About Us : History

Separation Technologists is an envirotech company specializing in water and chemical recycling used in the parts cleaning industry. The company has an installed base of more than 450 systems worldwide, in the US and around the world.

History
Separation Technologists, Inc. was founded in April 1986 as a national company specializing in recycling wastewater for electronic assembly operations.

In the following years the depletion of the ozone layer required electronic assemblers to change from CFCs (chlorofluorocarbon) to other cleaning processes, such as aqueous and semi-aqueous cleaning. This greatly increased electronic assembler's concern about the discharge of wastewater from their cleaning process. Since they did not discharge CFCs to the environment and were not familiar with the discharge of any wastewater, our closed-loop wastewater recycling design was very attractive. Separation Technologists pioneered this new process that later became the design standard in teh industry. And it continued its leadership with with new designs for related electronic cleaning processes.

As a result of Separation Technologists' leadership, in 1994 it became the only company receiving an award for "Leadership in Closed-Loop Water Recycling" out of more than 240 other companies and individuals who received EPA awards during the four years in which such awards were given. This original wastewater treatment design became the standard for all manufacturers of electronics assembly cleaning equipment in the world. About 450 wastewater recycling systems are now installed world-wide.

From 1995 on, Separation Technologists diversified into cleaning all kinds of parts. These applications include: cleaning oil contaminated parts (precision metal machined, stamped and related) by numerous cleaning operations, plating and ultrasonic; and emulsified oil removal.

Founder
In November 1983, John F. Russo led a collaborative effort with two other engineers to invent the first known closed-loop wastewater recycling systems for an electronics assembly aqueous cleaner in the USA.

In June 1989, he was listed in the United Nations Electronics Cleaning Solvents Technical Options report as an expert adviser to the UNEP Committee (United Nations Environmental Program). Further development of the wastewater treatment processes led to a number of "firsts" in the industry, such as surface mount, semi-aqueous cleaning, and saponifier cleaning.

Click here to download a PDF of: "Making Decisions about Water and Wastewater for Aqueous Operation" by John F. Russo Chapter 2.17 Handbook for Critical Cleaning Editor-in-Chief Barbara Kanegsberg Reprinted with permission from CRC Press www.crcpress.com

Background and Other Accomplishments
John has held various technical positions at Corning Glass Works, DuPont, and Polaroid Corporation.
As a water application specialist since 1974, he worked on more than 50 different applications that involved designing, engineering, manufacturing and installing systems for tap water, high purity water and wastewater treatment. These systems utilized numerous mechanical filtration, adsorptive, ion-exchange and membrane separation technologies.

• Authored and co-authored more than ten technical papers on wastewater treatment for electronics
  cleaning and corrosion of metals.
  
• Wrote 28 page chapter, "Making Decisions about Water and Wastewater for Aqueous Operations," in the Handbook of Critical Cleaning, CRC Press, 2001.
  
• Presented five workshops offering training in wastewater recycling and water treatment

He holds an Associates in Metals Engineering, B.S. in Chemistry, an MBA and CW-V certification (reverse osmosis, deionization, filtration, disinfection) from the Water Quality Association.