Clean Up Plan: As Featured by Inside Business
By Shawn A. Turner | September 2009 | Inside Business
Photography by Eric Mull
The light auburn liquid in the glass to the right of Mar Systems CEO Tony Lammers looks a little like iced tea. But the reddish-brown water is nothing you’d want to drink: It’s heavily contaminated with mercury.
To his left, inches from the tainted sample, is an identical vial that contains crisp, clear and, most importantly, mercury-free water. Lammers’
Solon-based water-purification company has spent almost three years creating a system that turns the murky water on the right into the clear water of the sample on the left. And now he believes his small company has a chance to make a big splash in the water purification industry.
“What we want to do is have Mar be a company on the leading edge of water-based pollution remedy processes,” Lammers says. “We’re on a steep growth path.”
Mar Systems’ process, dubbed Sorbster, was developed with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. It removes potentially deadly substances from industrial water streams through a process that binds contaminants to materials added to the water. Processing time is what gives Mar Systems a significant advantage. While Lammers says it generally takes his competitors hours to decontaminate a water sample, Sorbster allows Mar Systems to cleanse contaminated water in anywhere from minutes to seconds.
Mar Systems’ original CEO, Claude Kennard, spun the company off from the Cleveland materials management company Metaloy in 2005. (He still sits on Mar’s board of directors.) The next three years were spent raising money to fund the development of the water purification process. Mar Systems received a total of $900,000 from Cleveland development organization JumpStart Inc. and secured a total of $1.7 million in third-party financing. The company will soon finish another round of fundraising, Lammers says, though he declines to talk specifics.
That work has paid off. The company already has three patents for its process and is closing in on another: the synthetic creation of a petrochemical byproduct that has shown potential for removing contaminants.
With such success, you’d think Lammers has a strong background in the field. He doesn’t. His previous startup experience was as president and CEO of Cleveland-based consumer products company InnoDesk Inc. He also spent almost two years in China as a vice president of RT Sourcing Co., a sourcing, trading and product-development company. Former CEO Kennard, a fellow Case Western Reserve University graduate, had approached Lammers about working for Mar Systems before he departed for China.
“I was already committed to that opportunity [with RT Sourcing],” Lammers recalls. “But I was interested enough that I carried that info with me.”
When Lammers returned to Cleveland in fall 2008, he saw a newspaper story about how companies were looking outside the region to hire qualified candidates. A JumpStart official was quoted in the story, so Lammers contacted the organization to say that companies didn’t need to go outside Northeast Ohio for talented executives.
That meeting reintroduced him to Mar Systems, which seemed to be a more intriguing opportunity now that Lammers had witnessed the very real need for better water purification systems while in China.
“What’s happening over there is what happened here 40 years ago,” he says. “The industrial plants are pretty casual about what they’re doing with their waste products. The polluted water will turn in to a serious problem."
While leading a tour of Mar Systems’ 4,000-square-foot office and laboratory, Tony Kuhel, the company’s chief technology officer, lingers in the company’s storage garage. He’s looking at a silver 8-by-12-foot trailer the company uses to analyze and clean water at client locations.
“We are stewards of the environment and clean water,” he says, an approving smile spreading across his face. “It’s pretty cool.”
Inside the trailer, which company officials refer to as a mobile deployment unit or MDU, a team of just three people can examine and clean water before it seeps into a community’s ground-water supply. As part of a pilot program begun this year, Mar Systems sends the unit to client locations and cleans samples in a few minutes or less.
“You see the water coming out of the ground, and you have a heart attack,” Kuhel says. “But it looks like spring water [after it’s been processed]. It makes you feel good.”
Essentially, when Sorbster comes in contact with a contaminant, it absorbs or gathers the harmful material within seconds — without using supplemental chemicals. The material left after the process is completely recyclable, according to company officials. This is the first time Mar has begun recognizing revenue, though just how much, Lammers doesn’t want to say.
“Our plans for 2009 are relatively modest,” he adds. “Our plans for 2010 are relatively aggressive. This is our launch year.”
Robert Heath, director emeritus of the Water Resources Research Institute at Kent State University, believes the mobile treatment units are important both in remote areas throughout the developing world and in rural areas of the United States.
“There is a need for small, portable water treatment plants transported on the back of a truck,” says Heath, who has a doctorate in biophysics. “That’s the only way some of these places can be reached.”
Mar Systems has just one MDU at the moment, but Kuhel says the plan is to add another, larger MDU — an 8-by-16- foot trailer — next year. Additionally, Lammers says, Mar plans to go from five employees to as many as 20, mostly chemists and engineers, during the next six to nine months.
The market for water purification is a large one. According to data published by Beacon Equity Research, a small-cap stock research firm that follows companies in the water purification industry, the water purification market was a $450 billion industry in 2008, trailing only the power generation and oil sectors.
“There simply isn’t enough fresh water to meet the needs of growing populations and expanding economies,” writes Victor Sula, a senior analyst with Beacon Equity Research.
Bill Purves, president and lead chemist of Mercury One Ltd. in Twinsburg, which specializes in analyzing mercury levels in water, says the market in which Mar is engaged could prove to be a lucrative one, especially now that the EPA is increasing its enforcement of water quality standards.
“I think Mar is positioned very well to get a foothold on the treatment side,” he says. “Already, we’ve seen a lot more enforcement.”
Purves is impressed with the job Lammers has done so far.
“I think he’s doing an excellent job of going in and getting it off the ground,” he says. “He has knowledge of his customers and what it will take to move the company forward.”
Mars’ customers are engaged in the industrial sector, though Lammers declines to identify them. For now, Lammers says he is content to focus on the U.S. industrial market, but he hints at an entry into the U.S. consumer and foreign markets, though those ventures are still a long way off.
“Heavy-metal contamination is a global marketplace,” Lammers says. “It’s big, and it’s growing. There’s an enormous opportunity in the rest of the world.”Mar Systems has created a new, faster, portable water-cleaning process that could make the small Solon firm a major player in the water purification market.
