From Trash to Treasure: How ARC Ento Tech Is Redefining Waste Management

Lastly, we have Ramon Atad, Chairman and Managing Director of ARK Intotech, an Aussie biotech company that's refining and redefining waste management.

Ramon is a seasoned management and engineering professional with 36 years experience.

He's developed the company's patent pending technology.

So now over to you Ramon.

Thank you, Jamie.

Thank you for having me.

And just want to start with, you know,

What is it that we're trying to do here?

So the first thing we do is try to understand what the problem is.

And the problem is really about waste.

It's an everyday thing.

We talk about it.

We read about it.

We want to do something about it, but nothing has really been done in enough efficiency to effectively address this issue, which is why we still talk about the same things every year.

Now, what are we seeing?

We're seeing billions of tons of waste being buried.

It's fine while we have space, but we're running out of space to bury the problem.

Now, just to give you a perspective of where we're at, there's about 2 billion tons of waste being buried around the year.

2 billion tons of waste produced every year, and less than 20% of that is recovered.

In Australia, less than 27% is recovered.

That means the balance of that amount of waste being generated is ending up in landfill.

What do we need to do?

We need to understand what's the real impact of burying waste.

It all goes to landfill, and we're running out of landfill space.

Now, what happens when you bury waste in landfill?

Basically, you have all these issues with contamination, methane gas, which affects our atmosphere, and leachate.

It's all an environmental issue or problem we'll have to deal with in the future.

So the time is, at this point in time, when we're running out of space,

What do we start to do?

What do we have to do?

It's not easy to process always.

We have solutions for some types of waste, like we can recycle some of them.

We can reuse some of them.

But the bulk of the waste is still being ending up is still ending up in landfill.

Or at worst, we try to destroy them or hide them in systems or processes that actually create more problems for the future.

What have we done?

So what we've done is you have to look at the solution that consists of

a total addressing system approach to the problem.

The problem is mixed solid waste is quite complex.

It has organic and inorganic content, which means how do we address those two types of waste and still come up with an economic solution?

Because sustainability, a sustainable solution has three pillars.

It must have a social equity,

It must provide environmental viability, but most of all, it must be profitable.

So in addressing those three pillars of sustainability, we developed our technology.

And that's important because with missing one of those pillars, then the solution is not sustainable.

Now it's easy to create environmental solutions.

It's easy to create socially equitable solutions.

The hardest part and the biggest challenge is

the economics of it.

How do we make the solution viable, commercially viable?

We had to look at it from a business point of view rather than just saying, you know, it's the right thing to do.

It's not enough that we talk about the right things to do because somebody has to pay for it.

And every time you pay more, there's always resistance.

We had to create a business outcome.

In other words, we had to change a perspective to the problem

by changing the approach to problem to a approach to an opportunity, resource.

Converting that perspective from a problem to a resource allowed us to create a business solution.

And the business solution will make it commercially viable so that we achieve the two other pillars, which is social equity and environmental sustainability.

So how do we do that?

we had to change the prospect or the approach we did to the problem and looked at it from every component of that waste stream.

And that's what we've done.

We've come up with a total solution.

We're not just dealing with one aspect, like maybe just the organic side or just the inorganic side, like plastics.

We came up with a total plant design and a total plant concept, which by the way is patent pending because it's unique.

We are in a space that has no competition, literally.

We're in a space where people have given up and the only approach or the last resort is bury it, burn it, hide it.

And that's not enough.

If we're going to make a real change in the world, we have to look at difference.

Our solution is a complete waste of resource.

And we've applied both biological processes using insects, a unique approach to using insects.

Why?

Insects have been bio-engineered by nature for millions of years to do one thing perfectly.

convert all our excess, convert all our waste.

Now given enough time, they can do it.

What we've done is we've developed a process that allows them to be used so that they provide a business opportunity for us.

Our insects recover the organic component and we can convert that into new sustainable products that can replace and substitute unsustainable commodities that we're using today.

And that's the same as in the case of the inorganics.

The inorganics we currently throw away such as plastics, big, big problems.

75% of our waste is really inorganics.

We had to be creative in how we look at that.

We don't look at it as a problem.

We saw it as an opportunity and we saw it by making a new product out of plastic, not the conventional approach that says, oh, we're gonna make

furniture or fuel from all that, it's all about cost and it's all about market.

What we've done is we've developed a synthetic substitute for coal, which we call SYNCO.

Now, why is that important?

Because it's the elements of the product that are the real market value, that provides the market value to create the business.

Now, why is that critical for the model?

Our model is completely different because we also base it

where all waste is being consolidated today, always goes to landfill.

And that's where we put the process.

That's where we apply the recovery systems.

We capture it there, we convert it there, and then we bring it out as new products.

We give it new life.

But in that whole concept of giving it new life, we're able to create a viable business opportunity.

We make a profit from recovering the resource.

We've got the processing plants designed to take

as low as 10 tons per day to 330 tons per day.

And that's what we're offering right now.

We're offering an opportunity to invest and to engage and to participate in this technology.

It's an emerging technology.

It's going to be a game changer.

It's a disruptive system to what's being used today, but it will provide a model that can be used anywhere in the world.

It doesn't matter whether you're first world or third world or developing.

Waste is waste.

The solution is the same.

We create an economy that's based on recovering from that resource to feed into applications today where we're using non-sustainable material.

For example, in steel making, we use natural coal or metallurgical coke.

We can use our synthetic coal for that.

In producing feeds for our food, we use fish meal from wild-caught fish stocks, which can't be sustained.

because there's not enough fish to keep feeding the world as the global population grows.

But what's constant about our protein, our source of protein, which is insect-based, it's an insect meal, where there's people, there's waste, and where there's waste, there's insects.

We use that opportunity to create a sustainable protein to produce our food for the future.

Now, even our process generates some organic waste from the processes of the insects consuming organics,

that's also converted into an organic fertilizer, which we can then produce more of our food.

That's what we call a completely and entirely circular system.

It's this concept of circularity that will make a difference in the world's management of waste.

Today, we all do something a small bit in every part, but we still haven't addressed the end, which is why there's a whole amount, there's a large amount of waste still being

thrown away, buried and looked at as a problem.

We have to stop looking at this as a problem.

We have to look at waste today as a very important secondary resource.

And that secondary resource is where the world has to go.

We have to stop relying on primary resources, conserve that for the future of our future generations,

and create an economy through a business model that makes a profit through secondary resource recovery.

And that's what the whole concept of the AHRQ process delivers.

It delivers a total solution to waste management where we will no longer bury waste in landfill,

We will convert waste into commodities we need for our future, regardless of what challenges we face in the future.

That's what we are offering today.

An opportunity to invest in the company and to join us in this venture, which is going to drive the way we recover resources in the future.

Thank you, Jamie.

Thanks for your presentation, Ramon.

Again, you have time for a few questions.

Sure.

by all means.

So what makes this technology different from the rest?

So we've had to look at the business model.

It's all about the business.

It's all about economics.

And it's in that approach that we provided a different concept to recovering organics through insects, through the use of insects, but not in the conventional sense where it's not contaminated.

We are realistic in understanding that most of the organics that can be processed or recovered is contaminated with either plastics or some other material that contaminates the product.

we have found a solution to being able to recover that despite the contaminants.

And it's the same way.

So what do we do with the residual waste?

We provide a solution so that there is value.

It's all about value recovery.

And that's different from any process around the world today.

How does this technology attain one of the key pillars of sustainability, namely profit?

It really revolves around economics.

We have to make a profit.

And the only way to make a profit is to be competitive.

We can't rely on subsidies or goodwill to keep a sustainable solution in place because it'll discriminate by economic level or economic standards, right?

So what we've done is we've looked at the business aspect.

We looked at the competition.

And we're not talking about competition in our space, we're talking about the commodities we're targeting to substitute how they're applied, what are the barriers, what are their requirements quality-wise and price-wise.

And by creating that target and using the revenue streams we've generated from our model, we found that we can compete with any current commodity and provide a truly sustainable alternative.

Thanks Ramon, great to see you and it was a great presentation.

You're welcome Jamie.