About

Ellakmon is a company with pioneer technologies in renewable energy sources and wastewater treatment. Aiming to play a significant role in the challenge towards green economy, applying environmental technologies that promote a circular and sustainable economy, the company plans to expand its activities, introducing and promoting to the Greek market new electromechanical equipment and technologies.

Solution & Product

This project meets the specific needs that arises in the industry to seek and develop economically viable and technically efficient methods of wet industrial waste management. This need is urgent in our time, as we often hear scientists reporting the huge problem of aquifer contamination, resulting in the contamination of almost all foods in the food chain (fruits, vegetables, fish and meats that are polluted with heavy metals as they are watered by contaminated rivers and boreholes). The stricter legislation imposed today, as a consequence of the catastrophic effects of groundwater contamination on the environment, but also on humans themselves, encourage industries to develop innovative treatment methods, which will be efficient, but also economical sustainable. This proposal attempts to address this problem by developing an innovative pilot unit, combining high efficiency in the removal of pollutants and reduced processing costs. It is proposed to develop an industrial wastewater treatment plant, which will be placed in the effluent of the biological treatment of each industry (tertiary treatment) and will include three fluid beds (continuous reactors). Each of the fluid beds will be filled with a different filler (mineral, modified mineral and compost or microorganism culture), to allow each bed to remove a different type of pollutant, in order to allow the entire system to efficiently process the fluids waste produced by any type of industry.

Innovation & Scalability

The key elements of innovation of this project are: • For the first time, a unit is created, which can efficiently treat the liquid waste produced by any form of industry and with any combination (cations, anions, non-polar organic compounds). • For the first time, a unit is created, with high efficiency in the removal of polluting liquid industrial waste, which has low installation and operation costs and is sustainable. • For the first time, a unit is created that can remove hexavalent chromium from liquid industrial waste, which also contains many more forms of anionic and cationic pollutants and also converts it, by reducing it to trivalent, to a non-toxic form. This project is aimed at industries that produce liquid waste loaded with heavy metals and other pollutants, small and medium-sized enterprises in the private sector, the domestic industry, as well as public sector entities.

Traction & achievements

The actions that have been achieved so far are divided into two stages. In the first stage, an extensive literature review on the current situation of industrial techniques, in order to identify and document the extent of the problem, as well as the existing technical solutions to address it, so that at a later stage, they are put in a comparative perspective with the proposed one. The implementation of this action was carried out through research, analysis of wastewater samples, questionnaires on the management of their treatment and compliance with the legal framework, as well as semi-structured interviews. The research results combined with the three dissertations were extended and transformed into a new theoretical approach, which incorporates the findings of stage one, responding substantially to problems that have been detected empirically. In the second stage, the creation of a general-purpose pilot unit took place, which aims at investigating the production of experimental processes in real conditions, for the control of their properties and the scaling of size. It was also the control of feasibility and utilization, as well as the optimization of the proposed processes.

Team & Why Us

Dr Markos Margaritis is the CEO and one of the founders of Hellakmon. He holds a degree in Chemical Engineering and holds a PhD from the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), in the field of waste management and design of chemical reactors/bioreactors, entitled "Utilization of the biodegradable system with the use of pre-waste type. The second member of the research team is Mr Konstantinos Tsikas, as Chief Knowledge Officer. He is also one of the founders of the company. He has significant professional experience in strategic and business planning, organizational restructuring and business reorganization, project management and coordination, business planning, coordination and evaluation, and the transfer of explicit and implicit knowledge within a group or organization. The third member is Emmanuela Εrrera Fotiou. She is a Chemical Engineer of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, with a Master’s degree in Water Resources Management and Environmental Engineering.

Funding Needs

The funding needs of the project will cover the expenses for the dissemination and the distribution of the product, as well as the construction of an industrial scale unit.