Rapid Radicals Technology’s Torrent3 treatment system can treat municipal wastewater to discharge permit levels 20X faster than conventional treatment in 95 percent less space. It provides a cost-effective and reliable solution for eliminating sewer overflows and asset degradation during intense storm events and enabling wastewater utilities to build climate adaptation resilience.
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Paige Peters
Paige Peters is the founder and CTO of Rapid Radicals Technology, Inc., which she founded in 2016 to commercialize her graduate research on the development of a decentralized, high-rate advanced wastewater treatment process. Peters scaled both the technology and the company during her Ph.D. in civil engineering at Marquette University. Peters is passionate about pairing customer discovery principles with technical expertise to deliver appropriate solutions where needed most.
TECHNOLOGY
Critical Need
Every year, 850 billion gallons of untreated sewage are discharged into U.S. rivers and lakes due to sewer overflows during intense storm events caused by aging infrastructure, rising urban populations, and the changing climate. Current solutions, such as underground storage tanks, are invasive, capital-intensive, and undersized for today’s unprecedented and unpredictable storms. Conventional centralized wastewater takes over eight hours to treat wastewater to meet permit requirements, and not addressing peak flows can lead to long-term capital asset damage. Wastewater utility leaders seek new solutions that take up less space, use energy more efficiently, and are easy to use and maintain.
Technology Vision
Rapid Radicals’ proprietary solution, the Torrent3, can treat wastewater to the same quality as conventional treatment 20X faster in a significantly reduced footprint at a competitive capital and operating cost. The Torrent3 treatment system combines rapid solids removal followed by chemical oxidation to remove organics and disinfect harmful pathogens. With customer priorities of efficiency and ease of use in mind, our system can be integrated into existing infrastructure at the point where overflow events occur, installed at a wastewater treatment facility for additional capacity, or used as a mobile treatment solution for plug-and-play applications as needed.
Potential for Impact
Rapid Radicals’ Torrent3 treatment system increases sewer network capacity, treating water before discharge to improve regional water quality and public health. By applying a sewershed-level implementation approach—considering historic overflow volumes, land use, population, and poverty index at overflow locations to determine where decentralized installations of the Torrent3 would provide the greatest benefit to communities—Rapid Radicals will empower wastewater utilities to be agile in building climate resilience. Adopting this technology can significantly reduce or eliminate overflows through advanced treatment, save municipalities millions in fines, and protect health and the environment, providing a cost-effective solution for climate adaptation.
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