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Melanie McClare: Working Smarter With Wastewater at Swirltex
By injecting gas into the influent stream, Swirltex increases the efficiency of tubular membranes.
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nnovation can take many forms, and these can include making existing technology work better and more efficiently. Swirltex is committed to doing exactly that. The company produces custom, modular wastewater treatment systems that use buoyancy-based membrane filtration to more efficiently separate solids and liquids, producing higher-quality effluent and better production rates while requiring less energy. Swirltex’s technology is designed to augment existing wastewater infrastructure, eliminating the need for expensive capital upgrades. In this interview, Swirltex CEO Melanie McClare tells Municipal Water Leader about how Swirltex is driving innovation across the wastewater management sector. Municipal Water Leader: Please tell us about your background and how you came to be in your current position.
28 | MUNICIPAL WATER LEADER | May 2021
Municipal Water Leader: Tell us about Swirltex as a company. Melanie McClare: We’re a team of nine headquartered in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; we have a few people in Houston, Texas, as well. We serve both industrial and municipal customers and target wastewater reuse. We currently operate in Canada and the United States. We’re focusing on growing into the South American and Asia-Pacific markets over the next 2 years. municipalwaterleader.com
PHOTOS COURTESY OF SWIRLTEX
Melanie McClare: I have a chemical engineering background. Right out of school, I bounced around the world to countries in Europe and West Africa, mainly in the industrial sector. I landed in the water industry in 2008, when I started working for a fast-growing company called FilterBoxx that serviced customers through a fully containerized modular approach to solving water and wastewater problems. Most of the sales happened in Canada.
During my 9 years at FilterBoxx, I started working on my MBA. One of the programs that was part of the MBA was an accelerator for deep science–based technology companies that needed business help. That’s how I met the founder of Swirltex, Peter Christou. He had invented this wastewater technology in his garage and had had the opportunity to test it in Antarctica for the European Space Agency. I thought that was a really interesting start to his journey. I was fascinated by the technology, and he needed some help on the business side getting the company going and raising capital. I took the leap and joined Peter in 2018. Since then, we’ve grown the company, and we are now servicing three different vertical markets. We have some amazing customers, and it’s been an awesome 3 years.
