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Biomin manufactures state-of-the-art water filtration media and flocculants for removal of oil, grease, and other organics (i.e. PCBs, PNAH, PCP, and color/tannin) from water. Biomin's products include OilSorb™, ColorSorb™, Clayfloc™, EC-300, and EC-400. We also design, install and maintain filtration systems.

Article from Oakland Business Review:

Clay, chemistry key ingredients in Success of Oak Park's Biomin

By Julie Edgar

oakland@mbusinessreview.com

The 10,000-square -foot plant behind CEO and President George Alther's Oak Park Office is dusty and noisy with the sound of clay jostling in a huge drum and being thrust down a series of chutes. It will be mixed with anthracite to ultimately become the mainstay of Biomin Inc.'s organic clay-based filtration products.

Biomin, the company Alther founded and has operated since 1991, produces OilSorb and Clayfloc, along with a series of carbon-based products. All can be used in applications ranging from groundwater remediation to cleaning wastewater to lining landfills at a lower cost.

The operation is simple and the product cost-effective, said Alther, 64, a Swiss-born hydrologist who taught himself chemistry. "One way to save water is to recycle wastewater," he said. "You also save money."

OilSorb is formulated with carbon that, when activated, removes dangerous compounds from soil, including heavy metals. A typical application is cleaning up brownfields; after the contaminated water is pumped out, OilSorb can finish the cleanup.

Clayfloc can be used to clean wastewater without having to pre-treat with acids and salts. The products are also environmentally sound, said Alther. Last year, revenues topped $1 million, up from $700,000 five years ago.

Besides himself, there are only two other employees; one is Alther's son Phillip, 23, a business student at Wayne State University. The market fluctuates, he said, so he hires larger crews when a big job comes in.

Alther, a Ferndale resident, expects higher revenues this year as a result of a soil stabilization project in Massachusetts; creosote, a chemical used to paint telephone poles and railroad ties, is the culprit.

Another recent client is a Pittsburgh company that also needed to clean up creosote that had leached into a water source.

His short-term goal is to get his patents to market; in the long term, Alther would like to explore alternative energy sources, for which he needs money to build a plant. Biomin, at www.biomininc.com, is the only company in Michigan that manufactures filtration media like this. A company in Illinois does something similar, but most of his counterparts operate on the East and West coasts in Texas, he said.

Early in his career, Alther worked as a technical manager at the defunct International Minerals and Chemical Corp. in Detroit, where he learned about the potential of organic clays for removing toxins. In 1986, he formed Bentec in Ferndale, which produced organic clays for paints. He moved a block away to Oak Park and started Biomin.

Other companies that have used the products include General Motors, which used Organoclay to clean up stormwater runoff in a parking lot at its Pontiac plant, and a lab in Pennsylvania.