washington business
Below:
The prototype
Omni Processor in
Sedro-Woolley,
before it was
disassembled for
shipment to Dakar,
Senegal (at right).
“It’s definitely making a huge impact
and a big impression over here.
There’s a lot of excitement.”
— Aaron Janicki, from Dakar, Senegal, where he is
meeting with elected officials about setting up future
versions of the Omni Processor
building the future in sedro-wooley
The Omni Processor uses the potential energy inside sewage
sludge to fire a steam engine and a process called fluidized
sand combustion to boil the water at 1,000 degrees Celsius.
The 1,800 liters of distilled, filtered water that come out the
final tap of the prototype Omni Processor each day meet all
international and U.S. standards.
“We didn’t invent anything,” said Peter Janicki. “There’s
nothing new here. All we did was take stuff that had existed
before and we shrunk it down and put it together in a very
nice package.”
So what will keep the Omni Processor from becoming
another expensive, complicated, broken-down relic in a faroff land? Two things: profit motive and the Internet.
First, the local partners in
the developing world will have
a strong incentive to keep the
Bill Gates Blog:
machine running — it makes them
http://bit.ly/wastetoH2O
money every day by producing
valuable commodities.
Janicki Bioenergy:
Second, the machine is designed
www.janickibioenergy.com
so that it can be monitored and
diagnosed over the Internet, with
Twitter:
world-class engineers in Washingtwitter.com/janickibionrg
ton giving direction to locals on
maintenance and repairs.
30 association of washington business
Janicki Bioenergy is working with the state of Washington to
open a research and development site at the historic Northern
State Hospital facility in the Janicki family’s hometown of SedroWoolley. The state-owned 250-acre former mental hospital
— abandoned for 40 years — would eventually become work
space for 1,000 people, mostly engineers. Janicki envisions it as
a place where people would come from around the world to help
develop solutions for sanitation and water treatment.
Janicki’s vision includes researching how to scale up development of the Omni Processor to be built quickly, efficiently,
and at new factories around the world. If this machine can
truly deliver on its promise — as Janicki and Gates believe it
will — then there’s no time to waste.
“We see that providing value is incredibly important at the
end, so we need to provide a really sophisticated machine as
inexpensively as possible,” Janicki said. “We’re dealing with
multiple billions of people who need this technology.”
working with bill gates
As for his world-famous supporter, Janicki said he and Bill
Gates see the world the same way.
“He’s easy for me to talk to, he’s easy for me to get along
with, because at his core, he’s an engineer,” Janicki said. “He’s
interested in the technology, he’s interested in how it works, he’s
inquisitive, he studies everything, and he listens.”
It has also been tremendous fun watching the story circle
the world. His sons and their friends got a kick out of seeing
Gates joke with Jimmy Fallon about the technology, especially
a “taste test” that included a toast with the purified Omni
Processor water.
And for those who have trouble with the idea of drinking
water that was once human waste, Janicki said it’s a nonissue. In much of the world, the only water available is truly
fouled by sewage. Pulled from a local lake or