Brisa International

A truly sustainable society doesn’t just dispose of waste; it reimagines it as a resource. Today’s waste management technologies are no match for the scale and urgency of circular economy goals. The future belongs to solutions that turn yesterday’s leftovers into tomorrow’s assets quickly and with maximum efficiency.

Brisa International isn’t following this shift to sustainable infrastructure, it’s reinventing it.

A pioneering force in environmental engineering and consulting, Brisa transforms how industries deal with waste, water and air. Its patented systems extract value at a remarkably low cost from materials others pay to discard. This isn’t incremental change; it’s a bold reimagining of what’s possible.

“With our technologies, we’re able to take the things industries worry about and turn them into entirely new value streams,” says Kevin Harmon, founder and CEO.

That philosophy runs through everything Brisa does, from water treatment and waste recovery to air quality improvement. For industries ranging from power generation and cement manufacturing to steel mills and breweries, refineries, agroindustry, wastewater treatment plants, and other facilities with waste issues, Brisa offers solutions that go beyond compliance. It does this through a portfolio of green, low-impact technologies that replace traditional, energy- and chemical-intensive systems.

At the heart of its innovation is EcoTech Complex, a patented design that integrates power plants, wastewater treatment, solid waste treatment and other industrial systems to maximize efficiency and eliminate waste. An advanced algae-based technology captures carbon and other emissions and removes harmful contaminants, transforming pollution into clean water, renewable energy, and valuable byproducts.

This design philosophy is based on a biological metaphor. Power plants and incinerators represent ‘animal kingdom’ processes that consume oxygen and emit carbon dioxide, while algae systems mirror the ‘plant kingdom,’ absorbing emissions and turning them into value. The result is a synergistic platform that reuses energy, heat and waste across interconnected systems.

Built on Synergy to Future-Proof Industrial Operations

EcoTech is about rethinking how industries operate, not by replacing old infrastructure, but by connecting existing systems with a smart platform. Unlike traditional infrastructure, where each plant operates independently, EcoTech connects them in a way that allows them to share resources and dramatically improve overall efficiency.

Algae-based technology optimizes processes across this network. It offers strong potential for carbon capture and nutrient removal, yet developers have often deployed them in isolation.

Brisa takes a different approach. For example, when paired with a power plant, algae capture carbon dioxide emissions and use photosynthesis to convert them into oxygen and usable biomass. This process offers a cost-effective and natural alternative to traditional carbon capture and storage technologies that are often expensive and impractical to deploy at scale.

The integration goes even deeper when paired with power plants that generate large amounts of heat. The patented EcoTech system captures heat to maintain algae system temperatures and dry the algal biomass, eliminating the need for external energy sources. This turns an otherwise wasted byproduct into a resource.

When connected to a wastewater treatment plant, the algae system replaces bacterial processes, reducing energy use by up to 50 percent. The more efficient, algae-based treatment cycle doubles or even triples the plant’s efficiency. A key component of EcoTech, the Brisa Biosolids Processing (BBP) system, also drives this improvement.

Turning Sludge into High-Yield Bioenergy

Brisa Biosolids Processing (BBP) is a breakthrough system for treating wet organic waste. This includes materials like wastewater sludge, waste oils, grape pomace, food waste, palm mill effluent, olive mill waste, and other agricultural byproducts with high water content. Traditional systems struggle with these wastes due to the energy-intensive and costly measures needed to dry these wastes for disposal.

"We’re replacing outdated, inefficient methods with something that produces much more energy quickly,” says Harmon.

Using a low-energy, high-efficiency process, BBP rapidly converts wet waste into valuable outputs such as biofuels and fertilizers, all in 15 to 30 minutes. This is in sharp contrast to anaerobic digestion, which requires 20 or more days to produce limited biogas. By comparison, BBP delivers a significantly higher energy return, about eight times higher, faster processing time and broader product value.

Its ability to bypass the drying phase that burdens traditional treatment methods makes it especially impactful. Instead of requiring waste to be dried from as low as 3 percent solids to over 90 percent before it becomes usable, BBP processes the material in its wet state, slashing energy use and unlocking cost savings.

That same disruptive thinking guides how EcoTech tackles solid waste and emissions. In standard waste-to-energy systems, pyrolysis or gasification convert waste into energy but still emit gases, such as carbon dioxide, nitrous oxides, sulfur oxides, and particulates. EcoTech redirects stack gases to the algae system, where it captures the carbon dioxide and other emissions and reuses them to grow more algae biomass.

Adding further potential to the EcoTech platform is a major academic study conducted jointly by Princeton University and Tsinghua University in China, two of the top universities in the world. The study analyzed thousands of wastewater treatment and power plants across China. It concluded that if an integrated design—connecting these systems together—were implemented nationwide, it could save billions of dollars annually, and greatly reduce carbon footprint of both the power plants and wastewater treatment plants. This is the essence of Brisa’s patented EcoTech Complex, which further enhances this integration using many other breakthrough technologies to mitigate waste between these major industrial systems.

This represents a landmark moment in the independent, global academic validation of the Brisa platform’s economic and environmental value.

The Power of Green Engineering in Action

Brisa’s systems have already demonstrated this in practice, in one example, in revitalizing a legacy wastewater treatment facility struggling with outdated systems and rising operational demands.

The plant was using conventional activated sludge technology. It was generating significant carbon emissions and large volumes of sludge, leading to high operational costs and additional expenses for landfill disposal.

Integration of algae-based treatment and an early iteration of the BBP technology proved transformative. The algae-based system replaced the bacterial treatment process, achieving higher nutrient removal, a dramatically lower carbon footprint, and achieving a substantial reduction in energy consumption. It treated the wastewater more effectively and absorbed carbon dioxide, offering a net-zero or even carbon-negative solution. Instead of sending sludge to a landfill, the BBP system converted it into a high-value biofuel. Even with wet, organic waste inputs like sludge, BBP achieved an energy return on investment, producing up to five times more energy than it consumed.

The plant’s operations became cleaner and more sustainable while significantly more cost-effective. Waste was turned into revenue- generating resources, including biofuels and valuable byproducts for agriculture.

Beyond wastewater, Brisa has continued to test and tailor its BBP technology globally. In one instance, it successfully converted dilute mixed palm waste into a marketable biofuel, helping solve a major environmental issue while opening up new income streams for the client.

Reducing Emissions, Boosting Efficiency—At Every Scale

Backed by over a decade of R&D, Brisa is now scaling its patented innovations to deliver large-scale, real-world impact across key industries and geographies. The roadmap is focused on the strategic implementation of its EcoTech and BBP technologies across major urban, industrial and agricultural settings worldwide.

A key milestone on this journey is winning the prestigious C40 Reinventing Cities competition hosted by the City of Phoenix, Arizona, USA. As part of a global initiative to drive sustainable urban transformation, Brisa and its partners will help the city redesign its approach to solid waste, wastewater and emissions. This project will serve a metro population of over five million, diverting solid waste from landfills, treating municipal wastewater to high standards with near-zero carbon footprint, and capturing stack gas emissions to create usable energy and byproducts. The implementation of the project will inform all of the world’s major cities in the C40 program as to best practices in future sustainability.

It is also advancing multiple wastewater treatment and agricultural waste projects in other sectors. These include the transformation of traditional treatment plants using algae-based systems for higher efficiency and lower cost, as well as the conversion of large-scale agri-waste streams into renewable fuels and fertilizers. Brisa is also working with luxury resorts suffering algae blooms due to nutrient loading of beaches and other water bodies, refineries with oily sludge, and a host of other pollution problems.

The company is also preparing a major carbon capture initiative associated with mining operations at a coal-fired power plant in Asia. This project, and others involving large power plants will demonstrate the scalability of Brisa’s algae-based carbon utilization model in even the most carbon-intensive sectors.

As these systems permeate more and more industry sectors over the coming years, Brisa will demonstrate how next-generation engineering redefines industrial sustainability. Brisa’s website is at brisainternational.com.