AIMM’s hierarchically porous carbons (HPCs) are a tunable porous carbon material for wastewater treatment. This platform technology enables superior, tailored contaminant uptake at vastly faster speeds—over 20 times faster than the best performing activated charcoals. Yet, HPCs present as charcoal powder, a form factor used in wastewater treatment for 100 years.
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Luis Estevez
Luis Estevez is the founder and CEO of AIMM, a startup focused on clean water. His unorthodox career path began with obtaining a mechanical engineering degree at 35—after spending his twenties running his family’s Spanish restaurant. An internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory opened his eyes to a scientific career, inspiring him to obtain a Ph.D. in materials science at Cornell University, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, resulting in 40 peer-reviewed articles with over 5,000 citations.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
The global $1.8T textile industry has a massive problem: it is the world’s second biggest polluter after the fossil fuels industry. Roughly one fifth of the world’s total wastewater is produced by this industry—most of it involving dyes. Dye wastewater is not only toxic to aquatic life and human health, but it also disrupts ecosystems by blocking sunlight from reaching aquatic plants. Efforts to combat the consequences of “fast fashion,” such as textile recycling fall short when it comes to effectively removing dyes and other legacy chemicals used extensively in textiles, such as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS), from the recycling process.
Technology Vision
AIMM is focused on cleaning water using their game-changing HPCs. Much like activated charcoal, HPCs are porous charcoal-based materials—but that’s where their similarities end. Current state-of-the-art-activated charcoal has only tiny nanopores to capture contaminants such as dyes and PFAS, while AIMM’s HPCs contain a tunable and vascular-like network of pores. This thorough network enables fast uptake—between five and 25 minutes—versus the hours or even days activated charcoal would require. HPCs also have tunable surface chemistry, allowing them to treat a range of difficult-to-remove contaminants.
Potential Impact
AIMM’s HPCs offer superior performance, but in a similar form-factor to the state-of-the-art: charcoal powder. Building on 100 years of established engineering, HPCs will not only remove harmful chemicals and PFAS from wastewater through an easy replacement into standard wastewater processes, but also have the potential to cut textile recycling process time in half and create a regeneration system for HPCs saturated with dyes. At scale, AIMM’s HPCs will continue to cut costs of production while removing them from landfills, revolutionizing how we remove harmful dyes from textile wastewater and unlocking a circular economy. AIMM will improve human and aquatic life for communities around the world while providing cost and time benefits to the textile industry.
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