This is Climate Tech Distillery, a newsletter where I talk about one specific climate tech company every week.
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Today we’ll distill a company that’s powering communities by turning sewage sludge into renewable electricity, heat and high-quality phosphorus ash: Shit2Power 🇩🇪
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What Problem Does Shit2PowerTackle❓
They deal with the inefficiencies, challenges and environmental problems of wastewater treatment. There are a few:
1. Treatment Gap: 80% of wastewater globally is not safely treated, current processes are too expensive and energy intensive. This leaves billions without proper sanitation and creates environmental and health risks.
Sewage treatment plant
2. Expensive Process: These plants are a significant cost factor for municipalities. Disposal of sewage sludge is becoming increasingly complicated and costs are thus skyrocketing across Europe, reaching €230 per tonne. New EU laws (2026) will further exacerbate the situation.
3. Regulatory Pressure: In the next few years EU sewage treatment plants have to become energy-neutral, recover phosphorus from sewage sludge, significantly reduce their environmental impact, and improve their purification levels. Current plants are not ready.
4. Energy Potential: Treatment plants are major energy consumers and most of them cannot access scalable technologies to extract the significant renewable energy locked in their sewage sludge, representing a massive missed opportunity for clean energy generation.
Sewage sludge (lots of energy here)
Product / Service 📦
They turn wastewater treatment plants into power plants through their patented container solution! It’s quite awesome:
Straightforward Process: They dry sewage sludge in a closed circuit, converting it to energy-rich gas at 850°C. Then, a module turns it into both heat and electricity. The heat makes the sludge dry and thus enables the plant to operate independently of energy. The electricity can be used directly for existing plant processes.
Phosphorus Recovery: The by-product of the process is phosphorus-rich ash, which can be used to recover phosphorus - meeting upcoming EU regulations requiring phosphorus recovery.
Plug & Play Solution: Their containers can be easily attached to existing sewage treatment plants and also process other types of wet biomass. No upfront investment required, customers only pay per ton of recycled sludge and per kilowatt hour of electricity produced.
Volume and Cost Reduction: Their process reduces sludge volume by >90% instead of traditional methods’ 50%, while the temperatures over 800°C completely decontaminate the sewage sludge. Treatment plants benefit from 30% lower energy costs thanks to the heat and electricity generation.
Dry sludge would take up 5x less volume with Shit2Power tech
On-Site Local Processing: The small-scale on-site solutions to recycle sewage sludge directly at the sewage treatment plant minimize transport routes and therefore costs & emissions while closing a local energy cycle.
Market 🌐
The global wastewater recovery system market crossed $44.5 billion in 2024 and is estimated to grow at a CAGR of 9.2% through 2034.
Freshwater scarcity, rising industrial wastewater reuse initiatives and EU regulations requiring energy-neutral operations and phosphorus recovery are strongly driving the demand for this type of tech.
Other Key Players
Veolia 🇫🇷: Treats sewage sludge and transforms it into energy through large-scale centralized processing facilities.
Cambi 🇳🇴: Thermal hydrolysis pretreatment tech that increases biogas yields and reduces sludge volumes in anaerobic digestion processes.
Most companies focus on traditional anaerobic digestion achieving ~50% volume reduction. Shit2Power differentiates with >90% volume reduction, energy self-sufficiency, and on-site processing.
Founding Story 🦄
Fabian and Nina
Shit2Power was founded in Berlin in 2023 by Nina Heine and Dr. Fabian Habicht. The idea originated from a 2021 conversation with a farmer who highlighted Germany’s inefficient sewage sludge disposal system, transporting sludge up to 800 km by truck.
Nina and Fabian later identified a global challenge: 80% of wastewater remains untreated, causing over 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. They then discovered that wet biomass (especially sewage sludge) has energy levels comparable to brown coal.
They combined their business and engineering expertise to turn this untapped opportunity into a solution: transform wastewater treatment plants into energy-autonomous power plants.
Since 2023 they’ve raised $170K in pre-seed funding, built their first container plant (2025), and received awards and support from dozens of companies and institutions all around Europe.
Their first container power plant
Top Impact Stats 📈
1. 100% self-sufficient solution that makes phosphorus recovery much easier.
2. Requires 0 upfront cost and reduces treatment plants’ energy costs by 30%.
3. 90% reduction in sludge waste volume dramatically reduces disposal costs and logistics, which is crucial given the €230/tonne disposal costs.
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