Nathan Armstrong recently quit his job to focus full time on CeteX, the cleantech startup he and his brother Gregory started to help industrial facilities clean up wastewater.

Cetex is one of five finalists in the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation’s Breakthru competition, which will award $406,000 in cash and services to the three top teams at a dinner in Fredericton on Wednesday. Obviously the Armstrong brothers are hoping CeteX walks away with the gold for the prestige that comes with the win, but they also could use the $192,000 first prize (which includes as much as $160,000 in cash) to help develop a working prototype.

“I left my job and I’ve decided to take it on full-time,” said Nathan in an interview Wednesday. “I’ve basically saved up and it’s given us some runway until we hit our seed round. You have to prove to your investors that you’re committed to it.”

The Cetex system helps businesses to clean up wastewater from their plants without a massive investment in infrastructure and avoid fines that can reach $100,000. The estimated market for wastewater treatment and maintenance in Canada alone is about $1.1 billion, and the Canadian government has projected that $5.7 billion will be invested in wastewater treatment by 2020.

CeteX proposes fitting all the needed technology into a mobile shipping container, backing it into a plant and letting a client lease the system without an expensive upgrade. It will clean the water so that it can be flushed away with no harm to the environment, or re-used in the plant. The Armstrong brothers believe this system will cost 50 to 55 percent less than other products available now.

If clients like the system, they can buy the container of equipment, use two or more containers side by side to increase capacity, or install the facility in their plant. In the third option, CeteX can even extract methane from the wastewater. That methane can power the treatment facility and even return energy to the plant.

Nathan Armstrong said the company needs about $250,000 to develop a working prototype and establish proof of concept. He said the company can operate for about 16 months before it needs to raise seed funding. Gregory Armstrong is finishing up an engineering degree at University of New Brunswick, where he is part of the Management, Technology and Entrepreneurship program.

CeteX is in talks with a funding agency to help with the development costs, and will be working in a UNB lab to prove the technology works.

The brothers have identified two New Brunswick companies they hope will test the first mobile prototype and hopefully adopt the technology.

“It’s kind of a trial purpose to show that it works,” said Nathan. “It’s baby-steps and if it works they can break their lease and move up to a larger facility.”