‘It’s funny how you make relationships’
A wind-up for the Regina Nancy Greene Ski program this spring led to a conversation between the owners of two Regina-based environmental companies, and it’s been downhill ever since.
“At the ski wind-up, we were just (shooting the breeze),” said Sean Frisky, CEO of Ground Effects Environmental Services Inc. “I said ‘We’ve got extra capacity in our shop’ and he (Ryan Van Dijk, CEO of Living Sky Water Solutions Inc.) said ‘We’re building this (new wastewater treatment plant) and maybe there’s something we can do.’
“One thing led to another and we had a few meetings and then it seemed like a good fit for us.”
Ground Effects, which Frisky started 18 years ago to clean up soil and groundwater contaminated by hydrocarbons, was looking for some diversification from the oil and gas business, while Living Sky was looking for an environmental engineering company with some experience in manufacturing specialized equipment.
“For us, it was some diversification outside of oil and gas, which is up and down, and right now it’s down,” Frisky said. Added Van Dijk: “We were always looking for someone to partner with, to manufacture for us.”
So the two companies recently formed a partnership that will see Ground Effects become the official manufacturer for Living Sky’s leading edge wastewater treatment technology.
“One of the things we bring to the table is, they have a new technology and we can bring some of our experience with different technologies,” Frisky said.
“It’s not just purely manufacturing where we weld exactly what they want, but we can add some value and shared experiences on how to improve things.”
Specifically, Ground Effects is manufacturing components for Living Sky’s patented wastewater treatment technology, which is owned by Micromet, an Australian environmental technology company, but licensed in Canada by Living Sky.
“Sean and the Ground Effects team have experience in making everything CSA (Canadian Standards Association) approved, so all regulations and standards that need to be met within Canada, we can look to them for all that,” Van Dijk said.
Living Sky is offering Micromet’s innovative wastewater treatment solutions to Saskatchewan communities that are facing challenges with their current infrastructure.
Compared with traditional wastewater lagoons, Van Dijk said Living Sky’s system treats wastewater in less than an hour, requires no chemicals, filters, or membranes; fits in a building half the size of a tennis court; uses minimal power; and can be retrofitted to existing wastewater treatment infrastructure.
In order to prove the technology in Canada, Living Sky conducted a pilot project in the town of Pilot Butte, east of Regina, in 2013-14. The technology was built to specifications recommended by the Saskatchewan Water Security Agency (WSA) and monitored by a local engineering firm.
“We ran it through a 12-month cycle and put it through a ‘shock test’ where we ran all kinds of chemicals through the system,” Van Dijk said. “That was mainly to satisfy the WSA.”
Following completion of the pilot project in 2014, the WSA approved Living Sky’s ‘flagship project’ at Kerrobert in west-central Saskatchewan.
“The building is being built right now and the manufacturing of our equipment has already started. We would expect to have a ribboncutting ceremony in late fall,” Van Dijk said.
And Van Dijk believes this could be the first of many such projects across Saskatchewan.
“In 2010, some federal regulations came in that have changed water quality standards and capacities. So a lot of lagoons that are around Saskatchewan are now under-sized and not meeting standards for (effluent) discharge. What our system is designed to do is work with the existing infrastructure, increase the capacity of the lagoon and give a consistently higher quality of product water.”
Because the Living Sky system can be added to the existing lagoon system, the wastewater treatment facility doesn’t require expensive reconstruction or expansion.
“It utilizes the advantages of the existing lagoon, so we didn’t have to increase the footprint very much. The footprint of our system for Kerrobert is about 1,000 square feet.”
Added Frisky: “The alternative is to increase the lagoon size dramatically, which is a huge capital expenditure and footprint. And who wants a big (sewage lagoon) in their backyard?”
Even biological wastewater treatment technology requires “a massive surface area, so the size of the building, equipment and capital is not even close (to the Living Sky system),” Frisky said.
“This is a low-cost alternative technology.”
Van Dijk said the Living Sky system will increase the capacity of Kerrobert’s wastewater treatment by about 4,000 people, which is more than three times the size of the town’s current population of 1,300.
Saskatchewan has hundreds of similar municipal wastewater systems.
“That same model can be applied to Western Canada, Canada, the U.S. The opportunity is fairly large,” Frisky added.
And all because of a chance conversation at a ski club wind-up a few months earlier.
“It’s funny how you make relationships,” Van Dijk said. “With kids and sports, a lot of times you end up meeting people that you didn’t expect you’d meet. Here we found someone right within Regina with two decades of experience in making equipment like this.”