Never too late to build a better planet: CEO takes second company public 15 years after he 'retired'

Author of the article: Joe O'Connor
Publishing date: Jul 15, 2021
Financial Post

Andrew Benedek is chief executive officer of Anaergia Inc., a Burlington, Ont.-based firm that converts organic waste into clean water, fertilizer and renewable natural gas. PHOTO BY PHOTO PROVIDED

78-year-old Andrew Benedek's plan is to combat climate change by transforming trash into clean energy, making landfills obsolete.

BNN Bloomberg made its morning rounds of the North American stock exchange bell-ringing ceremonies on June 23, showing scenes of smiling executives enthusiastically cheering as their respective companies were welcomed to the public markets as new listings.

Among the companies listed that June day was Anaergia Inc., a Burlington, Ont.-based outfit that converts organic waste into clean water, fertilizer and renewable natural gas. It has operations worldwide, including Toronto, new patents galore, a variety of proprietary technology and an additional $175 million in the bank after its initial public offering on the Toronto Stock Exchange.

In the midst of Anaergia’s madly clapping remote-working executives was a wiry gentleman wearing glasses and sitting on a swivel-back chair in a modestly decorated home office in San Diego County, Calif.

Despite the West Coast address, Andrew Benedek certainly isn’t some young whippersnapper tech-bro-founder cracking the big time for the first time. Instead, he’s a 78-year-old water treatment expert and somewhat of an international legend.

Once upon another corporate incarnation, he sold his first publicly traded Canadian-based company — Zenon Environmental Inc., which he built from scratch — to General Electric Co. for $760 million in 2006.

He was 63 years old at the time of a transaction that netted him a princely sum.

“I had zero reason to ever work again and, frankly, I didn’t intend to,” Anaergia’s chair and chief executive said.

Andrew Benedek in 1999. The 78-year-old is a water treatment expert and somewhat of an international legend. PHOTO BY PETER REDMAN/NATIONAL POST FILES

So much for intentions: Benedek’s new business plan is to combat climate change and make landfills obsolete by transforming the heaps of gunk that typically get dumped into them into clean energy, and going public is just the latest step.

Viewed from the outside, it is a rather unlikely pivot for the septuagenarian, who initially moved to California post-GE windfall because he liked the weather and wanted to take an unpaid position as a researcher with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

An inveterate bookworm, Benedek had always wanted to study oceans. The trouble was, he had been too busy building a successful company to do so.

Sailing away into the sunset of academia was not a complete shocker to others, either. Benedek had been a chemical engineering professor and water researcher at McMaster University in Hamilton, where he was entranced by differential equations and the like, until he realized that the best way to make an impact on the real world was to become an entrepreneur, which led to Zenon’s founding in 1980.

“I had no knowledge of business,” he said. “My former dean, Jack Hodgins, gave me a book on entrepreneurship, and that was my training.”

It proved to be enough, apparently: Zenon’s groundbreaking work with advanced membrane technologies and ultra-filtration techniques would become the gold standard for drinking water purification and wastewater treatment worldwide.

A guy with no business training eventually collected a bucket full of prestigious awards, gave speeches to attentive audiences, rubbed shoulders with politicians and policy-makers, and was the go-to when things went horribly wrong.

Andrew Benedek with Zenon’s proprietary ZeeWeed(R) membranes in an undated file photo. PHOTO BY CANADA NEWSWIRE PHOTO/ZENON ENVIRONMENTAL INC.

For instance, Zenon got the call to help clean up the mess in Walkerton, Ont., after the town experienced a contaminated drinking water crisis in 2000 that would kill seven and sicken scores more.

Then along came GE, and the rest could have been history, only it wasn’t, thanks partly to the oceanographers at Scripps. The professors got to talking with their unpaid researcher about climate change, its impact on the world’s oceans and the dismal outlook for the planet if nothing is done.

It was enough to convince Benedek that maybe he should try to do something. He did. Anaergia was born after he took a shine to UTS Biogastechnik GmbH, a German biogas company that was going bankrupt. He wound up buying it in 2007, taking charge as chief executive, moving to Germany for a spell and working 24/7, just like in the good old days.

“I will start to lose hope, but then I think of a new angle — something I could do — and I get excited again, pick myself up and move on”

ANDREW BENEDEK

“It took me a while to get used to it,” he said. “I relearned all the lessons I had learned the first time around.”

This time, however, he was an entrepreneur starting out with his own money, rather than just a how-to book. He made additional strategic acquisitions, beavered away on some new patents and went public — again — 15 years after he had left the public eye and four decades after founding Zenon.

“I am building a solution for the planet,” Benedek said. “If I do it right, it will both help the planet and make a significant amount of money for the shareholders, just like Zenon did.”

GE paid a 55-per-cent per share premium when it bought Zenon for $24 a share. Anaergia’s IPO went for $14 a share and the stock is up to $15 after three weeks of trading.

I am building a solution for the planet

ANDREW BENEDEK

Anaergia recorded $128 million in revenue in 2020, and another $37.4 million in its most recent quarter, but said it has an order backlog of some $2.8 billion.

Money is nice, but what really drives Benedek — and always has — is making a difference. He fled Hungary during the 1956 revolution as a teen and came to Canada. His first job was in a Montreal pencil factory.

“Everything they taught me in communism about how bad capitalism was, was absolutely in play,” he said. “But I still loved it.”

Still, he wound up getting fired, because he didn’t like “being pushed around.”

Books and school beckoned, and it was Benedek’s life story, coupled with his brains and belief in putting values ahead of profit, that won over Frank McKenna when he was New Brunswick premier.

Benedek brought his membrane technology to the province in the 1990s. McKenna, now deputy chair of TD Securities, joined Zenon’s board after he left politics. It is a role he is reprising with Anaergia.

“Instead of sitting on a beach somewhere spending his money, Andrew has spent the last 15 years investing in all kinds of innovative solutions in cleaning waste and creating a waste-to-value stream,” McKenna said. “Any conversation you have with him is not so much around dollars and cents, but around the ability of technologies to transform the great challenges facing the world.”

Consider landfills: garbage dumps are the third-largest emitters of methane gas in the United States, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Escaping methane gas further cranks up the heat in the atmosphere. This, we know, is not good.

“Unless we are prepared to move to Mars, we have to stop this,” Benedek said.

An Anaergia renewable energy facility. PHOTO BY CNW GROUP/ANAERGIA INC.

Anaergia believes its technology trumps conventional digesters at wastewater treatment plants because it requires 60 per cent less in capital expenditures and can increase capacity of existing digestion systems by approximately 300 per cent.

In a perfect world, the water-treatment legend would put landfills out of business. In the deeply imperfect present, he fears for the future and admits that thinking about it can be depressing.

“I will start to lose hope, but then I think of a new angle — something I could do — and I get excited again, pick myself up and move on,” he said.

In other words, Benedek is not willing to go down without a fight. It’s clear he is showing no signs of slowing down as he creeps ever closer to his 80th birthday.

Indeed, even though his corner of San Diego County includes the likes of Bill Gates, Kawhi Leonard and Ace Frehley, he still keeps a solid foothold in Canada, with a vacation home in Salt Spring Island, B.C., which is where he is headed at the end of the month for the first time in almost two years.

Benedek quotes Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister, when he reflects upon his age. Peres had this to say when asked at 90 whether he thought of himself as old:

“What is old? In my view, old is when your dreams of the future are less than your accomplishments of the past.”

By that definition, Benedek isn’t old. On the contrary, he is just getting started.