By Business & Finance OxyMem, a UCD spin-out company, is delighted to announce that it has won the first Water Innovation SME Award in Europe for Membrane Technologies.
The award was presented to the company at the Water Innovation Europe 2014 conference, organised by WssTP, and held last week in Brussels, Belgium.
WssTP (Water supply and sanitation Technology Platform) is the European Technology Platform for Water, initiated by the European Commission in 2004 to encourage collaborative, visionary and integrated research, development and innovation for the European water sector.
OxyMem won the award on the basis of its innovative technology, market potential and exploitation strategy. This achievement sees OxyMem characterised as a ‘best practice’ in the field of membrane technology with high-market potential.
OxyMem Ltd, which has developed a breakthrough technology for wastewater aeration, was co-founded in 2013 by Professor Eoin Casey and Dr Eoin Syron as spin-out from UCD’s School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering.
For 100 years the cornerstone of global wastewater treatment has been ‘forced’ or ‘bubble’ aeration. OxyMem’s solution does not rely on this highly inefficient method, instead it uses gas permeable membranes capable of delivering Oxygen directly to the bacteria, resulting in a four-fold energy saving with more compact, lower cost infrastructure.
The first Water Innovation SME Awards in Europe were created by WssTP to support economic opportunities for the European water sector, especially SMEs, that have generated innovative solutions and technologies for water resource management with high-market potential.
The awards ceremony took place during Water Innovation Europe 2014, a unique two-day conference, which brought the economic potential for an innovative sustainable water sector in Europe to the foreground and discussed the legal, technical and political bottlenecks that stand in the way of the European water sector in achieving its economic potential.
On receiving the award, Wayne Byrne, CEO, OxyMem said: “OxyMem is delighted to have received recognition for its innovative solution and is thrilled to be a part of this year’s conference. Water Innovation Europe is a major opportunity for people from across the water sector to meet, debate and contribute to shaping the mind-set of the new European Parliament and the new European Commission with regard to the opportunities for the European water sector, as well as the Work Programme 2016-2017 for Horizon 2020 along the lines of the Green economy concept.”
Earlier this year OxyMem, an Enterprise Ireland client company, won the overall ‘Innovation of the Year’ Award at the 2014 Irish Times InterTradeIreland Innovation Awards.
