Anyone who’s been to the beach knows that sand and water go well together.
So maybe it’s only natural that Chardon’s Fairmount Minerals, one of North America’s leading suppliers of industrial sand, has launched a new subsidiary focused on clean water, one of our planet’s most pressing issues.
It’s a noble goal and one that advances Fairmount’s sustainability mission of people, planet and prosperity. Nearly 1 billion people lack access to clean water, and more than 3.5 million people die due to water-related illness, according to the World Health Organization. By 2050, more than a third of the Earth’s population could lack access to a clean, secure source of water.
“Any technologies that even have the potential to be used toward that effort are of interest to Fairmount,” says Dave Chew, (pictured at left) director of sales and marketing for the new subsidiary, Fairmount Water Solutions.
So Fairmount acquired the rights and equipment to manufacture Macrolite Engineered Ceramic Media, an artificial substance smaller than a grain of sand, from Newbury’s Kinetico Inc.
Patented by 3M in the 1980s, the ceramic composite spheres exhibit impressive characteristics. Each orb has a durable, rough surface that fits with a jigsaw tightness, forming a formidable barrier most particles cannot penetrate.
Although it has been around for years, it wasn’t until the ’90s that these properties were properly exploited, when 3M sold the rights to Kinetico.
“They didn’t really know what to do with it,” explains Chew, who was a director of marketing at Kinetico at the time. “So they were looking for someone to take advantage of it.”
Kinetico did just that, using Macrolite in water-filtration beds, large tanks used to remove contaminants such as dirt and pathogens from water pumped through it. The tough material’s high flow rate makes the process quicker and more effective than sand, a common water-filtration media.
Although 40 times more expensive per ton, Macrolite takes up less space and traps contaminants as small as 3 microns, or 3 millionths of a meter. Conventional filter beds remove solids down to 10 microns. Not even major microbial culprits, like giardia and cryptosporidium, which killed dozens during a 1993 outbreak in Milwaukee, can pass through a Macrolite barrier.
Macrolite has already proven itself in that area. Chardon has seen dramatic results since a 2005 Kinetico pilot study used the ceramic media to remove arsenic from its well water.
“Chardon had roughly 12 parts per billion, and now it’s undetectable,” says Dan Sellitto, Chardon’s water superintendent. (The Environmental Protection Agency’s standard is 10 ppb.)
Macrolite is already being used in 60 to 70 other municipalities as well. But Fairmount is thinking bigger — more cities and more uses. To fulfill its mission to “help the world get clean water,” Chew says, Fairmount believes Macrolite can be useful in the desalination of seawater into potable water.
Most of the world’s approximately 1,500 desalinization plants use a distillation process that forces a high-pressure stream of salt water across a semipermeable membrane that won’t allow salt and other contaminates to penetrate. However, the process is expensive and consumes a lot of energy, so it is used only in extreme environments. Recent methods have involved heating water and forcing it through the membrane to remove salt.
Macrolite’s structure could be a benefit as a prefiltration step in the process, extending the life of a desalinization plant’s membrane and reducing how frequently it needs to be cleaned to maintain its effectiveness. “These two items account for the biggest operating costs related with desalinization,” Chew says.
Lower costs mean the expensive process may someday be affordable to all coastal nations and change the way we look at a day at the beach.