What motivated you to replace chemical additives in portable toilets with a microbial solution?
My first thought was linked to the end-user experience. Chemical toilets smell, we all know that, and I wanted to find microbes that can eat something bad smelling and give us something neutral in return. So I investigated the problem and found out there was a much bigger issue caused by the chemical toilets being chemical: the necessity of bringing all wastewater to specific disposal sites. So I caught myself thinking: “why can’t we cut a piece of the supply chain and use microbes as in the depurators?”
Can you explain how your microbial technology works, and what makes it more sustainable than chemical alternatives?
It always amazed me how scaling up and down technologies born for different uses is one of the keys to sustainable development. Basically our technology wins on three different aspects:
Firstly, chemical disruptors get mixed and diluted each time the toilet is used, thus encountering a diminishing efficiency over time. On the other hand, our microbial cocktail grows eating the wastewater, becoming more and more effective and rapid by the hour;
Secondly, when the wastewater is collected and brought to our equipped tank (placed on the costumer’s venue) microbes deposits at the bottom of the tank, allowing us to recover and reuse them as raw material for other toilets;
Last but not least, wastewater treated by microbes is just “bio-treated” and thus can be disposed directly into the sewage system without needing to go all the way to a treatment facility. On one hand this means less CO2 emissions by avoiding wastewater transport on trucks, but also no additional resources required for the treatment.
From an LCA perspective, the more customers switch from the chemical disruptors to our microbial cocktail, the less chemicals needs to be produced to furnish this market, meaning another abatement of environmental impact. Our technology is patent pending, with the patent including the cocktail formula, the degradation process and the microbial growth’ surfaces.
What kind of impact can a typical portable toilet dealer expect (economically and environmentally) by switching to BathBact?
Sustainability in our vision is always both economical and environmental. While our microbial recharge costs more than a classic chemical recharge, this is more than balanced with the sparing on logistics and especially disposal, which is ten times less than disposal cost for a chemical toilet wastewater. This remains true considering the leasing and maintenance of the equipped tank, which is completely evened out by the mere cost of the fuel wasted every year for travelling from our client venue all the way to the treatment facility.
Environmentally speaking the advantages are clear and simple: no chemicals required for the treatment inside the toilet, no CO2 emissions related to travelling to the treatment facility, no additional resources required for treating the wastewater from biological toilets.
How is the user experience for your customers? Is the transition from chemical to microbial systems difficult?
Logistics is pivotal for our customers - and we know that. Our product is tailored to our customers needs: microbial recharges can be easily put into the toilet as monodoses, the emptying of toilets’ tanks is conducted as before, the authorization for transporting and keeping wastewater in their venue is the same. The only change is about avoiding the travel from their venue to the wastewater facility, which is a simplification both time-speaking and logistics-speaking.
What barriers have you faced in bringing this solution to market, and how have you overcome them?
Biological products in general are often considered less efficient and more expensive: convincing our potential customers that ours is the opposite was quite a challenge. Also, there usually are doubts about the effectiveness over time - which as said before is intrinsically guaranteed by microbes. Us being a young startup with a young team raises reliability issues sometimes, but we overcame them all by demonstrating our preparedness and knowledge of our client everyday problems.
More specifically, we had to adapt some features of our product to slightly different logistics and toilets’ functioning (e.g. recycling water systems): we took all these challenges as a chance of growth and overcame them together with our partners.
What’s next for BathBact - any new partnerships, expansions, or R&D developments on the horizon?
We are on the verge of a huge growth. We are in the due diligence phase with a soft committed investor, we have a strong declaration of interest from one of Italy’s biggest players, and raising amazed impressions by other potential investors. Other than big players and partners, we gathered interest for our product, via market surveys, from several smaller customers that deal with portable toilets everyday - both end users, such as construction companies and event organizers, and medium-size distributors. We are looking at having our MVP ready for the go to market by the end of the year, thanks to a pre seed round which will be open until June, and also a seed round to be realised in 2026. Once our patent will be granted we will apply for European patenting process, and we are always looking for other possible usage of our technology to include in our future development and patent material - such as the degradation of other everyday wastes and industrial wastewaters to be treated in-situ.
