A small start-up recently opened new headquarters on the top floor of a two-story building in Indialantic, pledging that its products could help prevent algae blooms in the Indian River Lagoon.
Kationx Corporation employs 14 full-time and part-time workers – mostly sales, marketing and administrative staff – at 442 Fourth Ave., but plans to expand statewide with its environmentally-friendly products made for the wastewater treatment and mining industries.
Company CEO Bill Cox, a retired U.S. Navy officer and former geologist, launched Kationx less than two years ago in Lakeland to produce SETTApHY – an ordinary-looking white powder that, when put into a municipal or industrial wastewater treatment facility, separates biosolids (sewage sludge) from wastewater. The powder, Cox said, is non-toxic and mineral-based, using positively-charged ions to reduce nutrients such as phosphorus, nitrates and ammonia from treated wastewater before it reaches local water bodies such as the Indian River Lagoon. Kationx also produces KCD-X, a cleaner for wastewater collection stations, and KBM drilling mud for the mining industry.
“We lower operation and maintenance costs,” Cox said. “We’re cleaner; we’re green. We’re not throwing chemicals in the water.”
Reducing nutrients in treated wastewater, he pointed out, lessens the chance of harmful algae blooms which have plagued the 156-mile-long lagoon on and off since 2011. Blooms kill fish and other marine creatures by sucking oxygen out of the water. They kill sea grass – important habitat for the entire food chain – by blocking sunlight it needs to grow. Some cyanobacteria, or blue-green algae, produce microcystin – a toxin that can sicken people and pets who swim in it.
Cox has been meeting with local politicians and environmental groups since relocating to Indialantic in June, trying to drum up interest in Kationx products. He is welcomed by Deputy Mayor Stu Glass, past president of the Florida League of Cities and current chair of League’s Utilities Natural Resources and Public Works Committee.
“Biosolids is a big issue statewide,” Glass said. “We’re always looking for products and services that help our municipalities.”
Kationx doesn’t have any customers lined up on the Space Coast yet, but its products have garnered the interest of the tiny town of Dundee in Polk County.
Kationx recently demonstrated the uses of SETTApHY for Lance Powell and his co-workers at the Dundee wastewater treatment plant.
“It does what they say it does,” Powell said. “It coagulates the sludge so it separates out faster. Their [product] helps by settling out quicker and we don’t lose the sludge out into our [waters].”
Powell said town officials are expected to decide soon whether to begin regular use of the product.
