Reducing Waste Makes Good Business Sense

Estimated reading time: 11 minutes

Alex Stepinski, president of Stepinski Group, and Mike Brask, president of IPS, announce a new partnership to bring Alex’s latest generation zero liquid-discharge (ZLD) waste control systems to market. Alex first developed the ZLD concept 10 years ago at a state-of-the-art PCB manufacturing facility. Over the years he refined and improved the entire system to increase efficiency and lower cost, and different versions of the system are currently used in several facilities around the world.

IPS has been a wet process equipment producer for over 30 years, so working together makes good sense for them and helps our industry. Both greenfield and brownfield sites can move into greener manufacturing, while lowering their cost of waste treatment.

Barry Matties: Mike, why did you and Alex create this partnership?

Mike Brask: Alex and I have known each other for quite some time now. We've done projects together and always talked about how to take the next step together. He’s aware of my goals and business plan for IPS as a turnkey builder of wet process equipment. Because of Alex’s work in the waste treatment area and his advanced technologies, we looked at how to brand his products and bring to market these advanced technologies, and what service and support would be needed to make that happen and create an identity for both of us. We continued to explore ways we could collaborate, and that led to developing a business plan. We would take the things that Alex is doing on greenfield sites and apply them to brownfield sites. We want to bring these advanced concepts to market on a bigger scale. For IPS, this feeds into our objective as a turnkey wet process provider, not just with equipment, but the additional environmental accessories that are needed in today's market.

Matties: Alex, do you want to add to that?

Alex Stepinski: I’ve worked with Mike for more than 10 years, and he’s one of the most agile suppliers I’ve ever worked with, while also having an excellent price-to-value ratio for custom work. When it comes to integrating new chemical wastewater recycling technologies into existing factories, that agility is super important. Most installs for wastewater treatment equipment are at brownfield sites, so you need a partner who can assess the situation and integrate the new technology with some of the old system and manufacturing process components. Mike and his team are very adept at that, and my team specializes in the engineering support of the process integration, while also doing full chemical process simulation with empirical data for permitting.

When Mike helped me build the first new PCB facility in the United States in 2013 (since the 2000 industry collapse), there were a lot of technical challenges with new technologies and equipment to achieve a plant that produced at lower cost than China, but we made it all work. It was just about the most efficient factory ever built. We did some things that are only now just starting to come to market in the industry, and made them work: full 3D printing instead of photolithography, completely in-line touchless operation, no DL, ZLD, etc. Mike was the key contractor for all of that.

The type of recycling system designs I did when I was an employee in the past were more focused on ion exchange and other chemical treatment processes, because I only moonlighted in this area, and focused more on business topics than recycling. Now, after a two-year, mid-career back to school break, I’ve started my own engineering business and taken the time to develop a novel new product line with a central recycling system that’s almost completely physical treatment—no chemicals at all. We eliminated the need to source almost all the chemicals, and you can even mix all the rinsewaters together. The net is that it has significantly less capital cost than the systems I previously produced. The real savings, however, is with operating costs, where we have 50–80% less opex with these new designs, because we’re not using chemicals, thus achieving much higher recovery rates, halving the sludge volumes, and automating out all the labor. The new system design is revolutionary and obsoletes the previous generations of the system, while also easily out-competing traditional technologies on cost and value.

We already have two companies that have adopted the latest generation this year with a rapidly growing pipeline, which is what prompted me to contact IPS to help scale up.

Mike will be covering both the North American and European regions, where we have been receiving a lot of requests. I also have other partners already active in India and China, and will announce the partners in Taiwan, Japan, Korea, and ASEAN at TPCA in Taiwan this week, and at the productronica show in Munich. I'm coming to market as a public benefit corporation with these new wastewater designs. I am partnering exclusively with efficient, agile, and reputable SMEs, and am balancing reinvesting all profits to grow the recycling kit portfolio, while maximizing market penetration rate. At the end of the day, we just focus on getting rid of wastewater discharges globally as quickly as possible. Having the right partners is key to achieving constructive synergies for high growth. I’ve also filed a new round of patents globally, but this is just to stop others from trying to restrict the technology by stealing ideas and filing themselves. All patents associated with ZLD from Smart Process Design will be available to be used by all companies worldwide. Restricting the technology with licensing/royalties in an effort to increase shareholder value, while developing countries dump waste in the rivers for people to drink, is not something I can morally support. 

Matties: Obviously, there’s limited space in brownfield sites, and you have to work within their footprint.

Stepinski: Compared to conventional systems, a greenfield design is usually less than a third the size of a traditional system. The challenge with brownfield is integrating it without shutting it down because you can't tolerate even a minute of downtime. This is an area where Mike excels.

Matties: So, while the technology has improved, is it high on a fabricator’s investment list?

Stepinski: It seems to be moving higher on their list of priorities. We find that if over 30% of the water in your factory is deionized (which most fab shops have nowadays, if not much more), the operating cost of this system is less than whatever you're doing now. So, it's really just the capital expenses that are slightly higher than a traditional system for the ZLD units, but the ROI/LCV is much better with some of our new developments. I’ll be releasing the details of these new developments in my white paper and presentation at the TPCA show as well as at productronica.

Nolan Johnson: Does the system change compliance with local government environmental issues?

Stepinski: If you already have permits, you may no longer need some of them. In some cases, I can see you might need a different, less-burdensome permit. Usually, when you take away sources of environmental concern, the permitting level goes down. It's only in the most bureaucratic locales that it goes up, but it has happened. In general, you're getting rid of permits, and the ZLD systems have even now passed full EPA audit for reference.

Brask: We know typically our industry uses a lot of water. If you take a brownfield site and apply these concepts in phases, there won’t be downtime, it cuts down on the water bill, the amount of water used, and reclaimed water is moving in the right direction. That’s the wave of the future. Our job is to get that customer base comfortable with the idea that it can be done. A brownfield site might be using 80,000 gallons of water a day, so if they could save 80% of it, they're super excited and that’s fairly easy. But we want to get across the idea that zero discharge will clean up the regulatory issues and is achievable. I help with execution and implementation of all that. So, once our customers start seeing that benefit, I think it will take off like wildfire.

Matties: Is 80% recovery of water a typical number or is that best case?

Stepinski: Advanced systems with recovery capabilities range anywhere from 60–100% recovery. We’re seeing most fabs are doing some level of recovery nowadays. In the 1990s, when those aero or microfilter systems became popular, you could tap out around 60–90%, and then evaporate the rest at super-high cost. That’s about as advanced as it's ever gotten. Our design is a totally different concept. You're doing multistage physical treatment, converting all the organics to CO₂ gas, recovering the metals, and putting them in a roll-off. We go through a sequence of membranes and use some rectifiers to get the recovery up to 98.5–99.5%.

At that point, the cost savings of the system originates from two things. The biggest driver is the evaporation process. With such a high recovery, we can reduce the amount of liquid that needs to be evaporated, and that’s what drives most of the cost savings. The other big savings is by doing this process without chemicals. In my original designs years ago, we used chemical treatments—using chemicals to treat the other chemicals, which is very wasteful. With the physical system, we ended up with only half of the waste coming out of the evaporator in solid form. Then we have less than half in the liquid form. We have less sludge because we’re not using chemicals; there’s less to distill because we figured out how to recover it higher. That’s the key takeaway here. Because the efficiency is so high we can compete with traditional systems very easily now, which was not possible even a short time ago.

Matties: Is this a partnership between two companies or are you forming another company jointly?

Stepinski: It’s a long-term contract, a partnership for IPS to integrate these systems for clients who want turnkey systems or retrofits of their existing system. IPS assures that everything is done with high quality.

Brask: While running IPS’s traditional day-to-day operation, it’s exciting to work on this high level of engineering and technical support for the waste treatment and bring this to market. Alex will be a great resource to look at how we also deal with things, the tools that are creating the waste, and how to minimize the effect it has downfield. There's a lot of synergy and we’ll see how that will roll.

Matties: Having a company that's building the tools, or the process equipment in the waste treatment gives an advantage.

Brask: There's just a lot of excitement about the idea of being able to mix all this together. Like we mentioned, Alex and I have been talking about this for some time. Now we're executing some plans to see how that plays out. For IPS, it enhances our offering and the goal of being a turnkey solution for our customers.

Stepinski: The first product release is the next-generation central system that will be extremely hyper-efficient compared to what's been done before—all with the ability to put this and similar systems into a brownfield site. That's the first big step, and what we're announcing today. 

The next step is a detailed roadmap of circular economy products. For example, with a microetch, can you put a box on the back of the machine so that microetch lives forever? We want to fill up the swimming pool once for each of these applications and have controls that preserve the value of chemistry by treating it, removing the byproducts, and keeping it going indefinitely to keep the chemicals off the roads to improve process controls. 

Matties: Alex, we've had this discussion in the past: Why would a brownfield site bring a new waste treatment system to the top line of their capital equipment list over their direct imaging or new AOI? If they have a system that's working, even if it's not terribly efficient, it's doing the job.

Stepinski: There are a couple of drivers. First, if you have the newer design, then there is a decent ROI for most applications, because the operating cost is so much lower than what you're doing now. Second, you will get a lot of pressure from the market to change because all the newer shops are now zero waste. It will build over time, and you may be asked, “What's wrong with you?” by some regulator at some point. Third, you are de-risking your whole business. There’s much less chance that you’ll have to move your business to a different locale (which happens a lot in PRC these days).

Matties: Beyond that, if your business strategy is to sell the facility, it will be more appealing to have a zero liquid discharge facility.

Stepinski: Absolutely. You've de-risked the business significantly. If you think the regulations won’t change, you're happy that everything's under control, and your cost structure is great, then don’t change. But if you if you want to reduce your costs, and de-risk your business for the future, then you have some interesting things to think about.

Matties: Mike and Alex, thank you very much. 

Stepinski: Thank you, Barry and Nolan.

Brask: Great talking to you.