Rapid Radicals launches pilot wastewater treatment system

Rapid Radicals, a company providing innovative, high-rate wastewater treatment, launched its pilot wastewater treatment system on Thursday, August 10 at the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District (MMSD) facility located at 5901 W. State St.

Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Dr. Paige Peters, along with Chief Executive Officer Dylan Waldhuetter, and Chief Operating Officer Will Schanen provided an overview of the technology developed at Marquette University.

“Every year in the U.S., 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage are discharged into lakes and rivers, due to sewer overflows during intense storms. That’s equivalent to 170,000 Mississippi Rivers filled with poop water,” explained Peters.

The pilot Torrent 3B Treatment System was created to combat this problem.

Inspired by Milwaukee’s almost annual occurrence of stormwater overwhelming the city’s sewer system, leaving the overflow with nowhere to go but into people’s basements and into Lake Michigan, Rapid Radical technology can also be used in a variety of other situations where a fast, portable, and energy efficient method to clean water is required.

Designed to address combined sewer overflows for municipal sewerage districts, the technology can treat water 22 times faster than conventional treatment processes. According to Peters, the mobile treatment tool is “1,000 times scale” from the company’s initial pilot.”

The company has received over $1.6 million in federal funding to support the development of the technology. In addition to participating in accelerator programs like Imagine H20 and BREW Accelerator, Rapid Radical also won the Wisconsin Governor’s Business Plan Contest in 2022.

Marquette’s Office of University Relations has filed patent applications on this important technology and recently completed a pivotal intellectual property license agreement with Rapid Radicals to facilitate the transformation of this technology to help society. The company announced it will complete its first product sale in 2024.

The partnership between MMSD and Rapid Radicals supports MMSD’s goal to eliminate sewer overflow by 2035.

To connect with Rapid Radical, click here. To learn more about the Marquette University Technology Transfer program, click here.