4 | Factor Engineering step. “We first made the switch in 1998,” recalls Rex. “At the time, we were doing some consulting work and buying waste water treatments for some of our customers. We found that the people who were supplying the systems weren’t very good at it, and one of our customers said ‘I’m sure you can do this better than most of the people you’ve engaged.’” “So we ended up deciding to go into the waste water treatment business, and started buying some technology out of Europe,” he continues. “However, because of the Australian high-cost environment, we found that despite the fact we produced very high quality water, the capital costs for the systems meant that we just weren’t competitive in the market.” “It was then that I had an idea to take out some tanks and still manage to accomplish the same result as these multi-part treatments,” he concludes. “From that process we managed to eliminate all the tanks but one in the system.” The end result of Rex’s work was a new base technology for waste water treatment, which is essentially a controlled bio-reactor – or as they call it, the Sequencing Batch Reactor (SBR). Over the least 15 years, Factor UTB has built more than 40 of these systems for a variety of customers including municipal councils, to pulp and paper
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