A successful pilot of wastewater treatment technology from Miranda Water Technologies has led Kawartha Ethanol to agree to purchase the technology for use at its Havelock facility.
Miranda announced Tuesday (October 13) that a pilot using its MC200 Miracell Rotating Biological Contactor (RBC) system at Kawartha Ethanol achieved greater than 98 per cent removal of targeted contaminants under the tested operating conditions.
Based on the results, Kawartha Ethanol has agreed to purchase the system along with additional Miranda filtration and treatment technologies, as part of a broader initiative to recover and manage waste streams at its ethanol and alcohol production facility.
The project represents Miranda’s first deployment of its Miracell technology in the specialized industrial wastewater market in North America, extending a technology previously used for community-scale wastewater treatment into high-strength industrial applications.
Since 2008, Miranda has been a globally recognized leader in supporting the sustainable and environmentally friendly treatment of water and wastewater with water reuse systems for commercial and residential areas. Deployed in more than 40 countries across six continents, the company has 1,200 installations running globally, treating about 60 million litres of wastewater every day.
While Miranda was originally founded in Türkiye, Peterborough investment company Viva Industries Inc. acquired the majority of the shares in 2024. Miranda now operates a Canadian office in Keene as well as offices in Ankara in Türkiye and in Providenciales in Turks and Caicos Islands.
During the Kawartha Ethanol pilot, Miranda’s North American team worked with its environmental, process, and manufacturing engineers in Türkiye, continually evaluating data and adjusting operating parameters to develop a treatment process suited to Kawartha Ethanol’s wastewater and changing production conditions.
“It was a pleasure working alongside the Kawartha Ethanol team and benefiting from the extensive operational and technical expertise of its staff throughout the pilot project,” said Miranda Water Technologies president and CEO Michael Skinner.
“This was a highly collaborative process that brought together Kawartha Ethanol’s industry knowledge with the environmental, process, and manufacturing expertise of Miranda’s Canadian and Turkish teams.”
Skinner said the results demonstrate the potential for Miranda’s Miracell RBC, filtration, and SmartCell technologies to treat challenging industrial wastewater streams.
The final system at Kawartha Ethanol will combine biological treatment with additional filtration and treatment technologies designed for the characteristics of the facility’s industrial wastewater.
The project will also incorporate an industrial version of Miranda’s SmartCell intelligent control and optimization platform. SmartCell will provide centralized process control, performance monitoring, and operational data collection, allowing the treatment system to be evaluated and adjusted as production conditions and the characteristics of wastewater change.
The technology has roots in a collaboration Miranda announced with Fleming College in Peterborough in 2024. Working with Fleming’s Centre for Applied Machine Intelligence and Integration Technologies, Miranda began developing a SmartCell control module for the Miracell system that uses sensors to monitor wastewater characteristics and treatment performance in real time.
The aim was to replace or supplement less frequent laboratory sampling with continuous information that could help operators optimize treatment.
At the time, Skinner described the intelligent monitoring and data-management component as a Canadian innovation being added to Miranda’s established wastewater technology.
The Kawartha Ethanol project takes that concept into a more complex industrial environment, with Miranda establishing operating parameters for a SmartCell platform specifically intended for industrial wastewater.
“It has been a great experience for our team to leverage Miranda’s environmental engineering capabilities and manufacturing design expertise to develop a highly efficient treatment process,” said Kawartha Ethanol president Darrell Drain.
“We look forward to seeing the additional improvements Miranda will bring to this project and to the broader industrial wastewater sector.”
Miranda plans to use the operating experience and performance data collected through the Kawartha Ethanol project to further develop its technologies for high-strength wastewater, resource recovery, filtration, biological treatment, and intelligent process control.
Kawartha Ethanol began constructing its Havelock plant in 2007 and began producing fuel-grade ethanol in 2010. The facility was later expanded to produce premium alcohol products under the Kawartha Premium Alcohols brand. The company produces ethanol from corn and controls several stages of its supply chain, including growing corn, operating grain elevators, and processing the crop at its Havelock facility.
Kawartha Ethanol’s fuel-grade ethanol is sold through major oil and fuel companies in Ontario and Quebec, while its premium alcohol products are sold both domestically and internationally. The company also sells co-products from the distillation process, including wet and dry distillers grains used as livestock feed in the Kawarthas.
