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Studying Worms to Revolutionize Wastewater Treatment: The Science Behind Vermifiltration at the Vermitech Innovation Center

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WALLA WALLA, Wash., March 20, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — https://perca.net/ As industries and municipalities seek sustainable solutions for wastewater treatment, a remarkable and reliable natural ally is emerging—earthworms. The study of worms for vermifiltration, a process that leverages their biological activity to purify water, is gaining traction as an eco-friendly alternative to conventional wastewater treatment methods. At the forefront of this research is the Vermitech Innovation Center, a pioneering facility owned and operated by Perca, Inc., dedicated to advancing vermifiltration technology and demonstrating its potential in real-world applications.

The Science Behind Vermifiltration

Vermifiltration harnesses the natural capabilities of earthworms and beneficial microbes to break down organic matter and remove contaminants from wastewater. This biological process not only treats water effectively but also significantly reduces energy consumption and the need for chemical additives. Compared to traditional wastewater treatment plants, which can be energy-intensive and costly, vermifiltration offers a low-carbon, low-maintenance, and cost-effective alternative.

“Earthworms act as nature’s tiny engineers, processing organic waste, aerating filtration beds, and enhancing microbial diversity,” explains Dr. George Damoff, Chief Science Officer at Perca. “Through continuous research and innovation, we are improving the efficiency of this process and scaling it for broader industrial and municipal applications.”

The Role of the Vermitech Innovation Center

As a hub for research, development, and real-world implementation, the Vermitech Innovation Center is instrumental in refining vermifiltration techniques and promoting industry adoption. Located in Walla Walla, Washington, this state-of-the-art facility houses advanced and proprietary testing grounds and pilot systems designed to optimize worm-based filtration for diverse wastewater sources, including municipal sewage, agricultural byproducts, and industrial effluents.

Perca’s commitment to sustainable water treatment solutions is evident in the Center’s focus on scientific experimentation, performance validation, and commercial scaling. By collaborating with universities, environmental organizations, and industry partners, the VIC is actively driving the global transition toward nature-based wastewater treatment technologies.

“The research we conduct at the VIC is essential for demonstrating the real-world feasibility of vermifiltration,” says Sierra Smith, Director of Research and Development at Perca. “We are constantly innovating and fine-tuning our systems to enhance water quality, improve efficiency, and make this technology accessible to industries and communities worldwide.”

Key Benefits of Studying Worms for Vermifiltration

Sustainability & Carbon Reduction – Unlike conventional treatment methods that rely on high energy inputs and chemicals, vermifiltration is powered by biological processes, significantly reducing greenhouse gas emissions and energy consumption.

Cost-Effectiveness – Vermifiltration requires minimal infrastructure and operational costs, making it an attractive option for rural and decentralized wastewater treatment systems.

Efficient Contaminant Removal – The combination of earthworms and microbial activity effectively removes even toxic chemicals such as pharmaceutical residues, pesticides, and heavy metals, organic matter, pathogens, nitrogen, and heavy metals, producing cleaner effluent water that can be safely discharged or reused.

No Sludge or Brine Production – Unlike traditional wastewater treatment that generates large amounts of sludge requiring disposal, vermifiltration produces no sludge or brine during the process, eliminating costly waste management concerns. Vermifiltration eliminates sludge accumulation, lowering waste management costs and environmental impact.

Biodiversity & Soil Health Benefits – The byproducts of vermifiltration, including nutrient-rich worm castings, can be repurposed as soil enhancers, supporting regenerative agriculture and reducing landfill waste.

Looking Ahead: The Future of Vermifiltration

With rising global demand for sustainable water management solutions, the Vermitech Innovation Center is positioning itself as a leader in advancing vermifiltration technology. Through continued research, pilot projects, and strategic partnerships, Perca aims to scale this natural wastewater treatment method to benefit industries, municipalities, and communities worldwide.

“We believe that engaging with nature, rather than working against it, is the key to solving our most pressing environmental challenges,” says Russell Davis, President and CEO of Perca. “The research being conducted at the VIC is proof that solutions inspired by nature can drive real impact in wastewater management.”

For more information about the Vermitech Innovation Center, its research initiatives, or partnership opportunities, please visit https://perca.net/contact-us/ or contact Nicky Ridler at betterwater@perca.net.

About Perca

Perca is an industry leader in sustainable wastewater treatment solutions, specializing in innovative nature-based technologies. With a mission to transform wastewater management through eco-friendly and cost-effective approaches, Perca continues to drive impactful change across industries and communities.

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SOURCE Perca, Inc.

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Trustpilot unveils new features to help businesses further leverage consumer insights, drive growth

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New tools enable brands to get more from reviews, turn trust into a competitive advantage

LONDON, April 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Trustpilot, the world’s largest independent platform for customer feedback, today introduced new features that go a step beyond customer feedback, and enable businesses to transform trust into action. The new features allow businesses to showcase verified customer reviews exactly where and when they matter, with the goal of driving conversions and maintaining loyalty through targeted and relevant engagements. These new features bridge the gap between marketing and customer experience teams, equipping them with shared insights and tools that help create stronger relationships, higher conversion rates, and better business health.

Customer trust can make or break a brand. According to PWC’s 2024 Trust Survey, 93% of business executives agree that building and maintaining trust improves the bottom line. To underscore this, 46% of consumers say they spend more with brands that they trust and 28% would even pay a premium.

Businesses have no shortage of customer data—star ratings, NPS scores, survey results, social engagement – but turning that data into actionable strategies has been a missing link. In fact, according to the same PWC Trust Survey, 90% of business executives from a range of industries believed that their company was highly trusted by consumers, however, only 30% of consumers polled indicated that they highly trust the businesses in those industries.

Trustpilot’s new features enable brands to transform reviews into an invaluable data source for customer, market, and competitive insights. These insights can bolster sales, strengthen customer relationships, and ultimately, help businesses improve. The new features enable Trustpilot customers to:

Learn more from reviews: Review follow-up, an immediate post-review questionnaire, allows businesses to gather more specific and actionable feedback from their customers.Better understand customers and prospects: With visitor insights, businesses gain a deeper understanding of their review engagement and customer behaviour, which can then uncover untapped growth opportunities.Dive deep into review trends and patterns: With analytics explorer, Trustpilot customers have one place to easily track all their metrics including TrustScore, number of reviews, invitations, profile views, search impressions, and more.Promote relevant reviews: Trustpilot widgets help businesses showcase reviews on their website. With flex widgets for review content, businesses can group reviews to feature in widgets based on keywords mentioned in the review copy, star rating, recency and more.Customise social proof: Online ads with the Trustpilot logo and stars are 6x more persuasive than those without. (London Research) With the new asset builder, businesses can quickly and efficiently customise trust signals to feature in owned and paid media assets.

Many businesses understand the value of earning trust with customers, but can struggle to turn customer feedback into valuable action. Trustpilot’s new features change that, giving brands the insights needed to build a business their customers trust.

“Customer feedback isn’t meant to just be collected—it’s meant to drive action,” said Alicia Skubick, Chief Customer Officer at Trustpilot. “When businesses showcase their TrustScore in advertising, or refine internal processes to address customer concerns, they are turning their customers’ voices into measurable business success. These features will enable businesses to take those insights, and the value they offer, further.”

To learn more about working with Trustpilot, and the new features, visit: https://uk.business.trustpilot.com/

About Trustpilot

Trustpilot began in 2007 with a simple yet powerful idea that is more relevant today than ever — to be the universal symbol of trust, bringing consumers and businesses together through reviews. Trustpilot is open, independent, and impartial — we help consumers make the right choices and businesses to build trust, grow and improve.

Today, we have more than 320 million reviews and 70 million monthly active users across the globe, with 140 billion annual Trustbox impressions, and the numbers keep growing. We have more than 1,000 employees and we’re headquartered in Copenhagen, with operations in Amsterdam, Denver, Edinburgh, Hamburg, London, Melbourne, Milan and New York.

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Rakuten Symphony and Nirmata Announce Successful Testing and Certification for Kyverno Policy Engine for Rakuten Cloud Solutions

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TOKYO and SANTA CLARA, Calif., April 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Rakuten Symphony, Inc. and Nirmata, Inc., today announced successful testing and certification for Kyverno, the policy engine designed for Kubernetes, on Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform and Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage. The integrated solution will allow Rakuten Cloud customers to leverage Kyverno to enforce security and policies in their Kubernetes® deployments.

“Rakuten Cloud offers ease-of-use automation with industry-leading features including data security and compliance enforcement in cloud-native environments,” said Partha Seetala, President of Cloud Business Unit at Rakuten Symphony. “With Nirmata and Kyverno, Rakuten Cloud customers in sensitive and critical industries like health care and finance benefit from Kyverno’s policy-as-a-code approach.”

Rakuten Cloud offers robust data access controls and encryption mechanisms to protect sensitive data in edge environments. Kyverno adds enhanced policy enforcement and governance capabilities within Rakuten Cloud solutions, allowing users to define and apply custom policies for security, compliance, and operational best practices across all Kubernetes clusters. This enables granular control over resource configurations and workload deployments, ensuring consistency and security at scale.

“Integrating Kyverno with Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform empowers users with robust, policy-driven governance across their distributed Kubernetes environments,” said Ritesh Patel, Co-Founder and Vice President, Products at Nirmata, the creators of Kyverno. “By providing a centralized policy engine that works seamlessly with Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform’s multi-cluster management, we enable enterprises to maintain compliance and data security while accelerating their cloud-native initiatives by enabling developer self-service. Kyverno’s declarative approach to policy management aligns perfectly with Rakuten Cloud’s goal of simplifying Kubernetes operations across diverse infrastructures.”

Kyverno’s policy-as-code approach allows users to define policies while eliminating the need for complex programming. This integration with Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform and Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage allows users to apply these policies consistently, ensuring uniform security and compliance posture regardless of the underlying infrastructure. Additionally, Kyverno’s ability to mutate and validate resources at runtime provides real-time enforcement and prevents misconfigurations before they impact production environments, adding significant value to Rakuten Cloud customers. Nirmata Control Hub, a central platform designed to manage Kyverno policies, enables security and automation for Kubernetes at scale.

Rakuten Cloud provides industry-leading cloud-native platform and Software Defined storage solutions designed for automation and AI. Rakuten Cloud-Native Platform provides these advantages using an intuitive, declarative interface, with advanced automation, that reduces deployment complexity, timelines and human error, with high availability which ensures no single point of failure. Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage offers high-performance capabilities at scale for diverse applications including AI/ML, retail, IoT, and gaming. Rakuten Cloud-Native Storage stands out from competing solutions in delivering true application awareness without requiring extensive Kubernetes and storage expertise.

To learn more about Rakuten Cloud or to schedule a demo, visit https://cloud.rakuten.com/.

For more information on Nirmata and Kyverno, visit https://nirmata.com/kyverno-oss.

Please visit Nirmata at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe in London on April 1-4, 2025 at booth N660, and at the Kyverno Booth 17B at the CNCF Project Pavilion, and Rakuten Symphony at booth S763.

About Rakuten Symphony
Rakuten Symphony is changing supply chain norms and disrupting outmoded thinking that threatens the industry’s pursuit of rapid innovation and growth. Based on proven modern infrastructure practices, its open interface platforms make it possible to launch and operate advanced services in a fraction of the time and cost of conventional approaches, with no compromise to network quality or security. Rakuten Symphony has operations in Japan, the United States, Singapore, India, South Korea, Europe, and the Middle East Africa region.

For more information about Rakuten Symphony’s offerings, please visit: https://symphony.rakuten.com.

About Nirmata
Nirmata is a leading provider of cloud-native policy and governance solutions, empowering enterprises to innovate securely at scale. Powered by Kyverno, a popular open-source Kubernetes policy engine with over 3.2 billion downloads, Nirmata enables real-time policy enforcement across multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructures, ensuring secure and compliant operations at scale. For more information, visit www.nirmata.com or follow Nirmata on GitHub, X, and LinkedIn.

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SOURCE Nirmata, Inc

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Hyundai Mobis to Use Eco-friendly Aluminum for Main Auto Components

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The company introduces low-carbon aluminum using solar energy, signing a 15,000 tons contract with EGA.Using low-carbon aluminum is expected to reduce carbon emissions to a quarter of the current level.It has proactively introduced eco-friendly raw materials in response to the full-scale enforcement of the European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) next year.It plans to secure low-carbon aluminum in the long term in response to the transition to eco-friendly mobility such as EVs.

SEOUL, South Korea, April 2, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Hyundai Mobis (KRX 012330) will proactively apply low-carbon aluminum produced using solar power to the manufacturing of main automotive components starting this year. This is part of its concrete action plan for achieving the goal of carbon neutrality by 2045. Aluminum is a key material for the lightweighting of mobility, such as electric vehicles, and Hyundai Mobis plans to strengthen its green supply chain starting from the raw material procurement stage in response to the transition to eco-friendly mobility.

Hyundai Mobis announced on 2 that it has signed a contract with Emirates Global Aluminum (EGA), a global aluminum producer, securing 15,000 tons of low-carbon green aluminum. EGA is a world-class aluminum producer headquartered in Dubai, United Arab Emirates (UAE), and the aluminum Hyundai Mobis has secured this time is low-carbon aluminum produced using solar power.

The 15,000 tons of low-carbon aluminum secured by Hyundai Mobis is the annual amount the company needs, which is worth about 62 billion Korean won. This is more than 20% of the total amount of aluminum the company purchased throughout the last year, which is 67,000 tons in total.

Low-carbon aluminum is called an eco-friendly material because carbon is less emitted during its manufacturing process. It is generally known that about 16.5 tons of carbon is emitted during the manufacturing of refining, smelting, and casting to produce one ton of aluminum. On the other hand, the carbon emissions of green aluminum produced by EGA using solar energy are about 4 tons, which is only a quarter of those of regular aluminum.

Hyundai Mobis plans to proactively respond to environmental regulations of governments around the world by using the green aluminum it introduced this year in the manufacture of main components such as chassis. In particular, as the European Union (EU) will fully enforce the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) regulation from next year, Hyundai Mobis is expected to be able to minimize the impact of the regulation. The CBAM regulation is a program that calculates and charges the carbon emissions of products imported into Europe, targeting six carbon-intensive products: steel, aluminum, electricity, fertilizer, cement, and hydrogen.

Hyundai Mobis plans to continue to introduce low-carbon aluminum and make specific efforts to strengthen its ESG management and achieve its carbon neutrality goals. Hyundai Mobis plans to establish a strategic partnership with EGA in the first half of this year to secure a stable and systematic supply of low-carbon aluminum in the future.

“We will proactively respond to global environmental regulations by establishing a green supply chain and embody our efforts to reduce carbon emissions from the supply chain stage,” said Sun-woo Lee, senior vice president of purchasing, Hyundai Mobis.

About Hyundai Mobis

Hyundai Mobis is the global no. 6 automotive supplier, headquartered in Seoul, Korea. Hyundai Mobis operates its R&D headquarters in Korea, with four technology centers in the United States, Germany, China, and India. For more information, please visit the website at http://www.mobis.com.

Media Contact 
Choon Kee Hwangckhwang@mobis.com
Jihyun Han : jihyun.han@mobis.com

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