The city of Visalia, CA, will make history in 2013, when its newly upgraded wastewater treatment plant enters service. The plant, which will treat wastewater so that the city of Visalia can reuse it, will rank as the largest membrane bioreactor plant in the state.

It will also address a serious problem, one that Visalia is far from alone in facing: Many areas of the United States face water shortages. It’s essential for these regions to rely on new technology to recycle and reuse their water.

By doing so, municipalities will take water that they once pumped back into nearby streams, creeks, or other bodies of water, treat it, and then send it back to their communities. The communities can then use this water for everything from maintaining the landscaping at local parks and golf courses, to flushing the toilets in large government buildings.

Under a contract with Visalia, GE will equip the city’s wastewater treatment plant with membrane bioreactor (MBR) technology, a water treatment system that features hollow-fiber membranes. This filtration technology separates particles, bacteria, and viruses from water or wastewater. Nearly 1,000 plants across the globe use this technology to produce high-quality drinking water or to meet or exceed wastewater treatment and water reuse standards.

In the city of Visalia’s case, the membranes will result in water that municipal officials can use for agricultural or landscaping uses. This is a significant improvement over how the city currently handles the water from its wastewater treatment plant: It discharges it into the nearby Mill Creek.

Committing to the upgrade was no small matter for the city. But municipal officials agreed: They had to do something to guarantee that their city would be able to supply adequate amounts of drinking water to its residents in the future.

“We are very excited about this,” says Andrew Benelli, public works director for Visalia. “This will be the largest project that the city has ever done, as far as a dollar-amount investment goes. This is close to a $100-million project. There has never been one that expensive in the life of this city. But it’s an important project; it’s one that we had to take on.”

The good news is that Visalia is not alone in its efforts to eliminate a possible future of water shortages. It’s old news that many cities along the West Coast of the United States are dealing with an ever-shrinking supply of available drinking water.

What isn’t as well known is that many of these municipalities are investing big dollars into upgrading water treatment plants so that they can recycle and reuse their water.

Robert Nespeca, vice president of asset management with Costa Mesa, CA-based PERC Water, says that many municipalities have little choice but to commit to water-recycling technology. The regulators in their states are making sure of that.

“Regulations are demanding reuse,” says Nespeca. “We can’t just continue to take fresh water, use it, treat it, and waste it in the ocean. Any surface water distribution into the ocean is highly inefficient. Once it mixes with salt water you have to use a lot of money to get it back. We’ll only see the demand for water reuse technology increase in the coming years.”

Making a difference in California
California is the center of water recycling technology for a good reason: The state, along with others in its region, faces the constant threat of water shortages.

That’s why officials with the city of Visalia are so excited about the plans for their upgraded wastewater treatment plant. Once the upgrade is completed, the MBR technology will remove nitrogen from the plant’s effluent. This will result in improved water quality, allowing Visalia to divert the wastewater it treats for a wide range of recycled water uses.

Benelli admits that the project does come with a significant price tag. But if city officials did not approve the plant upgrade, he says, they would have been guilty of shirking their responsibility to make sure that residents always have reliable access to safe, clean drinking water.

“There are real consequences for not planning for the future,” he says. “If we didn’t take real measures to address this issue, we wouldn’t be able to deliver water to new residences in the future. This is a necessary investment. It’s a much better investment than is paying for new water from outside sources. We realize that wastewater is a valuable resource.”

The city of Visalia has had been fortunate when it comes to water supply, Benelli says. Historically, it has always had an adequate supply thanks to the mountains surrounding it and the snow packs that they hold.

That has steadily changed, though, as the population here increases and as the area’s many farmers change the crops that they produce.

“We’ve seen more and more building here,” says Benelli. “The city has grown substantially. The amount of water we are using has increased. Farms in the area have changed a lot of their crop patterns. They used to plant a lot of wheat, corn, and winter-type crops. Now they are primarily growing trees, nuts, or fruits. These all use a lot more water.”

Visalia had several options when choosing the technology and the provider of this technology that it could use for upgrading its wastewater treatment plant.

Yuvbir Singh, general manager of the ultrafiltration/membrane bioreactor product line for GE Water, says that his firm had to compete with three other bidders on the Visalia project. When choosing a vendor with which to partner on this project, Singh says, Visalia city officials considered everything from capital costs and maintenance to reliability and the ability of technology providers to provide quick and efficient service.

City officials eventually decided that GE and its MBR technology provided the best combination of results and pricing.

Singh says that GE officials must always focus not just on the performance of its MBR technology, but on the costs that municipalities will incur during the lifetime of the membranes. The weak national economy has forced municipalities to focus ever more on their costs, even for essential items such as water recycling technologies.

And while municipal officials agree that they can’t ignore water-shortage issues, they’d like to spend as little as possible in addressing them.

“The operating costs have always been important. But today this is even more paramount,” says Singh. “The operating costs translate to what residents will end up paying for their water. That is becoming a bigger deal, it seems, every day, especially considering the way the economy is struggling. Municipalities want to know how much the energy to operate this technology will cost. They want to know how long the membranes will last, how robust they are. All of this is becoming very important. It always has been, but there is more intensity in these areas today.”

Singh says that GE will build the membranes for the Visalia facility next year at its plant. GE will then ship the membranes to the Visalia wastewater treatment plant, where they will eventually be installed.

Though this is a large project, it’s not an unusual one for GE, Singh says. The company has already equipped similar-sized plants across the globe with its MBR technology. And Singh, like most analysts of the water recycling and reuse industry, says that he only expects demand for his company’s product to increase.

“It’s not just in North America, in water-deprived regions such as California and Arizona, that we’re seeing a strong demand for this technology,” says Singh. “It’s beyond that. It’s a global demand. People are becoming aware of this technology. It is becoming more common for regulations to be more stringent on discharge. There are a ton of applications for this globally.”

Not even the bad national economy has been able to slow the growth of recycling technologies, Singh says.

“This business has been growing through the last couple of years, and we know that those have been touch economic years,” he says. “People need water, no matter what the economy is doing. But even if the business does slow in the United States, we have other areas to help us balance that out. It might slow in the United States, but we might see growth in the Middle East or in China. There’s a good balance, globally, in demand for this kind of technology.”

Reducing Costs Through Energy Savings
Even though reusing water is imperative in many regions, that doesn’t mean that municipalities aren’t hoping to spend as little as possible when upgrading their treatment plants and boosting their ability to recycle.

Fortunately, the providers of recycling systems have focused on this demand and have been able to shave a significant amount of dollars off the operating costs of treatment facilities.

This has certainly been the case in Santa Paula, CA. That municipality’s water recycling facility, which went operational ahead of schedule in mid-2010, is now using 35% less power to operate than municipal officials had originally been promised.

Much of the credit for this goes to PERC Water Corporation, the designer and builder of the facility, which added important energy-saving technologies to the project.

PERC, for instance, installed high-efficiency blowers throughout the recycling plant. This is important, because the blowers in a biological treatment plant tend to constitute about 50% of these facilities’ power consumption.

“If you can save anywhere, you want to save money on the biggest power-eaters in the plant,” says PERC’s Nespeca. “One of the things that help us is that we have an integrated design-build operation and finance firm. We have on our team engineers who determine the sizing and type of equipment that we use. We have people in our construction division who know how to install equipment. We have an operations group that is involved in the process from the beginning. They are all able to share ideas. We end up with a very efficient program to produce a very efficient plant. Every discipline is involved in this effort from the beginning.”

Marian Clayton, director of marketing with PERC Water, says that the city of Santa Paula has saved about $10,000 a month in operating costs of its new water recycling plant for the first seven months in which the plant was in operation.

The Santa Paula plant isn’t only about cost savings. It also demonstrates a growing trend in the construction and operation of water recycling facilities: More municipalities are entering into design/build/operate/finance arrangements with technology providers, meaning that these companies not only design the plants, they also handle the building, operation and financing of them. This minimizes the financial risks taken on by municipalities, who only pay service fees to the companies that build and operate their water-recycling facilities.

Under the design/build/operate/finance model, PERC Water and its financial partner finances the design, construction, and startup of the facilities without any capital cost required by the public agency for which it is working, in this case the city of Santa Paula.

Once the Santa Paula facility began operation, PERC Water and this financial partner began to receive a service fee from municipality for the treatment and recycling of its wastewater.

This arrangement works because it encourages operates such as PERC to do everything they can to reduce the operating costs of the water recycling facilities they design and build. After all, they are the ones financially responsible should the facilities eat up more power than expected.

“We bought the additional energy-saving equipment for the Santa Paula facility on our own dime,” says Clayton. “We are operating it for the next 30 years. We spent a significant amount of capital on the equipment, but we will recover the costs of that in a number of years in reduced energy costs. It only makes sense for us with the design/build/operate/finance structure to make this investment.”

Nespeca says that more municipalities are slowly turning to similar arrangements. “To be honest, a lot of municipalities want to consider design/build/operate, but there is still a bit of resistance to it,” he says. “Many people are still married to the traditional design/build scenario. But this method is becoming more popular. We are certainly seeing more design/build/operate plants in the last five years than we did 10 years ago.”

High-Quality water
Long Beach, CA-based APTwater, a technology company that specializes in water treatment technologies, has long been a player in the water recycling and reuse business. It is now taking on another important task, this time in the city of Anaheim, CA.

The City of Anaheim has entered into an agreement with USS Cal Builders to build a demonstration water reuse facility in its downtown. This facility, designed by MWH Americas Inc., will provide reclaimed water that will be used for flushing the toilets and watering the landscaping at Anaheim’s city hall building.

It will also serve as a type of showcase for the public, educating them about the importance of reusing water.

APTwater has been contracted to install its HiPOx system, an ozone-based oxidation process, in the new facility. This system will meet California’s disinfection regulations while simultaneously destroying any trace organic compounds in the recycled water as well as remove color and odor.

APTwater was awarded this project in early 2011 after a formal bid process. Start-up is scheduled for the late summer or early fall of this year.

Once in operation, the facility will pump 100,000 gallons of water a day.

Keel Robinson, Global Reuse Market manager with APTwater, says that though this is a small facility, it is serving an important purpose: As a demonstration facility its goal isn’t just to reuse water. It’s also designed to educate members of the public about both the necessity and safety of reusing water.

“One of the biggest obstacles still to implementing water reuse projects is public perception,” says Robinson. “It is important to educate the public about this technology. Once people learn that there are advanced technologies out there that make reclaimed water meet or exceed drinking water regulations, I think they’ll be less resistant to reusing water. They need to know that, in some cases, reclaimed water is better in quality than what you get from rivers and lakes. I think when people learn this, the acceptance of water reuse will only continue to grow.”

APTwater’s technology provides some important benefits that other treatment options don’t. For instance, the HiPOx system will simultaneously disinfect and oxidize the water to provide pathogen-free water and remove trace contaminants while improving the aesthetic qualities of water by removing color and odor.

“Those are all important things to our clients,” says Robinson. “Whether municipalities are using their reused water for indirect potable use, injecting the water in to the ground, or just using it for irrigation and toilet flushing, they want the water to exceed all regulatory requirements, be free of odor and color, and be free of trace contaminants.”

Wastewater Treatment in the Lobby
A project currently underway in downtown San Francisco is providing water-recycling proponents yet another opportunity to promote their technologies to an often skeptical public.

Charlottesville, VA-based, Worrell Water Technologies, a provider of wastewater reuse technology, is now working with the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission to install its Living Machine system to provide the onsite wastewater treatment and water reuse services in the utility’s new headquarters, an office building in downtown San Francisco that is currently under construction.

The public utilities commission’s new building will be 13 stories tall and offer 277,500 square-feet of office space. The building is definitely a green one, generating its own energy through integrated solar panels and wind turbines. As part of this environmentally friendly mission, the building will also treat and recycle all its wastewater for reuse. To do this, the building will rely on Worrell Water Technologies’ onsite Living Machine system.

In fact, the system will be located right in the lobby of this building, where it will look like an inviting bed of plants.

This isn’t the first such system that Worrell has installed. It recently completed a similar Living Machine wastewater reuse and treatment system in an airport in Portland. And that system, which also looks like a bed of plants, always generates surprise when unsuspecting visitors are told that this decorative feature is actually a wastewater treatment system.

This surprise is important, says Will Kirksey, senior vice president at Worrell Water Technologies. It shows people that wastewater reuse and treatment doesn’t have to be a messy process.

“They walk in lobby and see this beautiful bed of plants,” he says. “They are then stunned to learn that this is a wastewater treatment system. They are completely surprised that we are treating wastewater in the lobby. It’s a whole change in mindset. We always thought we had to take wastewater far away from human activity and treat it in these big smelly germ-filled basins. And now it has been demonstrated that this doesn’t have to be the case. Treating it onsite not only saves energy and resources, but it also gives you the chance to reuse that water onsite without a lot of pumping back and forth. You eliminate the energy consumption that pumping water to and from locations requires.”

When the San Francisco office building opens in the summer of 2012–its expected occupancy date–its onsite water treatment and reuse system is expected to save it about 750,000 gallons of water a year. That’s a pretty significant savings for a rather small system.

Kirksey is looking forward to the day when the San Francisco office tower does open. Once it does, after all, it provides him with just one more opportunity to educate the public about how important, and, oddly enough, aesthetically pleasing, that water recycling can be.

“We have a lot of experience in educating people on this,” he says. “Usually, there are champions for the project in the client’s organization. That’s where we get a lot of help. But we do spend a lot of time on education, too. We are constantly doing webinars, speaking engagements, and presentations about reusing water. We want people to understand that this is a very viable technology.”

And thanks to efforts like these from a wide range of water recycling technology providers, the future of this business looks to be a good one.