You founded pH7 in 2021. The
company has grown quickly—you
have this office here and a facility in
Burnaby and have raised a lot of money.
Why did you start the company?
What was the vision?
pH7 comes from my vision and passion about water
and the environment. I'm a mining engineer, a chem-
ical engineer, and I have been practising in mineral
processing and wastewater management for the last 15
years. I moved to Canada from Iran about seven years
ago. I saw a challenge in the mining industry, in min-
eral processing and wastewater management, in the
amount of water required for the extraction of metals.
And most of the water is wastewater that needs to be
treated. Some can't be.
The idea for pH7 is thinking outside the box to elim-
inate wastewater: a new system that extracts metals
with the same efficiency and economical unit while not
generating any wastewater. We came up with a closed-
loop system.
So you don't eliminate
wastewater like some other
companies. Your process just
doesn't generate it at all?
Exactly. We provide recycling and mining
industries with a processing solution that
doesn't generate any wastewater. It's a new
process. Our processing plant in Burnaby
can handle 5,000 kilos per day of raw mate-
rials. We extract critical minerals from those
materials without generating any wastewa-
ter. And so we process the materials in a
sustainable and economical manner.
What has been the mining
industry's reaction to this?
They love the process we have. We intro-
duced it as complementary to the market:
processing materials they can't process
easily—ones that are unextractable or un-smeltable.
Energy is another thing we're saving through this pro-
cess. Smelters melt everything down in 1,500-degree
furnaces and get less than 1 percent of the metals
they're trying to extract. We attack the 1 percent.
You've raised a significant amount
of capital as well.
We closed the Series A last year. We raised US$16 mil-
lion from Canadian and American investors. We got
WASTE NOT
Metal processing company pH7 Technologies
has come a long way in a short time. We sat down
with CEO Mohammad Doostmohammadi at his
office in East Vancouver to dig into how pH7 is
changing the mining industry
BE MINE
pH7 Technologies'innovative
mining process doesn't
produce any wastewater
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B C B U S I N E S S . C A
A P R I L / M AY 2 0 2 5 p H 7 Te c h n o l o g i e s
