Dimitri Iossifidis is a co-founder and CEO of Greener than Green Technologies, a startup developing technologies and processes for the circular usage of water and resources in the industrial sector, aiding the transition towards more circular manufacturing and production models. Dimitri studied Chemistry at the University of Reading before pursuing postgraduate and doctoral studies in chemical analysis at Imperial College. We met with Dimitri to learn more about the company and his journey. Here's what he told us. 

Tell us a few things about Greener than Green Technologies. How did it all start? How did you discover the market opportunity for your solution, and where are you today?

It all started back in 2014 when talking to colleagues - turned friends - we realized that there was a lack of commercially available reactors for a physicochemical process to treat and remediate water and wastewater - called the Advanced Oxidation Process (AOP). Given their expertise on AOP and mine on instrumentation, we created Greener than Green Technologies to build commercial AOP reactors for research and industrial applications.

It wasn’t until we were working on the first EU-funded project that we realized that there is more value in the constituents of wastewater than in the water itself. At the same time, the concept of Circular Economy started getting significant traction within the European Union. Heavily influenced by these two, we designed a process that can remove, purify, and reuse valuable material from already used water – I am not a fan of the term wastewater – and then proceed to treat the remaining water to the extent that it can be reused, ideally for irrigation.

This concept was funded under the Horizon2020 program within the project ULTIMATE (www.ultimatewater.eu), and today, in the project's final year, we have developed a working prototype installed in the food processing industry. It has the capability of selectively removing valuable natural compounds, or value-added compounds as they are commonly referred to, from the wastewater, which is then isolated and purified and ready to be used in the pharmaceutical, cosmetic, and food industries as well as in food supplements, while the recovered water is suitable for irrigation of nearby agricultural land.

How do you differentiate from other similar offers in the market? What value does greenerthangreen bring to consumers and partners?

Greener than Green technologies provides the ability to unlock the tremendous value of wastewater, and we do so by providing turn-key solutions which require little, if any, technical expertise utilizing AI within our software to monitor and control the process while gathering external data to predict the optimal water reuse, simplifying decision making.

To the best of our knowledge, no turnkey solutions are available for the remediation and reuse of wastewater, while at the same time allowing the ability to exploit the value-added compounds present, all in a format that is streamlined for industrial processes with seasonal peaks.

What would you consider to have been (or are) your biggest challenge so far?

Innovation is a road with challenges, so picking just one is not easy! I would say that one of the biggest challenges is overcoming the inertia of bringing about change in any environment, especially considering that innovation is exactly about that. From simple things like expressing ideas, when brainstorming, you will not believe how many times I have heard people saying, “This cannot be done; no one has done it before,” to more complex situations like changing industrial processes even when the benefits are obvious or scientifically proven.

What are the biggest learnings from your journey so far?

Embracing failure is probably the biggest single lesson from our journey so far: how to use it constructively to achieve the goal. In our culture, we have learned to consider failure a detrimental event, a point beyond which there is no return. I’d like to see failure as the foundation upon which success is built. To do this, it requires taking a step back and taking the time to reflect on what can be learned from any given failure and then proceeding to rethink what needs to be changed or done differently to move forward.