With a raise of £530,000 Pure Capture Innovations founders Mark Wild and Usman Shoukat are ready to utilise biochar’s macro/mesoporous structure to tackle PFAS in water systems. With water companies earmarking £5 billion of capital investment to deal with PFAS in the next few years, current technology on the market is solving the problem inefficiently. With more PFAS the current response is to build, more, bigger tanks with more replacements every few weeks. Read the interview below to learn how Pure Capture Innovations is using biochar to design smarter, drop-in circular PFAS capture.
what is pure capture innovations?
Sara: Hi, I’m joined by Mark, who’s one part of the founding team of Pure Capture Innovations. Can you tell us, in a nutshell, what Pure Capture Innovations is?
Mark: Yeah, so Pure Capture Innovations started through Carbon13, with the aim of removing carbon 10 million tonnes of CO2. We realised we could do that using biochar, for example, because it’s already a sustainable form of carbon.
But we realised we didn’t just want to be another biochar company. We decided that the industry needs to grow, and it needs new markets. So, we focused on how we could create a new market for biochar, and we found water purification.
With that, it was a question of how biochar could break into water purification against incumbent materials. And around that time, in the news almost every day, you’d hear stories about PFAS and short-chain PFAS, and the health effects that’s creating in the food chain and in the water. We came up with a good approach using some additives that we can combine with biochar to really focus in on dissolved organics and those short-chain PFAS, which are a problem for the water industry.
Why This Isn’t Just Another Biochar Play
Sara: So, as you said yourself, there are a lot of biochar companies out there. What, though, is the transformation with your technology? What makes this a breakthrough that differentiates your solution from existing alternatives?
Mark: It’s not just the biochar. For biochar itself, to grow the biochar market, it’s the fact that we’re adding advanced materials, combining the macroporous and mesoporous structure of biochar, which is already good in itself, with some microporous structure to capture these really small molecules.
But I think if you then look at what the alternatives are in terms of water purification, a lot of the techniques don’t really handle large volumes of dilute pollutants, which is what’s required for the likes of drinking water and wastewater. The adsorbents that exist used to be replaced every couple of years, now they must be replaced every few weeks. You need bigger tanks, more of them. It’s too costly, it’s unsustainable. So effectively, what they’re looking for is a more effective adsorbent, an easy drop-in solution that’s cost-effective and better than what’s out there right now.
The alternative is that you can concentrate these impurities and then destroy them, but again, that’s a costly process.
Why Water Companies Should Care
Sara: I think the problem is quite clear, but what’s the opportunity here? What’s the benefit for the water companies? Why are you helping their bottom line, at the end of the day?
Mark: There’s £5 billion of capital investment earmarked just to deal with PFAS in the UK over the next few years. And what we’re doing is using the same technologies, just more of them, which is unsustainable, essentially. We need better solutions. So, what we’re really looking for is a simple solution that can use existing capital, without requiring new capex or new technologies.
And we’re looking, overall and systemically, at building in sustainability, there’s the opportunity to avoid landfill, to reuse these materials in other industries, such as the built environment. By building sustainability into the core of the idea, we think there are opportunities right across the value chain of the waste, in a sense.
The Roadmap to 2027
Sara: Okay. So, what is the milestone you’re trying to hit by 2027?
Mark: So the two grants we’ve got right now are all about meeting those milestones for 2027. We have one grant, which was an investor partnership with Carbon13, thank you very much, and that’s very much a sprint-based, agile materials development programme, which really gets our IP and our product moving, and gives us our costings and our technical roadmap going forward in much more detail.
And then we’ve got a second grant, which is about supply chain. So, we’re building our supply chain and looking at how we’re going to scale, and who those scaling partners are. We’re building a collection of memorandums of understanding and contracts that we can pull together to form consortiums for larger grants, and so on.
That’s really what all this is about, building that momentum so that by 2027, we’re ready to take the next step in terms of funding, but also in terms of pilots, in terms of offering our water-testing services, our paid pilots, and further developing our IP portfolio, because, as a licensing-based company, we need to build on that.
Sara: I’m really excited about the progress you guys are going to make. I’m very excited. Thank you very much, Mark.
Mark: Thank you. Thanks for your time.