Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
Distributed Water Infrastructure: An Interview with Tristian Bounds
In this episode, Angela and Shawn talk with Tristian Bounds, a cochair of WEF's Distributed Water Infrastructure Task Force, who recently presented a paper on the subject at WEFTEC. The conversation covers the goals of the task force, the importance of clear definitions in the industry, various roles within distributed infrastructure, and its associated benefits and challenges. With a focus on resilience, accessibility, and regulatory acceptance, the paper is titled "Distributed Water Infrastructure, Frameworks, and Possibilities" and is available at accesswater.org.
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Hello and welcome to Make It Clear, a conversational podcast about all things related to water and wastewater. I'm your host, Angela Bounds, and I'm joined by my co-host, Shawn Rapp. In each episode, we'll tackle a relevant topic with facts and expert opinions and make things clear.
Angela:Hello and thanks for joining us again. Today, we've got Tristan Bounds with us. Hi, Tristian.
Tristian: Hi, how are you?
Angela: Good.
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Angela: So for those of you that don't know, Tristan is my little brother. Little in age only, but still my little brother. And he has recently worked on a paper that was presented at WEFTEC with a task force. So he's here today to kind of talk to us about that. We're gonna do this in a series of two podcasts. So we're gonna start with, you know, a cursory overview of the paper, what was in it,
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glance over some of the topics. And then we're gonna come back in a month. We're gonna answer any questions that any of you listeners have for us and do a deeper dive into some of the sections that really deserve more of a focus and that we feel we need to talk about a little bit more in depth. So let's kick it off. So you and the task force wrote a paper about distributed water infrastructure.
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Can you give us the title of the paper and talk to us a little bit about what exactly distributed water infrastructure is?
Tristian: Yeah, the task force was formed through the Water Environment Federation with the goal of attempting to deliver content and information to some of the more underserved segments of the industry that WEF recognized, you know, there was a growing
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part of the industry that needed to be maybe given a little bit different voice or needed to see some formation and organization around in order to provide information that could be shared through all of WEF membership. And the task force was developed in order to, and not really given a ton of guidance with regards to expectations or what was…
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what they were interested in seeing us produce. And that was nice because it gave us an opportunity to really dive in to try and figure out what the need was in the industry. And we decided as a group that we really needed to see kind of foundational document put together describing exactly what distributed infrastructure is,
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the challenges that we face in this section of the water industry, the benefits that these kinds of systems can provide, and then a little bit with regards to future and roadmap and where we see distributed infrastructure fitting into our overall infrastructure and One Water approaches.
Angela: Right. So for those of you that don't know, at WEF there are a number of task forces
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that they have formed, right?
Tristian: Yeah, I can't recall what the number is. There's six or seven task forces.
Angela: So what is the name of this task force specifically?
Tristian: It is the Distributed Water Infrastructure Task Force. Right, that's the full name.
Angela: Pretty easy to remember.
Tristian: We tend to refer to it as DWI, DWITF, but DWI mean Distributed Water Infrastructure.
Angela: Okay, and who sits on the task force with you?
Tristian: Currently there are three chair…
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chairs of the task force, Ed Clerico with Natural Systems Utilities and Paula Kehoe with San Francisco Public Utility Commission and then myself.
Angela: Okay. There you go. So there are different segments, according to the paper, of distributed water infrastructure. Can you kind of run through what those segments are, what they mean?
Tristian: Yeah, absolutely. We really actually, if I can backtrack just a little bit, we
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identified at the beginning of our meetings that there's an issue in the industry with regards to definitions. Definitions across regions, definitions across sectors. And we spent quite a bit of time actually trying to be clear about what our definitions were because there's overlap between the terms and words that we use in our industry, whether you're
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when you're, whether you're using the word onsite or decentralized or there's a number of different terms that can be used. Cluster systems, that all refer to a type of distributed water infrastructure. And therefore we spent quite a bit of time, you know, being very diligent about making sure that the paper identified specifically what our definitions were within this paper. Not saying that we're right or wrong, but this is what
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we wanted to utilize as definitions for these specific terms. After that was accomplished, we really determined that it was gonna be beneficial if we identified the players in all the roles within distributed infrastructure. And we identified four different main roles that were played. We call them synergistic roles. They are the controller role, which is, we use the general term controller,
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to represent regulatory and other enforcement type agencies that are involved in these projects. There are the implementers. We utilize the word implementer to really define the engineers, the contractors, the operators. There are also some overlaps within the definitions of roles, but that's really what we intended with regards to the term implementer. There's the beneficiary.
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Those are the individuals who actually benefit from these services. So the end users. And then there's also a category called owners, which are the individuals that own the infrastructure. Now that could be an operations entity, like a municipality. That could also be a private building owner that may own the system and hire out contractors, implementers, and have beneficiaries, you know, renters or something within the building.
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So there's a slightly different role in there for ownership. And again, as I mentioned, some of these roles do overlap. There may be individuals that fit multiple roles within an individual project.
Angela: Yeah. So this is a topic that I think that we're gonna give a cursory overview of, and then we're gonna come back in a month and kind of discuss, but what are the benefits of a distributed infrastructure?
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Tristian: Yeah, that's a great question. You know, as an engineer, I find myself really evaluating each project for its own merit. The benefits of distributed infrastructure can be seen on certain projects in which they may not be quite the same on others. So when we look at defining what benefits are, we've really tried to identify what all of the potential benefits are.
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Not expressing that all of these benefits will happen on every single project. Because of course, same thing when we discuss challenges. You know, there are going to be certain challenges that happen on certain projects because of the nature of that particular project. Some of the generalized benefits that you'll see from distributed infrastructure includes resilience by having smaller systems distributed throughout our communities.
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There is an element of resilience that happens. There's a number of case studies that were provided in the paper that really emphasize how distributed infrastructure can aid in creating resilient communities. Sometimes there are costs and economic financial benefits associated with this type of infrastructure, be it the cost to connect up to a centralized sewer that may be a distance away
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being excessive, allowing for an economic benefit to utilize a smaller distributed type infrastructure system. Operationally, there can be cost benefits. Depending on the cost of water supply in the area, there may be an economic benefit to reusing that water. So there are definitely different potential elements for economic benefit. There's a benefit with regards to accessibility.
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and underserved communities and providing different types of technologies that can possibly allow for better integration into underserved communities within the distributed infrastructure umbrella. And then I would say that on top of that, there is additional industry that is developed through the diversification of equipment that can be specified, of operations, of
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all of the different elements associated with these types of infrastructure. So those are the three that come top of mind. And as you described, we'll go into this more detail in a month.
Angela: Yeah. So we talked a little bit about the benefits. Why don't we talk a little bit about the challenges and barriers?
Tristian: Yeah. There is definitely, and we're kind of going through the main sections of the paper. These are the main different segments within the paper.
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Obviously, you know, there's a lot of focus on challenges and barriers in everything.
Shawn and Angela: Right.
Tristian: And we found that the challenges and barrier section, you know, ended up being very repetitive and spent a lot of time really trying to hone in on what the key issues were that we wanted to address. One of the coolest things that I would say came out of that exercise was the realization that technology is not
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necessarily one of our challenges. That we have the technologies available to accomplish all the things that we want to accomplish. The challenges that are the most obvious to us within the work that we've done have to do with regulatory acceptance and ease of developing new regulatory code to accept these kinds of systems. Which is also then linked to
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operation and maintenance and developing the responsible management entities that are necessary in order to take care of these systems. So those two are actually quite heavily linked together because a regulatory environment recognizes that there's an additional difficulty in managing these kinds of systems and finding the workforce available to manage these kinds of systems. Those are really in a generalized way,
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the two top of mind challenges that we address in the paper.
Angela: Yeah. So what's the future?
Tristian: Well, the future for the task force specifically is to continue to create content for the WEF communities, WEF membership, with regards to distributed water infrastructure. We've talked about road mapping, we've talked about manuals of practice.
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I'm not sure exactly what we're going to settle on in the near future, but the conversation is just to continue our work and continue to develop knowledge within the WEF community and assist in the development of documentation to further the knowledge of our membership. With regards to the industry, big picture, distributed infrastructure is growing. It's not gonna just have its time in the limelight and then fade away.
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It's being proven to play out with regards to the resiliency elements and benefits, with regards to accessibility benefits. And there's quite a few growing supporters within our industry with regards to everything that is distributed infrastructure and all the benefits associated with it. And it's...
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it's one of the fastest growing sectors within the wastewater water industry. You know, we, we know that there are others as well. Of course, you know, Bob was just on the podcast speaking about PFAS and yo u know, that's another, you know, very quickly growing segment of the industry distributed infrastructure is as well. And I think that the recognition from WEF that there was the need for distributed water infrastructure task force,
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just shows that they are staying up with the times and recognizing that there's growth happening in this sector.
Shawn: It points to the importance of it, yeah.
Tristian: And I truly believe that it is going to continue to grow and we will continue to find ways to incorporate distributed infrastructure within our existing infrastructures and the municipalities will find benefits to utilizing the different technologies and approach. And yeah, it's going to strengthen our overall...
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communities and our resilience to things that affect our wastewater and water systems.
Shawn: Yeah, absolutely.
Angela: So the paper was published on WEF's website, correct?
Tristian: Yeah, correct. October 2nd, I believe, is when it was published.
Angela: All right. So do you want to give everybody the title of the paper so that they can search it up on WEF's website?
Tristian: Yeah, it's Distributed Water Infrastructure, Frameworks and Possibilities.
Angela: There you go.
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So if you go to the WEF website...
Tristian: It's actually on the Access Water section of the WEF website.
Angela: Okay, and search up that paper. You should give it a read.
Shawn: Absolutely.
Tristian: It's a long one,
Angela: It is.
Tristian: but I think actually the way that it was written, it took accessibility into account. And we wanted to actually reach the largest
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group of people that we could within membership and potentially with outside of membership. So we tried to make it very readable. It's not highly technical. So, you know, anybody can pick this up and read it and I think enjoy it and follow along.
Shawn: Full disclosure, I'm not a technical guy. I've read the paper. I thought it was great.
Angela: Yeah, I've actually heard that from a number of people. So I had people stopping me at other conferences that I was attending after,
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after WEFTEC and after the presentations and telling me that they read it and they thought that it was fantastic and it's really necessary right now and appropriate. So download the paper, give it a read and send us any questions. So we're going to kind of open this up to you, our listeners also. So submit your questions once Shawn gets this all posted.
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You can send questions to training@orenco.com and Shawn and I will get those questions and we will answer them with Tristian on a podcast to be recorded in about a month. So you get a little bit of time to read, listen and get us your questions.
Shawn: Absolutely.
Angela: All right.
Tristian: And if I could end with a shout out to the task force members that participated in the development of the work.
Angela: Absolutely.
Tristian: There were, you know,
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really 30 plus members of the task force that really dove in and provided a ton of content. And the editing team at the end spent almost a year, really trying to take all of the voices that we heard and make it sound cohesive. And it was a lot of effort that was put in and a lot of the people that spent their time and dedicated to this effort deserve a lot of credit. And so I wanted to
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Just say thank you to all of them.
Angela: Making 30 voices sound like one cohesive voice is a challenge in and of itself.
Tristian:It wasn't easy.
Angela: All right. Well, thank you so much for joining us today and thank you all for listening.
Tristian: Thank you.
We want to thank you again for joining us today. Before you go, don't forget to subscribe where you listen to podcasts. So you're notified when new episodes are posted.
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Also, you can leave your comments or suggestions through the contact link on our website, www.orenco.com. Until next time, have a great day!
