The Halifax Tech Startup That’s Helping Turn Lobster Shells Into Reusable Plastics
HALIFAX – Every day, tons of lobster shells tumble in Nova Scotia landfills. As they rot, the incredibly valuable substance locked inside them is lost forever.
Now, using the same technology that helps radio stations broadcast their signal, a Halifax startup is helping save it.
Aethera Technologies Ltd. is an electronics engineering firm that specializes in radio frequency heating. Its technology uses low-frequency radio waves to heat and dry products on an industrial scale.
Through a partnership with The Verschuren Centre, based out of the university of Cape Breton, the company has developed a system that keeps lobster shells out of landfills and puts them in the hands of researchers eager to put them to better use.
“Nobody really wants to see all this stuff go into landfills,” Aethera’s chief technology officer Tim Hardy says. “And now we get to save tons of this valuable material for [researchers].”
Lurking inside every lowly lobster’s shell is a magic material that has a staggering number of commercial applications.
About 20 percent of a lobster shell is made up of chitin, and Verschuren CEO Beth Mason says chitin and its derivatives have uses “right from water purification to wound healing applications.”
At The Verschuren Centre, Mason’s team has created an environmentally friendly process that can use chitin as a biopolymer that replaces petroleum in plastic food packaging.
They’re also experimenting with it as a bio fungicide in crop production.
“We know there’s a market for that product, and it’s been known for a long time and everyone’s talked about chitin in shells forever,” Mason says.
But trying to harvest chitin from seafood shells has always presented a very pungent problem.
From the second the shells are removed from a lobster, the fight against time begins. Mason explains that the shells, being organic material, start to decompose almost immediately. Within hours they start to stink to high heaven and within half a day, they’re little more than a smelly, unusable mess.
Needless to say, trying to wrench chitin from a glob of rotting seafood is less than ideal.
That’s where Aethera comes in.
The company has developed a drying system that lobster-processing companies can use to dry large volumes of shells right at their facilities. The process uses Aethera’s radio frequency technology and works kind of like an industrial-scale microwave.
The shells are heaped together in large containers, two or three tons at a time, where they’re zapped with low-frequency radio waves.
“You basically load up these bins, put them in the unit, leave them over night and in the morning they’ll be dry,” Hardy explains.
He explains that, because radio waves vibrate at 1/100 of the frequency of microwaves, they can penetrate about 100 times deeper into the mass of shells. This means safely drying them out in large volumes without burning or otherwise ruining them.
And because the system is containerized, it can easily be deployed at several different processing sites.
“The whole idea behind the Aethera dryer is can we stabilize that product at site and can we now transport it from everybody to a centralized facility where we do the extraction of those valuable materials,” Mason explains.
The project is still in a beta testing phase now, but Mason says “there’s really good potential” in its ability to speed up and automate the shell-drying process.
For Hardy, piloting Aethera’s radio frequency technology with The Verschuren Centre and lobster processor is just the beginning.
Radio frequency heating has been used for decades to dry products in industrial settings, and Hardy says Aethera’s innovations to a technology that hasn’t really changed in nearly a decade has made it far more affordable.
He believes that new affordability will entice more companies to adopt radio frequency technology.
“The fact that we’re doing something a little bit different and innovative is valuable,” he says. “We think this technology is the start of something big.”