During the Winter Semester 2025/26, business and IT students developed a digital emissions calculator for industrial wastewater projects as part of the Co-Innovation Lab, in collaboration with EPSE Oy. The project focused on transforming complex, manual CO₂ calculations into a structured and scalable digital solution that supports faster decision-making and reliable climate impact reporting.
A Cleantech Company Addressing Industrial Wastewater Challenges
EPSE Oy is a privately owned cleantech company based in Finland that treats industrial wastewater containing soluble heavy metals. Its patented EPSE™ Method removes a wide range of dissolved metals in a single treatment step, producing clean water and an insoluble multi-metal precipitate that can be reused or safely disposed of.
The Challenge: Making Climate Benefits Verifiable
As sustainability requirements increase, EPSE customers request verified CO₂ emissions benefit calculations for wastewater treatment projects during piloting phases. Today, these calculations are not consistently available. In many cases, they are not produced at all, and when they are, technical workers create them manually or with limited support from Excel-based spreadsheets. As a result, calculations are time-consuming, prone to error, and difficult to verify consistently.
The Solution: A Practical Emissions Calculator
To address these challenges, the student team developed a practical emissions calculator tailored to EPSE’s project needs. The tool enables the structured and transparent calculation of CO₂ emission benefits by using pre-given formulas for calculating environmental impacts across pilot projects. EPSE technical team can now select predefined emission sources and enter project-specific quantities. Based on these inputs, the calculator generates a standardized emissions report that can be exported for documentation and customer communication. The underlying database remains adaptable, allowing emission variables, factors, and units to be updated as requirements evolve. By standardizing assumptions, data inputs, and calculation logic, the tool enables EPSE to communicate climate impact consistently across projects. This improves comparability, increases credibility toward customers, and reduces internal coordination effort. Therefore, the prototype creates a competitive advantage, reduces manual effort, and supports easier communication of climate benefits. This is an improvement EPSE identified as essential when reviewing the solution: “Compared to our previous Excel-based tool, the prototype looks significantly easier to manage and aligns well with our key requirement for a clearer and more structured approach.”- Mikko Rautiainen, EPSE Oy.
About the Co-Innovation Lab
This solution was designed in a project of the Co-Innovation Lab of Hochschule München guided by the lecturers Prof. Jessica Slamka, Prof. Dr. Holger Günzel, Prof. Dr. Lars Brehm, and Mr. Hans-Jürgen Haak together with Anne-Mari Stenbacka and Jere Käpyaho (TAMK). The Co-Innovation Lab offers students a virtual platform for learning how to work as a consulting team by creating temporary partnerships between companies, students, and lecturers.
For more information about the Co-Innovation Lab, contact holger.guenzel@hm.edu or lars.brehm@hm.edu.
- Project results:
- coming soon