Saskatoon-based Environmental Material Science (EMS) has secured over $1.6 million in investment. “That funding is to help EMS, expand its technology and its offerings to various customers,” CEO Steve Siciliano told CTV News. EMS uses technology to improve soil contamination monitoring and remediation. The company’s tools can save time and money and reduce the remediation carbon footprint by 99 per cent, according to an EMS news release. “It'll measure the pollution, how quickly the pollution is degrading, as well as other environmental parameters,” Siciliano explained. “So companies use this to understand how much pollution there is to help them clean up the soil faster.” With EMS companies can also see if they need to dig or just leave it and what the risks are if they don’t remediate the soil, Siciliano said. He said his company also improves the environment by reducing carbon waste. “They've saved 2.7 megatons of CO2 coolants from being emitted and saved four million cubic meters of water. That's an enormous amount of water.” He said EMS customers have saved $2.7 million in remediation costs. “So it's really a win-win for everybody.” EMS was founded in 2019 as a spinoff from the University of Saskatchewan, Siciliano said. “EMS was founded in 2019, with one employee and now has 17. It's based on over a decade of research in the department of soil science and in collaboration with Federated Co-op.” He said Saskatchewan was the best place for tech companies like his. “There's a lot of tech talent in Saskatoon. So when you couple that tech talent in Saskatoon with really good soil science in Saskatoon,” he said. “Then it makes a lot of sense that if you're going to build a soil science technology company, Saskatoon is probably the best place in Canada to do it.” The biggest investors include PIC Investment Group, Startup TNT, Golden Opportunities Fund Inc., and WTC Investments LP.
