THE BEGINNING
Would you believe that before we were consumed with creating practical ways to process waste, our Technical Development team was working primarily on complex composite parts and tooling for aerospace programs? That’s right—over the last 20+ years, CEO Peter Janicki has led teams to develop materials and manufacturing processes in the composite and large-scale machining worlds at Janicki Industries that have now become industry standard. This leadership in innovation is exactly what attracted the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to approach the Janicki team to assist them in solving sanitation challenges throughout the developing world. The fact that we were not already entrenched in the conventional systems used to mitigate waste problems allowed us to approach the challenge from a different perspective.
INTRO TO SANITATION
In 2011, we accepted the Foundation’s challenge to address the universal problem of waste. The team recognized this as an opportunity to develop technology that could make a major impact in the world: Over 700,000 children die each year due to poor sanitation, and millions more are impacted by various other effects of inadequate sanitation. This was unacceptable to us, and we knew there had to be a better way. We took the time to study the problem both technically and on the ground in the neediest communities to the point where Peter himself became violently ill on one of his trips to Africa. Lying in a hospital that was filled to capacity with others in the same pathogen-stricken state provided increased resolve and re-born optimism to solve this problem in a big way. To realize this vision, Janicki Bioenergy was established in 2014 with waste processing and waste-to-energy as its core focus. Janicki Bioenergy ultimately rebranded to Sedron® Technologies in 2018.
TECHNOLOGY REALIZATION
The first Janicki Omni Processor pilot unit, model S100, was manufactured in 2013 and has been operating in Dakar, Senegal since May of 2015. The S200 doubled the capacity of the S100 and shipped to West Africa in 2021.
Successfully piloted in 2022, the Firelight® toilet is one of our smaller technologies, but no small feat of engineering—this toilet is revolutionary in so many ways. In the future, Sedron® intends on building the right partnerships to facilitate commercialization.
Conceptualization of Sedron’s Varcor® system started to really take shape in 2017. Varcor® focuses on taking liquid waste slurries and recovering nutrients for beneficial reuse. The first application, in 2019, was on a dairy farm in the US. Subsequent dairy farms have adopted the technology as well, and the first septage receiving facility started operations in Washington State in early 2023. As the company places its initial focus with this technology domestically, it is quickly gaining traction in multiple sectors and is promising to be a huge game changer.
