

Can we have a bag? And so, to me, it was just really exciting to watch that over the course of those two days, we had 66 bags, I think, or 62, I don’t remember, that people were picking up a 32-pound bag, putting it on their shoulder, walking out of the convention center, walking up the parking garage and putting it in the trunk of their car. And, you know, for me, having been in the industry for so long, to see that, that you had a product that people were willing to go to that effort to get and then compare that to, you know, maybe some of the earlier years in our career when, you know, people would drive by, you know, a semi-load of material, you know, parked along the road that an applicator was nursing off of and just, you know, frown at it and want to get away from it because they thought it was hazardous waste or something.

So, so that’s, that’s the persona of what we are trying to do is create products that people have demand for and ultimately are willing to pay for. And I think if we as an industry can focus on that, we could completely change the, kind of the, the trajectory that, that BioSolids has been in and make it something that’s, that’s valuable.

Jason Moreau
Do you think it’s just as simple as showing people the possibility there, you know, or, or do you think there’s something else where, cause you’ve made mention that like, you know, the industry really hasn’t kept pace or, you know, why do you, why do you think that is generally, is it just, you know, people kind of knowing what they know in terms of the equipment? Or is it, is it something else?

Ted Merrell
Yeah, I’ll give you a classic example. You know, in our industry right now, one of the big catch words that everybody talks about is PFOS.

Ian Petrocco
Okay.

Ted Merrell
And so, you know, PFAS and PFOS, PFOA, you know, everybody knows that it’s everywhere. Okay. And that’s even in our blood and it’s in all kinds of products and stuff.

But yet when you think about it being everywhere, what do you attack first? Well, a lot of times you attack things that people have a negative connotation towards even though we know that PFOS is in, you know, styrofoam cups and straws and, and, you know, your, your eyeglasses and mascaras and, and, you know, your, your sunscreen and all those things, you don’t see people going out and attacking those products saying, we can’t have that anymore. We have to get rid of it.

It’s, it should be banned. But yet they do biosolids. Well, why is that?

It’s because it’s not looked at as positively as it could be. And if it were looked at that positive, then you wouldn’t be seeing it being attacked. It would be something that you would accept.

Okay. You know, I’ll, I’ll still walk on my carpet and sit on my couch that has Scotchgard on it. And I’ll still use biosolids because it’s good for my lawn and for my fertilizer.

So that’s what we’ve got to focus on as an industry is being proactive and, you know, making sure people understand the benefits and then obviously it, it can affect the whole industry.

Sheldon Young
So Kennewick, a big project you guys are working on.

Sheldon Young
Tell us a little bit about this, what this project is and how it got started and what it means for the industry.

Ted Merrell
Right. So the Florida operation, we completed that in 2018. It’s called Florida Green is the, it’s what we, that facility is called and it’s a solar thermal pasteurization is the process that we use.

That was a technology that we patented. And we had been doing lagoon dredging, dewatering for the city of Kennewick, which is clear across the country. It’s in Eastern, Southeastern Washington, but it’s not as far away from Tampa, Florida, as you can get, but they had heard about it, what we were doing and they were looking at doing a solid management upgrade for their lagoons because they just wanted to get some type of secondary treatment rather than just aerated lagoons.

And so they heard about it and wanted to find out more. So they came to Florida, they toured the facility, they saw what we were doing and, and so that’s kind of how that came to be. They entered us into their comparative study for solid management technologies and lo and behold, we, we won by about 15 or $20 million on the net present valuation comparisons.

By the skin of your teeth.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, it was really tight.

Ted Merrell
Yeah, but it’s, it’s been a, they’re a great, great community. They’ve taken a, they have a lot of faith in us and they have a lot of faith in the technology. And so that just increases the, the desire to want to do well for them and by them.

And so great partners, just like the Pasco, Florida team, that was, they were great to take a risk in, in that new technology.

Jason Moreau
For people who might not be as familiar with a wastewater treatment process. Can you describe what lagoons are used for and why for this particular project, you know, maybe they were looking to upgrade or, or go with some type of a different solution.

Ted Merrell
Right. So there’s all types of treatment processes. Kennewick Washington had a, a clarification process where they receive the sewage that comes into the plants, they screen it and then they aerate it and it goes into what they call clarification.

So it’s big clarifiers where these tanks take the aerated product that’s, you know, had microbial activity starting to get things activated, goes into the clarifiers and the solids settle down in the bottom of the clarifier and the water comes to the top and that’s where they do their first initial phase of separation. Well, then they pull out of the bottom of those clarifiers. They pull those solids out and that’s called waste activated sludge.

And that waste activated sludge then in some plants would go into like anaerobic digesters or aerobic digestion. Kennewick used big polishing lagoons where they would, they would pump that waste activated sludge out into the lagoon and they had massive floating aerators that would continue to pump oxygen into that. And essentially what they’re doing is feeding oxygen to the microbes so that it will kind of continue its degradation process.

And then after so many years, those lagoons would build up with solids in them and they had two lagoons. So they would rotate to the other lagoon and then pull samples, make sure it was, had enough pathogen destruction for class B land application. And then they would hire us to come in and or any contractor, but it just happened to be us the last few times to come in with mobile dredges, mobile dewatering units.

And then we would arrange for the beneficial class B land application. And so that’s how they kind of found out about it. And in doing that, the lagoons oftentimes would go through a seasonal change in the spring where, for whatever reason, the biology changes such that the solids, instead of settling to the bottom, sometimes they’ll flip and they’ll float to the top.

And when those solids get exposed to the surface, they don’t have that water cap over it anymore. That’s when you can get a lot of off-gassing from the sunshine and the temperatures rising. And so they were just to a point where, you know, we need to make some capital investments to kind of get out of this seasonal fluctuation of odor problems.

And so they were looking forward to doing something different. And that’s how we got selected to come in.

Jason Moreau
So like from a layman standpoint, the clarifying tanks in the lagoons, they’re sort of like the residential, they’re the municipal version of if you live in a house that has a septic tank, right? Like it’s essentially like a holding tank where the biosolids are essentially processed over time.

Ted Merrell
Yep. The biggest difference is that the wastewater plant accelerates that process because they feed the oxygen to the microbes. And so it’s just like a human, you know, the more food you give it and the more air you give it, the happier they are and the more active.

And so it kind of does mother nature’s job in a much quicker fashion. So a lot of septic tank type scenarios would take their solids products to a wastewater plant, and then they would go through that aerated process to again, create the digestion that’s necessary to reduce volatile solids and things. So yeah, the wastewater plant is really just an accelerated act of nature.

Some of them are chemical, some are biological, but it’s very efficient, very good way to process wastewater so that you can produce, you know, good clean effluent that goes back into the waters of the state. And then the solids are the nutrient-rich organic material then that can be beneficially reused.

Sheldon Young
So you use the term, the technology, solar thermal pasteurization. Ian, what’s solar thermal pasteurization? What’s happening with that?

Ian Petrocco
So it’s basically a two-step process where we take the dewatered solid material that’s coming out of a wastewater treatment plant. They’re typically coming in anywhere between 16 and 20 percent solids. So you’re between 80 and 84 percent water.

So what Ted and Terry were able to kind of figure out is we want something that is very, is as efficient as it can be and will utilize natural resources and utilize as a few like fossil fuels as possible to complete the process. So they had actually for a few years now back in Indiana, they used basically just a big concrete pad where when there wasn’t time to actually spread material, they would start piling it on this pad and then they’d use a brown bear turner to turn it and keep the pile exposed to oxygen so it wouldn’t become septic. And with that and the natural sunlight, you were getting a reduction in water volume, so your overall tonnage would drop down.

So they would be able to continue to add material to these pads until it was a time where they could actually take it out to the fields and spread it. So that was kind of the genesis of the solar thermal pasteurization. So they kind of thought, all right, well, what’s the next steps of this?

Because there’s different regulations in order to meet the pasteurization methods to be able to have a class A fertilizer. So obviously with the greenhouse, which was the next step from that concrete pad was putting it inside so that way you’re taking it out of the elements. You don’t have to have the risk of rain re-wetting the material.

And at that point, then you can enclose it and add odor control units to it to be able to mitigate any odor concerns. Where they’re at up in Indiana, it’s the middle of farm country. Everybody’s kind of used to the odors.

It’s just kind of a commonplace thing. Nobody really thinks much about it. But when you’re trying to take that and put that into a cityscape, that becomes a much bigger issue.

So the greenhouse was kind of an assistance with enclosing it and adding the odor control to it. So with that, you can actually take it to what you need to get to is 90% if you’re using a single method source of drying a material to get to a class A biosolids. So the greenhouses are really good at getting very easy moisture out of the material.

But then once you hit about a 50, 55, maybe 60% solids and anywhere from 50 to 40% water, that’s when you really start to plateau. So they took out the ideas. All right, what can be our next step to be able to speed up this process?

And that’s when they came up with a thermal belt dryer. So once again with thermal belt dryer, you can do the full process with that going from that 18% all the way up to 90%. But it’s a very slow process because you’re trying to drive off so many pounds of moisture.

So they took the genius idea of marrying the two technologies together and letting them utilize what they do best. Greenhouses for removing that easy moisture and the pasteurization oven for taking out that little bit of extra moisture and bringing it to that pasteurization level very quickly. So with that the way that our permit is written is because we’re meeting time temperature and a solids percentage.

It was written as we have to maintain the material at 70 degrees Celsius while it’s in the pasteurization oven for a minimum of 30 minutes and come out at 75% solids. So the way they figured it out to make more sense, it was most belt dryers are a single level. So it’s just a point A to point B start.

Well, at that point it became a struggle of, okay, when does that 30-minute window start? And so what we ended up doing is working with a company to actually do a double stack belt. So we have a belt one on the top where the material comes in and that’s kind of our preheat chamber.

So as it’s traveling along this belt, it gets up to that 70 degrees Celsius. So we know the second it falls down and hits a second belt. It’s at the right temp.

We can start that 30-minute timer and know that what’s coming out has achieved that. So we have temperature probes and the bottom belt and temperature probes in the top belt. Then we have a Red Lion tracker that tracks all four of those probes.

So we can prove that we’re meeting our time temperature and then we take samples coming out of the back end to also is showing that we’re achieving that 75 plus percent solid content level.

Sheldon Young
Wow.

Ian Petrocco
So that’s kind of our solar thermal pasteurization in a nutshell.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, interesting process. I mean, I’m just going off your website here like in your Florida site pulled 165 billion BTUs of energy from the sun last year. I was like, okay, that’s a lot of energy.

So that’s energy. That’s not natural gas, right? That’s from the sun and you know, when you start translating at the greenhouse gas impact from a sustainability point of view, it warms my heart to hear that, right?

You’re you’re minimizing taking the absolute appropriate amount of energy you can from the sun to have an efficient process deliver a reusable product and you’re taking this waste product and turning into value. So what is this a process like this mean for like Kennewick? What do they gain from it besides the odor aspect of it?

Is there a benefit from them as well?

Ted Merrell
So Kennewick, they have a 85% volume reduction. So when we would come in typically to dewater the lagoons, we actually brought in a fleet of our alpha labile belt presses. Oh, we yeah, my heart, but we would bring those in and we would produce about a 15 to 17% cake product out of which means, you know, was 83 to 85% water.

Well, by going through the solar thermal, you end up with only 15% left of what you started with. So you have a lot of water that’s driven off the facility in Tampa. I wish I should do the math sometime to see, but we have had literally hundreds of millions of gallons of water that is basically vaporized and just blown out the odor control units and gone.

It’s just, it’s just blows your mind away to think about that much water just disappearing that we don’t have to have a, you know, a sewer discharge or anything like that, but we remove 85% of it just by evaporation.

Sheldon Young
Interesting. Wow. And I’m assuming there’s a, my knowledge of emissive waste for our treatment plant.

They’re usually paying someone to haul sludge off, right? Yeah. What happens to the product that they produce in this facility?

Ted Merrell
Yeah. So they, we, the one in Florida, we actually, we were the builders. We were the general contractor.

So we build it and then we have a 30 year operating agreement with the utility. So we, we run the whole facility, which is good because it’s our technology and we’re constantly, you know, trying different things as an extension of our research and development. And so we’ve, we’ve learned things over the seven years or so that we have now incorporated into our design on new facilities going forward.

But the interesting part about this type of approach is that it actually cash flows for a wastewater utility. When you think about a wastewater plant, you know, when they put in a clarifier, they put in a lift station, they put in, you know, sewer mains and things that those typically don’t cash flow.

Sheldon Young
It’s just something. You mean they make money from it, what you’re saying?

Ted Merrell
Yeah. That, so this will pay for it. This will, this will pay for the CapEx because of your volume reduction.

And then we can market the material on the backend. And so for a wastewater plant to even think about selling what they make, you know, that’s just such a new concept. And most of them don’t think of that.

They just think they want to, they’re glad to get rid of it kind of thing.

Sheldon Young
Minimize the expense, right?

Ted Merrell
Yeah, but it’s a, it’s a, it’s a revenue source. So that that’s, what’s exciting for us is we kind of feel like we’re pioneers out there, you know, pushing new things. Now there’s other products that have been on the market for many, many years.

It’s just not been done regionally as much. And Milorganite is a great testament to a product that’s made by Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They’ve done it for like 40 years.

They’ve been putting biosolids in bags and selling it. And but yet they have a little bit of dust in their material, you know, because it’s a, it’s a thermally dried process.

Sheldon Young
And it uses a lot more gas. I’m assuming it’s thermally dried.

Ted Merrell
Yes. It’s a, you know, uses a tremendous amount of gas. But with the pellets that we make, we can bind all that up.

It’s all bound up in a pellet. And so you don’t have, you know, any dust cloud or anything when you spread the product and you can add synthetics to it. You can add other microbial products to it.

There’s just a, you can really tailor it to whatever the end user wants. And so we’ve got a lot of golf courses in Florida that our product now is being spread on that’s got inoculants. Microbial inoculants added to the pellet.

And so those manufacturers are looking for good delivery mechanisms and the biosolids is a great product to do that with.

Sheldon Young
Great. So, wow, this has been a really insightful conversation for me.

Sheldon Young
I love hearing people that are taking waste and turning it into something valuable. If I were either a municipality or someone that had a waste product of some kind, what advice would you give them about acting in a more sustainable way or moving in a more sustainable direction?

Ted Merrell
Yeah, that’s a, you’re speaking to the choir right now because that’s really been a focus of what we do. And we’ve actually been hosting a series of summits in the state of Florida where we’ve gone to different regions of the state and then we solicit, you know, all of the wastewater utilities in those regions. And we’ve had three of them now.

We’ve got three more we’re working on. But it’s really great to get the industry professionals in a room like that and just start to paint the picture, you know, kind of where things are with the biosolids world right now. There’s so many influences out there.

There’s urban sprawl. There’s, you know, things like PFOS and things like that. And so if you don’t continually to look at how you can improve and create those products of demand, you end up finding yourself in a situation where there’s only two alternatives.

You’re either allowed to keep doing it or they ban it and you can’t keep doing it. And so currently in the United States, we’re seeing that, you know, the state of Maine put a ban against beneficial reuse. It was just a line drawn in the sand.

You can’t do it anymore, which sounds noble of them to do that. We’re going to protect the whole world, you know, by banning this. But the reality is they just they just kick the can down the road and push it to somewhere else.

So a lot of those biosolids that can’t fit in the landfills of Maine are traversing into other states that surround Maine to find the next space to go with it or to be land applied in another state. And that’s really not solving the problem. That’s just kind of pushing it away.

So our advice to utilities is, you know, don’t don’t stop at just barely meeting the regulation. OK, produce a product that you can be proud of, first of all. But secondly, that you would want to see people within your service area benefiting from.

And, you know, we’ve got a lot of cool testimonials and things, you know, with the bag products because you can apply that to your yards and lawns. And, you know, we’ve got sod growers and people that say that we can’t get enough of this stuff because they like the slow release portion of it. It’s in an organic form.

So you don’t have bleaching like you do a lot of the synthetic products that are either available or not. So our advice to these utilities is, you know, think outside of the box of how you can attach yourself to a technology that’s going to get you the best product you can. Don’t don’t just make something that’s acceptable, but not the best, because those are the products that are going to come under attack because somebody’s going to find a problem with it.

I mean, there’s there’s thermally dried biosolids right now that are banned for land application because of the dust content. When they spread the really dry material, they have a lot of dust that’s left. And so that gets in the air and blows around when they do the application.

So, you know, that just breaks my heart to see them make that kind of investment to dry it out, make it as an efficient product as you can to apply. But yet then get banned because you got too much dust in it. So, you know, go to the next step, make a pellet out of it, bind all that dust up and then that’s one less thing that can be attacked.

Yeah, great stuff.

Sheldon Young
So what’s next for Merrell Brothers? You’ve seemed to have done it all in biosolids, but I don’t think that’s the case. What else is new and exciting for you guys?

Ted Merrell
So I guess we’re control freaks. We really like to have as much control as we can with our being a service provider and operating facilities. We think that’s one of our strong points.

And so we are aggressively going out there and marketing our services through public-private partnerships with utilities where we can build these facilities regionally with multiple utilities coming together, which again creates a whole new efficiency or economies of scale. Because if you think about a, you know, a wastewater plant that has to make an investment for some type of solids management, they may only produce enough to utilize that at about a 30% efficiency rate. But if you bring three of them together, all of a sudden they’re running at 90% efficient.

So you can spread that capital out. It’s kind of the doge effect, I guess, to wastewater treatment. But we’re really aggressively seeking that.

And in the back to the control thing, if there’s, as we get the economy to scale where we’re counting on a particular manufacturer or a particular process long enough and we can start to do it in-house, we do. And so we’ve added a lot of engineers now to our team. We have mechanical, electrical.

We’ve got our fab team now where we’re actually manufacturing like the pellet mill systems and those types of things. We’re putting those together. So we’re attaching that technology to a lot of other dryers, not just our own solar thermal or double drum.

But double drum drying is another technology that we’ve got our first full scale system in Kokomo, Indiana up and going now. We’ve got about six, seven, eight. I think there’s like eight other things in the hopper, I guess, with what we call our research and development, hydrodynamic cavitation.

We’ve got a super press I did attached to dewatering devices to get a little, you know, a few more points of moisture removed out of them. And so it’s super exciting for us right now because we feel like as a company, we still maintain the service aspect of what we do, but yet we expand it to offer more offerings. And that’s ultimately what we think a lot of utilities are looking for as the labor market gets tighter and tighter for them.

If they can join in a public-private partnership with a partner that they really trust and know will do their very best, that’s a win-win versus them trying to find people to go out there and work in the wastewater plants that they don’t have an efficient operation to maintain those. And so we can fill that gap. But it’s super exciting for us.

The work Ian has done, he mentioned being my right-hand man. I think he’s more like the man and I’m just out there putting these things together, but it’s so refreshing to see the next generation step in. We’ve got, you know, he mentioned we have six people on our management team now.

Well, four of those are all very young. And so that’s really exciting to see what that new energy coming into the company is. So my brother and I are kind of like the old cow out in the pasture, just having fun eating grass.

Sheldon Young
Which will create manure, which is good for business. That’s right. Better breed all together.

Okay, well, Ian, Ted, thank you so much for the conversation today. I think hopefully everyone that listens to this is going to learn a lot about what’s possible in, you know, waste management and turning it into value and doing it in a sustainable and value-producing way. And so thank you for telling your story and looking forward to hearing more about your future successes.

It sounds like you’re not sitting on your laurels. Never. All right.

Thank you, gentlemen. I appreciate it.

Ian Petrocco
Thanks, Sheldon. Thanks, Jason.

Sheldon Young
Well, Jason, we are back.

Jason Moreau
Phenomenal interview.

Sheldon Young
Phenomenal. That’s a good word. Phenomenal.

Jason Moreau
Phenomenal.

Sheldon Young
That’s right. So many people are not going to get that one. But anyway, it is.

It’s just for us. It’s our gift to each other. Yeah, the thing that stood out to me, obviously, two really smart, really interesting people doing a very cool thing and the power of waste, the power of waste.

How do you take it and turn it into something valuable? Wow, they’re like magicians in that regard.

Jason Moreau
I wrote down Willy Wonka of waste.

Sheldon Young
Wow, Willy Wonka of waste. Oh, who’s the Oompa Loompa here? That’s what I want to know.

Don’t you dare say me.

Jason Moreau
No, but I mean in a space that is not known for innovation or thinking what new technologies, what new processes. I just just super impressed with how they go about approaching and problem-solving.

Sheldon Young
But what they’re doing in particularly like sludge upcycling is super interesting and they’re doing it and I really like the partnership model that they put in place is certainly unique. They’re one of the few that I think, you know, there are plenty of people who go out there and they’ll dewater your lagoon for you and Merrell Brothers will do that. That’s that’s on their in their bailiwick, but these guys are also thinking of hey, if you’re the right partner, let’s find a way to really turn this into value, right and they’ll be there in a different capacity and they’re certainly I would say that solids management particularly municipal waste space.

Definitely stepping up and filling some kind of innovation void that that is really pushing the industry in new directions and turning what used to be a cost Center into a profit Center for some of these people.

Jason Moreau
Yeah, which is pretty amazing that that’s possible and conceivable. Yeah in in listening to the interview, I was struck again real time. I it it popped into my head but also just, you know, relistening to it.

There’s no excuse for anybody to say well, I don’t know where to get started with sustainability because they literally got started with spreading bio solids on a concrete slab as an experiment with the sun as an R&D. Like I wonder how long it would take the sun to evaporate, you know, a certain percentage of the water from this for it to become I think was class B at the time.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, it’s different classes. Yeah.

Jason Moreau
Yeah, but I just I was like you can always start somewhere and it’s just Yeah, I mean maybe that experiment would have failed but I mean, I just ton of kudos that they even thought to try and just go.

Sheldon Young
I wonder what would happen, you know, yeah, that’s awesome power of curiosity there for sure. And then moving it to like a greenhouse setting, you know, right? It’s largely creating all this value with really minimal impact.

You’re using a resource. It’s already there the sun and basically harnessing it to do a lot of the work of drying these bio solids, right? So they’re just basically taking that sludge getting it to you know, a minimal amount of dryness, you know, or I guess a moderate amount of dryness or like a belt press or whatever it is putting it in the greenhouse getting it quite a bit farther and then just finishing it off with their gas dryer or whatever it is.

And honestly, the impact of that is significant, right? The billions of BTUs. I can’t remember what the number was.

It was like 160 something billion BTUs of sun drying. They did in a year. That’s a lot of energy and that’s a lot of greenhouse gas.

They did not create by using a gas dryer and the fact that they also took these bio solids which would have decomposed and created methane and turned it into a fertilizer. Even more impact. So really sustainability champions in terms far as I’m concerned.

Jason Moreau
And I loved the as a marketer. I loved their the test and listening to the market and seeing how the market reacts, right? So he talked about just taking a pallet of like 32 bags of their you know, how it ties like fertilizer and just everybody wanted it at the trade show, right?

And so cool. Like that’s a very interesting data point that maybe we have something here and I just yeah, I just and I guess it goes back to, you know, the story he told about him and his brother and how his dad sort of would approach, you know, their chores where it wasn’t actually a chore. It was a hey, you’re running your own little business here.

How do you want to approach it? And if you approach it that way, then you’ll reap the rewards. And I just I loved the whole story.

And I mean, it just I don’t know made me think like, you know, what what more could I be doing, you know, in terms of like my own kids or the people I’m going to pay you to think that way, you know, I’m going to pay you in a sow.

Sheldon Young
I want to give you a sow. That’s your bonuses here. Jason.

I go do what you may. I loved I totally love that. I mean again, I think and I mentioned it during our interview with the fact of their you talk about companies and teams being like families.

They are tight group, you know, at Merrell Brothers. They treat their people again from all of the things I have seen and witnessed and on the obvious promotions from within and the growth that they give to their people. They’re winning the fight there when it comes to being a sustainable company from a human perspective.

And enriching the lives of the people that work for you. So I really give them kudos for that. I enjoy I enjoy them particularly for that reason as a partner to work with and so it’s fun to have people that treat their people really well.

Jason Moreau
Oh hundred percent. Yeah.

Sheldon Young
Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I think just in general like this whole thing with the partners they work with the trust and collaboration they have an intern in their their waste into resources.

Love it. So I don’t know. I what are the what are my favorite interviews?

I have one of my favorite interviews of the year Jason so far.

Jason Moreau
Yeah, I agree.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, for sure. A little a little hedger for myself, but I know just great people and thank you. I say thank you again to Merrell Brothers learn more about them.

It’s a it’s Merrell Brothers. I believe Merrell Brothers Merrell bros.com. I believe it is bros and you can learn what they do and you definitely if you if you’re into the water wastewater space, I think they go to a lot of the wastewater shows like left deck as well.

So look for them there say hi to them. If you got if you’re in the wastewater world and have a project about hey, I’d love to do something with my biosolids look them up there. They’re good people.

So absolutely. All right. Well Jason, I think that brings us to the end of our session here today again.

It’s always great. If you have any ideas for guests or a comments on this episode, feel free to reach out to us. It’s nofootprints.podcast@alfalaval.com.

A L F A L A V A L don’t forget to tell your friends about no footprints. We like more more listens more people joining the family here like subscribe share it with your friends follow us on LinkedIn Jason and I are both on LinkedIn are active on there and we always share stuff about the the podcast. So dive on in and say hi for sure.

We like to know who’s listening and if you have ideas send them our way.

Jason Moreau
Absolutely.

Sheldon Young
How’s that? Was that good marketing Jason? We’re getting solid first take.

Jason Moreau
Thank you. I mean no need for a second take. I mean, you nailed it.

Sheldon Young
Yeah, you gotta get one of those little I actually have one of those little clappers. If you want one, if you didn’t like it, you can just give it the clapper. They you know, not not the thing that turns the lights.

Jason Moreau
Oh, right. No, you know what I mean? The clack board.

Yeah, I don’t know that you want to give me that power and authority, but I don’t want to be sure.

Sheldon Young
I’ll take it. I don’t I don’t want to know that’s smart. Yeah, that’s yeah.

With that, let’s let these let’s just these people go. All right.

Jason Moreau
Bye everybody.

Sheldon Young
Our guests come from many industries and companies as we are talking about how the world makes sustainability real. Our company Alfa Laval is a global supplier of process solutions. So it’s very possible that the organizations our guests are with may use Alfa Laval or even our competitors’ products.

This does not mean that we the hosts or Alfa Laval are endorsing any of the company’s guests or the specific ideas that we discuss.