Innovation presents an eternal challenge. A big company has a problem that requires a solution that it doesn’t possess. A startup has a technology, but it doesn’t know the specific problem it could eventually solve. Getting these parties together is the first step to success, and that is what happened with SiTration and Rio Tinto.
SiTration began in 2020, coming out of MIT’s materials science department. Brendan Smith was doing his doctoral and post-doc work, and, along with his supervisor, Professor Jeffrey Grossman, invented a new ultra-durable filtration membrane technology.
It was promising, but as Smith, SiTration’s CEO and co-founder, says, start-ups born in academia are often “hammers looking for a nail to hit.” He wasn’t sure where it could provide the most real-world value, so over the course of many years, in parallel with optimizing and scaling up the technology, he “efficiently meandered through the market landscape,” talking to stakeholders and evaluating diverse industrial use cases. The consensus answer was to focus on the critical materials space.
At Rio Tinto, we thought this was a great innovation challenge and posted it on our website to scout for companies to partner with who can help us solve this water challenge
That might have given the company a direction but it still didn’t provide the partnerships necessary for commercialization. One of these came from Rio Tinto, an ILP member and global mining and materials company founded in 1873. It was looking to find partners with technologies that aim to enable the recovery of metals and other compounds, such as cobalt, lithium and copper, from the water generated at operating and closed mines. Traditionally, these metals are removed from the water as a waste by-product, which represents lost revenue. “At Rio Tinto, we thought this was a great innovation challenge and posted it on our website to scout for companies to partner with who can help us solve this water challenge,” says Nick Gurieff, principal adviser for mine closure research and development at Rio Tinto.
It sounds like a fairly straightforward request, but it was a big step to implement a process to develop an R&D portfolio focused only on water treatment. Gurieff says that the company took some convincing, but what helped was that the objectives of this R&D portfolio fit well with a new circular economy approach developing within Rio Tinto. Also, while the initial opportunity would be to improve mine closure outcomes, many of the technologies being developed could potentially deliver positive outcomes throughout the lifecycle of Rio Tinto’s operations. Since the R&D challenge focused on water treatment, the company realized it didn’t have all of the existing technologies to meet the challenge. It also knew that an opportunity was out there.
“We had to try something new and we wanted to move quickly,” he says.
The Power of Language
What helped narrow what could be a long, inefficient matchmaking process was the RFP. Rio Tinto made it specific, allowing companies to understand exactly what it wanted. Smith, who learned of the request through the ILP, originally wasn’t going to respond to what he sensed might be a “distraction” because SiTration had no experience in mining. Its focus had been on the recycling of lithium-ion batteries, but then “all the keywords start popping out,” he says, like “critical materials” and “acidic feed streams,” the same factors involved with battery recycling, and he saw the crossover potential.
The company submitted its proposal in August 2022. By October, it was on Rio Tinto’s shortlist of candidates. Gurieff says that SiTration’s membrane, by being both tunable and sturdy enough to handle mine wastewater, helped set it apart. Negotiations followed, which were finalized in June. Both call what’s happened so far in the process “frictionless”. Smith says he’s been impressed with the pace and with Rio Tinto’s openness to new technologies, something that’s not always seen in the mining industry. For Gurieff, SiTration has been open to feedback and making adjustments.