BELLINGHAM, Wash. – A company that got a financial boost from the Port of Bellingham is making a big splash in the water treatment industry.
Tidal Vision was featured on forbes.com for its method of extracting a biopolymer call chitosan from crab shells.
When introduced to wastewater, chitosan works like a magnet to bind with pollutants and suspend them so they can be filtered out.
It’s the only naturally occurring, bio-degradable biopolymer in the world and is cheaper than conventional metal-based coagulants.
And Tidal Vision gets the shells from sustainable fisheries.
Port of Bellingham Commissioner Michael Shepard says in a Facebook post that the port made a $75,000 development loan to the company in 2017.
It’s since grown from just six employees to 40 today with plans to add 20 more jobs this year.