Heartland Water Technology to open Robert E. Cawthorn Technology Center

Heartland Water Technology Inc., Hudson, Massachusetts, a market leader in technology-enabled solutions and services that reduce, separate and convert a wide range of challenging waste streams, has completed construction of its new 30,000-square-foot Robert E. Cawthorn Technology Center, just outside Nashville in the city of Murfreesboro, Tennessee. The facility is named in honor of the company’s long-time investor and board chair.  

The Heartland Technology Center is part of the company’s multi-million-dollar investment focused on developing and launching a holistic, distributed, climate-friendly solution for addressing its customers’ most complex waste treatment, conversion and destruction challenges. With the opening of the new facility, Heartland now employs more than 20 engineers and professionals supporting the growing technology sector in Middle Tennessee.

“Our new Technology Center represents a strategic investment by Heartland to help its customers solve the challenges they face in the way of constricting disposal options, rising transportation costs and a dynamic regulatory environment around contaminants of concern such as PFAS,” Heartland CEO Chris Beaufait says. “Our goal with this new facility will be to enhance customer awareness of Heartland’s solutions, facilitate collaboration and provide a place where the company can continue to develop optimal wastewater and waste conversion treatment systems for the market. We look forward to having customers and partners join us in Murfreesboro to work with our team, to view our world-class technologies in person, and to work together to find the right solutions.”

The new facility features a commercial scale version of the company’s proprietary HelioStorm technology—an ultra-high temperature, electrically driven and combustion free, ionic gasifier which, because of its modular and scalable design, efficiently converts organic material into clean, hydrogen-rich syngas that can be used directly to generate power, recover clean hydrogen or convert carbon for beneficial reuse into products such as carbon black.

Because HelioStorm operates at temperatures in excess of 3,000 degrees C, it has been proven to completely destroy many chemical contaminants and volatile organic compounds (VOCs), including per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). Solid waste products that can be treated using the HelioStorm system include biosolids, end-of-life plastics, solid waste, PFAS resins and regulated medical wastes.

The Technology Center also showcases the award-winning Heartland Concentrator, the company’s proprietary technology that treats challenging industrial wastewaters, such as landfill leachate and produced water. This patented direct-contact evaporation technology effectively evaporates up to 95 percent of the volume of such liquid waste streams (including the concentrate from reverse osmosis systems), while returning clean water vapor back into the atmosphere and sequestering PFAS and other contaminants in a concentrated residual that can be safely retained in a landfill or destroyed.

Heartland expects that the Technology Center will provide the ideal environment for customers to see how the company’s technologies perform on their waste streams. 

“After working with wastewater, residuals and gasification technologies for greater than 25 years, I’m excited about the opportunity our Technology Center will offer for our customers to observe how Heartland’s technologies will address their waste disposal challenges while simultaneously solving related challenges such as destroying or separating out such contaminants as PFAS,” Heartland Managing Director of Waste Conversion Jeff Snyder says. “Heartland also sees the Technology Center as a tool to drive more collaboration with its customers with the goal of finding even more creative, practical, economic and sustainable solutions.”