From East End breweries to refugee camps, this entrepreneur is turning waste water into energy

After getting sick in India, Thomas Fudge is on a mission to improve sanitation and access to clean water across the globe, says Hazel Sheffield

Fudge has invented a modular system to decentralise the treatment of dirty water – and turn it into energy

Thomas Fudge was travelling around India one university summer when he got sick. At the time he was studying product design as an undergraduate, but after a month being laid up from an infection connected to the poor quality water and sanitation in the country, he returned to England a stone lighter and the kernel of an idea for a business that could employ the latest technology to turn dirty water into energy.

“I was quite sick for three months from stomach issues and that sparked my interest in how you remove waste and stop the spread of disease,” he says down the phone from the west London office of Wase, his startup which employs the latest technology to turn toilet water into energy.

Wase is an example of the circular economy: it takes dirty water from latrines in a refugee camp, for example, and runs it through a system to produce methane. Methane can be used as gas power for heating and cooking, while the leftover wastewater is full of nutrients, including phosphorus, potassium and nitrates that can be used in fertiliser.

The scientific process is an improvement to the one used in anaerobic digestion, which is widely used by supermarkets to turn waste food into biogas, which can then be converted into electricity through burning. Wase integrates an electrode technology that speeds up the biological breakdown of waste. The hydrogen created in this process can be consumed by bacteria during digestion, converting carbon dioxide into methane much faster. This produces 20 per cent more methane, the largest chemical component of biogas, generating 1.3 to 1.7 times more energy than in anaerobic digestion.

The Wase process can be completely decentralised, treating wastewater at the source rather than after the expensive process of pumping it to a central plant for treatment. That means it could be transformative for refugee communities who do not have access to toilets, as much as for developed countries who are seeking more environmentally conscious ways of disposing of waste.

One mother with five children said currently they have to build a pit latrine every six months

A better system is urgently needed in the UK, now that London’s Victorian sewage system is needs urgent renewal. Fudge says the frequent appearance of fatbergs – giant solidified masses of fat, oils, wet nappies and sanitary waste – are a signal that the current waste disposal infrastructure is no longer fit for purpose.

Fudge says authorities need to think about waste disposal completely differently. Rather than combining all the wastewater into one big river of chemicals, bacteria and organic matter, the streams should be kept separate, with one stream for toilet waste and another from the washing machine, for example, so that treatment can be more effective.

“Decentralisation is the way forward and having expensive sewage works are extremely costly, there are quite often issues,” Fudge says. “Industry should be trying to treat their waste onsite. Sewage works combine their streams together, combining pollutants and making it more difficult to extract, whereas if you treat the waste at source it’s easier to treat and you can create energy from that.”

Fudge spoke to The Independent not long after coming back from a trip to Kenya, where he visited two refugee camps that could soon have access to Wase sanitary systems. In Dadaab, a camp of more than 200,000 people that has been there for more than 30 years, households who have access to electricity get it from diesel generators, which is only available at night and can be unsafe. They use coal or firewood for cooking, which causes problems from smoke inhalation.

We also visited a slaughterhouse where currently the waste is disposed into open ponds. It could be a huge opportunity to treat the 5,000l of wastewater it generates every day

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“It was interesting talking to people and trying to see how we can implement the technology,” Fudge says. “One mother with five children said currently they have to build a pit latrine every six months. She showed us where she had buried the pit latrines. She was on the last one and there was no space, in that case the family has to defecate in the open. When we spoke to her about wastewater treatment she was very excited about how it could help her.

“We also visited a slaughterhouse where currently the waste is disposed into open ponds. It could be a huge opportunity to treat the 5,000 litres of wastewater it generates every day.”

Wase, which was founded in 2017, is currently a global finalist at Chivas Venture, a competition for entrepreneurs that gives away $1m (£670,000) in funding to social businesses with a positive impact on the world. The business, which has eight employees, had just closed a small fundraising round, and hopes to raise a further £1.5m in the first quarter of 2021 to grow the team and take its product, SaniWase, to market.

This year, Wase is working with SNV, a non-profit from the Netherlands, on developing solutions for refugee camps that can be managed by people locally, so that they are sustainable in the longer term. “There’s an issue about how you pay for these services,” Fudge says. “We are trying to develop relationships with industries because the sanitation sector is a very difficult sector to work in and heavily reliant on grants to develop a business model over time.”

In London, Wase is working with the Forest Road Brewery. The idea is to use the SaniWase modular system so that waste can be recycled onsite, creating a biogas that can be used to power the brewery. James Garstang, head brewer at Forest Road, says that for him, recycling wastewater is one way of future-proofing the business. “I’ve been working in this industry for a decade and it does pang when you’re pouring things down the drain,” he says. “If you want growth you have got to take care of these things.”

But Fudge hopes that in the longer term, SaniWase will be integrated into existing waste disposal systems – from industry, to households. “It can be used to replace septic tanks but also by utilities to upgrade systems and generate biogas,” Fudge says. “It really has huge scope.”