Combating Child Mortality in Brazil Due to Improper Waste Management
“In Brazil, we can expect around 50,000 deaths a year, mostly children under five years old, due to contamination and disease from mismanaged waste. Biogas from waste is 80 times more aggressive than CO2.”
Andre Tchernobilsky with ZEG (Zero Emissions Generation) is looking to change that. Their small-scale, modular pyrolysis reactor (the size of a shipping container) has passed the 9 stages of NASA innovation development including running a fully-functioning facility for 8,000 hours – all without producing any toxic gasses.
Now they are looking for the next round of funding to scale this for the 5,500+ municipalities scattered across Brazil – 96% of which are under 100,000 inhabitants – where US/EU industrial scale solutions are not viable. From our conversation while visiting São Paulo, interviewing interesting individuals for our micro-podcast series.
Podcast Transcript
Jacob: [00:00:00] All right. I’m here with Andre Tchernobilsky.
Andre: That’s correct.
Jacob: With ZEG.
Andre: ZEG, yeah.
Jacob: And why don’t you introduce yourself and your company?
Andre: Well my name is Andre Tchernobilsky, I was born and raised in Brazil. I used to work for an automotive company for around 20 years. And I resigned my position as an innovation global project manager located in Europe.
To, Found ZEG. ZEG stands for Zero Emissions Generation, it’s a renewable energy startup, let’s say. And our main focus is on waste management and waste-to-energy projects. In order to progress in Brazil, because Brazil has a lot of small municipalities, poor communities we had to develop our own technology and which is quite [00:01:00] good for waste management and waste proper disposal.
Jacob: How big of a problem is this?
Andre: Brazil right now is under a kind of waste crisis, okay? Half of the waste in Brazil does not have any proper disposal, nor even a landfilling process is being achieved in Brazil. And if you consider that Brazil has around 80 million tons of waste per year half of it, is going anywhere on the land.
We are just expecting that mother nature to take care of the waste and that causes a lot of diseases, plagues, proliferation, and climate change. One of the major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions around the globe, it’s from the waste stream, and waste processing and waste landfilling.
The [00:02:00] biogas from waste is 80 times more aggressive than CO2 for example. So waste is mostly in underdeveloped countries, they are contributing to a kind of humanitarian crisis, right? That provokes diseases that provoke plagues, pollution, groundwater pollution, air pollution, and all the kinds of damage to nature.
So I think waste should be anywhere in the globe as one of the top issues to be addressed.
Jacob: And tell me a bit about the impact on human life as well.
Andre: Here in Brazil, there is a calculation that for each dollar you invest in waste management, you avoid investing $4 in the health system in public health [00:03:00] system. So you can imagine, how big the impact on waste management is. Mostly in underdeveloped countries and Brazil is one of these exact examples.
Jacob: And you also shared with me earlier about the number of deaths tied to it.
Andre: Sorry.
Jacob: You told me about the number of deaths each year. Tell me that story.
Andre: In Brazil, we can expect every year around 50, 000 deaths mostly children under five years old. As we are not properly addressing the waste problem in Brazil we are pretty much killing children under five years old.
Jacob: And how is your solution addressing that?
Andre: Brazil has 5, 600 municipalities, 96 % of those municipalities have less than 100, 000 inhabitants and for 100, [00:04:00] 000 inhabitants type of project, we would require a very small solution, right? A small-scaled solution. And when we try to find around the developed world North America, and Europe, we couldn’t find any small-scale solution that was affordable. Even technically speaking, because it’s very few tons per day of waste to be processed.
So we decided to develop our own technology. Our own technology is based on a pyrolysis system. Pyrolysis stands for in Greek, heat without air. We warm up a core it’s a reactor, so the core of the reactor is warmed up above the carbon boundary limit. In this way, we [00:05:00] are able to volatilize any volatile matter just as mother nature does with the organic matter, right? Mother Nature, what they recover the forests and the remains of the dinosaurs into oil and gas.
And it’s pretty much the same type of solution that pyrolysis does. But the issue with the pyrolysis in a small-scale project is that we generate oil, right? And in a small-scale project, if we need to Implement a refining process for that oil it’s not good economically wise in a small-scale project.
Instead of generating the oil, we operate at a very high temperature, above the carbon boundary limit, which means that any volatile matter will forcibly [00:06:00] be volatilized. And instead of condensing the vapor of hydrocarbons back to liquids, we just inject instantly this vapor of hydrocarbons with a synthetic gas. We inject it directly into a combustion chamber, we generate heat, and this heat can be recovered inside a boiler, a steam boiler, with a steam turbine, small scale as well, and we are able to generate energy by just resolving the waste problem in Brazil.
Jacob: And does that turn into electricity that’s saved in the battery?
Andre: It’s a good question. Energy is energy, right? Once you have the heat source, you can convert that into power, into electricity. You can convert that into steam to send to industries that need steam for their processes. Or if you put a chiller, you can [00:07:00] generate refrigeration.
By solving the waste problem, we will generate energy and out of the shelves industries, we can just convert the energy into thermal energy, electric power, or cold. Just like that.
Jacob: Maybe that’s also adaptable by the community what they need.
Andre: Exactly.
Jacob: How did you get into this? What sort of background led you to this kind of innovation?
Andre: I almost got an intervention from my family when I told them that I was leaving, resigning from my Luxembourgish job to become a waste guy, waste management guy. On the news, everything that you could see was children living and eating garbage, living on garbage, and eating garbage.
The poor families, they used to live on those open dump sites, without any kind of [00:08:00] regulation, law enforcement, or whatever. That was one of the good things that the law brought. They closed the access of the families inside those open dump sites, and that was accomplished. But I think watching that on the news, that really got me, and I decided that I would resign, and I would start that entrepreneurship into this field.
In my mind, I thought that I would solve the waste problem in Brazil. And the good thing is that because of the Brazilian, let’s say, the geopolitical situation of small municipalities. We have around 40 political parties, so the mayor from one city will never talk to the mayor of the other city in order to make a more scalable project.
Let’s say we had to have these small projects. [00:09:00] This is small solution. And because we had to design those small solutions that’s affordable, even for industries. So I think at the end, it can be applied for the ocean of plastics that we know that there is a resolution from the UN right now to end those oceans of plastics.
We can implement that in other communities inside the industries. So we, and because of the technologies inside the container 40 feet, conventional container, totally flexible, modular, you can plug and play whenever you want and whatever you want.
Jacob: So how does this compare to what technologies are out there already?
Like, why is this a better solution?
Andre: There are several technologies very similar to this one. And if you consider, let’s say the [00:10:00] waste, the energy recovery from the waste. We have basically four types of solutions, right? One is bio, biological. So you use you apply bacterias inside the reactor to digest those organic matters and generate bio biogas methane, basically. And you have three types off thermal treatment solutions.
One is Pure incineration. You put the garbage inside of mass burning incinerator and the heat will recover the energy right from the waste. You have gasification, which is a kind of incomplete combustion of the waste, but it’s more tricky to it’s trickier to operate. Because you need to inject the exact amount of air Inside [00:11:00] the reactor, in order to not burn the waste, but just dissociate or oxy reduce the waste. In operational wise, it’s not so good when you have a heterogeneous waste stream.
And you have Pyrolysis System. The issue of the pyrolysis system is that you will always have oil out of the pyrolysis system. And as I mentioned, for a small scale project, you cannot afford to have a kind of refinery of this oil after every small reactor that we will be implementing all over, hopefully the globe.
So instead of pursuing the oil generation, we keep all the system above the condensation point of this oil and we burn it instantly. inside a combustion chamber. And [00:12:00] because of the pyrolysis does not allow air entrance, you do not have oxygen enough to generate those toxic gases: dioxins, furan s, nitrous oxides. . Because you do not have enough oxygen, and neither nitrogen, right inside the reactor.
So in terms of emissions, the best solution is pyrolysis. And in order to be economically and technically efficient, we do not allow the vapor of the hydrocarbon, the oil, we do not allow the oil generation. So we keep it in a vapor form, we mix with the syngas, the synthetic gas that we will generate always in any kind of solution, and we generate energy out of that instantly. So we call it a flash box or [00:13:00] flash dissociation system.
Jacob: Where is this technology at in the process? Is it just on a napkin sketch? Is it fully implemented? Where on that continuum?
Andre: We followed the NASA technology readiness level methodology. It’s a very well known methodology. The automotive sector applies this kind of methodology. The airspace sectors apply this kind of methodology. Even the European Union applies this methodology in order to foster low carbon economy and circular economy.
Every kind of project and startup, they are evaluated under this methodology. Technology readiness level is the name and the levels come from one to nine. From one to eight, basically, you need to prove the prototype phase and the pilot phase. And the level nine, you have an industrial facility [00:14:00] and you need to operate that facility in a common operational mode. So we surpassed all this validation. We completed the full validation from one to nine. We passed the prototype phases, alpha, beta and gamma. We passed the pilot phases, alpha, beta and gamma. The pilot gamma reactor worked over 8, 000 hours in operational mode. Then we built a industrial plant. We call it an industrial eco park.
Eco park is basically a waste recovery facility where you can have in the beginning, a sorting plant. So you recover the recyclables with high value in the market, everything else goes to the reactor and the reactor converts everything into energy, So we ran this [00:15:00] industrial plant for over 8, 000 hours in a landfill, by the Brazilian environmental organ, followed by a group of laboratories, European laboratory called Eurofins.
So we have the technical evaluation from the European laboratory from the Brazilian government, the Brazilian environmental government. And we, so we have all the reports of the emissions we passed the emissions, even without, the need off cleaning the gas. So the gas at it goes out off the boiler. We do not need to treat because we do not have toxic gases generation because off what I have explained already. And we hired as well a PC company engineering company to make the energy and mass balance. And we have those reports as well. So we are fully validated. We are pre [00:16:00] operational. No And we are right now in a phase of fundraising and our business model is to acquire the small landfills and convert them into ecoparks, very efficient and modern ecoparks of waste recovery.
And the good thing about this strategy of acquiring the small landfills is that those small landfills they are fully operational already. They are positive. They have positive EBITDA, so we can even securitize investors through the recurrent receivables of the current operation from the landfills.
So that’s how we figured how to give to the investors. Let’s say the least risk because we are pre operational, even if we are fully validated, but we can guarantee the investment [00:17:00] against the receivables securitization.
Jacob: Interesting. What’s the biggest hurdle you’re facing right now?
Andre: For us, I used to work for a huge company, the company that I used to work for 60, 000 engineers our total and automotive sector is pretty much well known. Everybody knows the components, the systems and everything else. We had to invent by ourselves, without major support from a strong engineering department, let’s say. And we had to overcome, I think, every little aspect of innovation.
We are, we were creating a new product. We were creating a new system. We were creating a new market, at least in Brazil, and even abroad. If we consider [00:18:00] that they are small plants, nobody else is doing like us. Instead of getting big centers of waste recovery, we are decentralizing that. So imagine that a big city can have one of those eco parks in each neighborhood, right?
So we had to surpass that. And now we are in the last phase of innovation. Which is the financing structure. So the financiers, sometimes it’s harder for me to explain, waste type of business, but this kind of solution imitates mother nature, recovering organic matter turning organic matter into oil and gas. But we will not want the oil because we cannot afford to have small refineries. So that’s the hurdle that we’ve been facing for the last eight years.
Jacob: When you do talk to investors, what [00:19:00] are the things that they’re hung up about or concerned with? Like, why haven’t they already jumped on and are, throwing money at you
Andre: I think Brazil. It’s a very strange region for investing in innovation. The interest rates in Brazil are very high. The investors are very, risk averse, let’s say. So they just put the money in the banks and they have 12%, 15% of interest per year. And the investors abroad, they are afraid of Brazil sometimes. So I think I was just born in the wrong place basically.
Jacob: What would you, or how would you describe an ideal investor for you?
Andre: We are currently searching for [00:20:00] some types of investors. I think the best one for sure would be some strategic investor with a global penetration because since the beginning we wanted to be a kind of global company. I was the global project manager of an automotive company. I really like this kind of role, traveling the countries and understanding the different types of cultures and doing business abroad. This is something that I really like.
So a strategic partner with global penetration would be my ideal main investor, but we are going after some family offices as well. Venture capital, maybe, I don’t know if they would be willing to invest in a pre operational,company and impact funds for sure. I think the best [00:21:00] structure would be with impact funds. Here in Brazil we do not have access to those kinds of investors that I haven’t found at least, and we are trying to talk to some impact funds out of Brazil.
Frankly speaking, one of those we are engaged, let’s say, we even passed the due diligence, and I think we are just waiting for the process to come through.
Jacob: If someone wanted to learn more about this, what’s the best way to find you online?
Andre: I am on link LinkedIn Andre Tchernobilsky
Jacob: We can spell it in the notes.
Andre: Yes. I will spell my surname, which is T-C-H-E-R-N-O-B-…as ball…
I-L-S-K-Y and Instagram. And [00:22:00] we have as well a website ZEG Ambiental, which Ambiental in Portuguese means environmental zeg.com.br
Jacob: Awesome. And for you what are you most excited looking towards the future?
What are you most excited about?
Andre: I, I am sure that I will not, I will not be living, but because that’s a very cruel example.
Brazil has 3, 000 open dump sites. Polluting the groundwater, polluting the air, killing people. 3, 000 projects to be explored. My ideal dream was really to solve this situation in Brazil and implement 3, 000 projects. I am sure that I will not be there to accomplish this dream, but if I put that on [00:23:00] track, , because it’s very easy to copy and paste the business model, if I can see that rolling my dream will be fulfilled.
Jacob: Any last things you want to say before I let you go?
Andre: I’m happy to meet you and to be here with you and let’s solve the waste problem in the world. Thank you.
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