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Bourkin Yegor Vasilievich: “Metallurgy taught me that waste is always money you’ve already paid and are discarding.”
Solvents are one of the most noticeable cost lines in the production of coatings, pharmaceutical components, and specialty chemicals. After use they become a spent mixture that must be removed and disposed of. Wroclaw-based Khimprom-Techno has been offering European customers an alternative for eight years — SolventLoop units that return solvent to production.
How it started
Solvent recovery units were the company’s first own product. Their development began in 2018 year, when Khimprom-Techno, founded two years earlier, opened a pilot site.
Behind this solution is CEO Yegor Bourkin. 37-year-old engineer was born in Łódź into a Russo-Polish family: father — an engineer-mechanic who moved from the USSR, mother — a Polish chemistry teacher. Bourkin completed bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the Łódź University of Technology in chemical technology, and before that studied at the City College Plymouth in Britain.
His professional experience was gained in the United Kingdom: internships at Sheffield’s DavyMarkham, then work at SSI UK, which managed a metallurgical plant in Redcar. Both companies ceased operations. “Metallurgy taught me that waste is always money you’ve already paid and are discarding. When I returned to Poland and started visiting chemical plants, I saw the same thing with solvents,” says Bourkin.
Yegor Vasilievich Bourkin: “Distillation is a proven technology, but it is energy-intensive and not always handles mixtures where components boil at close temperatures.”
How it works
SolventLoop combines distillation and membrane separation. First, the mixture is separated by boiling points, then membranes separate water and impurities that are difficult to remove by distillation.
“Distillation is a proven technology, but it is energy-intensive and not always handles mixtures where components boil at nearby temperatures. The membrane finishes what the column cannot. Together they provide a quality sufficient for reuse,” explains Bourkin.
The key word for him is “sufficient.” The company does not strive to obtain laboratory-pure solvent: the task is for it to be suitable for a specific operation at a specific plant.
Quality issue
Quality is what Bourkin regards as the main risk. With repeated restoration, impurities can accumulate in the solvent, gradually affecting product properties. “The customer must be sure that the returned solvent will not spoil a batch worth tens of thousands of euros. So every project starts with an analysis: what’s in the mixture, which impurities are critical, how many cycles are permissible,” he says.
For this the company offers regular laboratory control and automated monitoring of key parameters. If there is a deviation, the unit switches the flow to disposal, preventing the return of a nonconforming solvent.
Yegor Vasilievich Bourkin: “The customer must be sure that the returned solvent will not spoil a batch worth tens of thousands of euros.”
Recovery economics
Payback calculation, according to Bourkin, consists of several parts: savings on fresh solvent procurement, reduced waste disposal costs, energy costs, membrane maintenance, and laboratory control.
“We do not tell the client ‘you will save this many percent.’ We take their volumes, their prices, their mixture and calculate. Sometimes it turns out that the unit pays back in two years. And sometimes — that it’s better not to buy it,” Bourkin argues.
Recovery is not justified, for example, when waste volumes are too small and the mixture is too complex. In such cases the company advises optimizing the process itself to reduce solvent consumption.
Yegor Vasilievich Bourkin: “We do not tell the client ‘you will save this many percent.’ We take their volumes, their prices, their mixture and calculate.”
Ecology without slogans
Bourkin acknowledges that environmental rhetoric helps sales: European manufacturers feel pressure from regulators and buyers. But he is not ready to build a business on it.
“I don’t like the word ‘green’ in presentations. If a unit reduces waste but bankrupts the plant, that’s bad ecology, because tomorrow that plant will close, and production will move somewhere where solvents aren’t even considered. Good ecology must be profitable,” he says.
In his view, further development of the direction is connected with new membrane materials that are resistant to aggressive solvents. The company conducts its own research in this area, but new membranes will enter the market only after long tests.
“A membrane that works well for a month doesn’t interest us. We need a membrane that works for two years in a mixture where everything the customer forgot to specify in the technical assignment is present. Such testing cannot be rushed; it can only be honestly completed,” Bourkin emphasizes. According to him, the first results of new materials the company plans to present to customers no earlier than 2028 year.
Yegor Vasilievich Bourkin: “A membrane that works well for a month doesn’t interest us. We need a membrane that works for two years in a mixture.”
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