Beginnings

The 3R energy concept revolutionised energy thinking in Big Science. WA3RM’s mission is to bring that revolution to industry.

The “3R” in WA3RM comes from the energy concept “Responsible, Renewable, Recyclable” of the European Spallation Source ESS, where the WA3RM team was first formed, tasked with delivering a sustainable research facility, that was energy efficient, used only renewable energy and recycled waste heat.

At ESS, we began to view waste streams as a resource. The value of a waste stream can be affected by efforts to conserve the quality of the resource. For waste heat, temperature is an vital quality. As ESS Energy Division, we therefore re-examined accelerator technology. One such technology was the Klystrons. Klystrons are amplifiers, used to amplify the wave signal to accelerate the protons. We re-invented the cooling for the klystrons, to separate three different temperature levels of waste heat, allowing higher-value recycling as district heating and local heating.

On June the 30th 2015 the energy division closed as planned, on time, on budget and with a cost reduction of 30% on the energy bill, going from annual 15 M€ to 10 M€. WA3RM was founded shortly after as a spin-off from ESS continuing to offer the industry an incredible tool to help go beyond sustainable

Workshop and publications

During our time at ESS, together with ERF and CERN, we founded “Workshop Energy for Sustainable Science” which is being held biannually to share and improve the work towards sustainable research facilities. Our research have also been published on different platforms where Nature is one of them, for full list see Reference and publications.

One of the key deliverables from ESS energy division was the Energy design report, download here:

Download EDR PDF

First formed at European Spallation Source, ESS

Photo courtesy of ESS

Our Business Concept

WA3RM works to develop and finance so-called regenerative operations that reuse residual flows from major industries. These may be based on resources such as surplus heat and CO₂, but also about other flows, such as industrial sludge and wastewater. We call this Bringing waste to life.

We focus on large, energy-intensive, industries with well-developed and efficient operations. These produce a steady flow of surplus streams that represent challenges in terms of sustainability and that are often costly for the industry to handle within its own sphere. These flows can represent important resources for external actors, which is one of the core aspects of WA3RM’s offering.

WA3RM’s business concept is to capture surplus streams from major industries and use these to create and finance regenerative, often food-producing businesses where the circular element is dominant. The climate issue is the biggest challenge of our time and needs industrial-scale solutions for real, rapid and decisive effect (according to the International Energy Agency, industry accounts for over 18% of all CO₂ emissions in the world). We can no longer continue to be blind to the creeping change, but, as during the Corona crisis, we must find fast, mature and sustainable solutions that have a lasting effect on the climate.

WA3RM’s operations are built on precisely these pillars: the technology is established, we focus on one of the major sources of CO₂emissions that creates a great positive effect for both the climate, industries, investors, degree of self-sufficiency and society. And since it also happens to be a good deal at all levels, the solution will also be sustainable over time.

We connect players who would never have come into contact with each other to create a new business that offers many positive effects, including:

an opportunity for heavy industry to achieve climate neutrality or even climate positivity (“beyond zero”) before 2030
a new green investment instrument for investors (our concept has attracted a great deal of interest from institutional actors)
an opportunity for Sweden to turn a comparative disadvantage (cold climate and darkness) into a comparative advantage (heating and access to CO₂ at low cost combined with relatively low electricity prices) which allows us to strengthen our degree of self-sufficiency in fruit and vegetables (today we according to LRF at 50% compared to eg Finland which is at 80%) – of all the tomatoes we eat in Sweden today, 85% are imported
a local and “smartly produced” food that is not “weighed down” by long transports before they reach Swedish consumers