Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
Sustainability and Solutions: An Interview with Lynn Broaddus, Ph.D.
In this conversation, Lynn Broaddus discusses her extensive experience in the water industry, focusing on the critical connections between water, energy, and climate change. She emphasizes the importance of water sustainability and the need for innovative solutions to address water scarcity and pollution. Lynn highlights the invisibility of water as a significant challenge and shares insights on rainwater harvesting and community projects aimed at improving water management. The discussion also touches on the role of regulations in facilitating water reuse and the potential of new technologies to enhance water infrastructure.
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00:08
Angela: 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.
00:28
Hello and thanks for joining us again. Today we've got with us Lynn Broaddus. Hi Lynn.
Lynn: Hi Angela, good to see you, good to hear you.
Angela: Good to see you too. So Lynn is the past president of WEF for those of you that don't know. And her latest venture is Broadview Collaborative. So she's got a wealth of knowledge in the water industry. So we wanted to bring her in to talk to us
00:58
about a variety of topics around water and wastewater and introduce her to those of you that may not know her, so on and so forth. So we're really appreciative that you're here today, Lynn.
Lynn: I'm honored to be here, I'm glad to be here.
Angela: Yeah, do you wanna give the listeners who may not be familiar with you a little bit of background?
Lynn: Sure, you know, yes, as you said, I have Broadview Collaborative as my own firm and I actually set that up about
01:27
10 years ago. So my time at WEF precedes, I was a member of WEF before I set up Broadview Collaborative but being on my own, I had the opportunity to go deeper into WEF and did go on the board and had the opportunity to spend some time as board chair, which was extraordinarily rewarding experience and an opportunity to kind of make change from within.
01:52
But I established Broadview Collaborative about 10 years ago to give me a platform to continue this extraordinarily exciting water sustainability work that I had been doing and leading at the Johnson Foundation at Wingspread, what was an endeavor that came to be known as Charting New Waters. And, you know, it's harder to put ourselves back into the late 2000s when we started that conversation, that initiative. But at the time,
02:18
water just wasn't something that most policymakers were thinking about. It was hard to get their attention on it. The country had a kind of build it and the water will come mentality. I remember at the time trying to get the attention of the US Department of Energy, DOE, getting them to see that critical connection between water and energy. As you guys know, and maybe a lot of our listeners know, the creation
02:47
of electrical power from traditional sources, whether that's fossil fuels, nuclear energy, hydropower. It requires enormous volumes of water, both for cooling, for fuel extraction. People oftentimes forget about that part of it, the fuel extraction part. And in the case of hydropower, of course, just powering the turbines. But what if water is running short? What if we've got droughts? What if people are using too much water? What if the rivers are too warm
03:15
to be able to provide that necessary cooling and that's a real thing that's happening with climate change. You know, on the flip side of that, water requires a lot of energy. Whether we're moving that water, water's heavy, anybody who's backpacked with water knows how heavy that is. Cleaning water takes a lot of energy, anybody who's run a treatment plant knows that. Heating the water in your house takes energy, whether that's electricity or natural gas.
03:45
And that doesn't even count the energy that's embedded in the infrastructure that we have. It takes energy to create the infrastructure. And then of course, there's the whole conversation, a very exciting conversation around reclaiming energy from wastewater. You know, anybody, I don't know if you guys have, but I've worked in a barn and anybody who's had the experience of turning a manure pile knows how much heat is in there. You understand it from a gut level. You understand
04:14
that excrement generates a lot of heat. That's true of cow manure, it's true of horse manure, and it's true of human manure. So, these connections between water and energy are manifold. You can't do something in one arena without having ripple effects in the other.
Angela: Right.
Lynn: I'm happy to say that Department of Energy has come a long way in those last 15 years and is now a real leader in helping us think, helping our nation think about how to...
04:42
do water and energy with less of both of them. And you know, we can make these same comparisons in other critical areas. Water and food, you know, a whole agricultural industry, the way we handle food, the way we grow our food, water and public health. Gosh, with COVID, that certainly came front and center for us. Even water and national security. It hasn't been an issue for the US, but for a lot of countries,
05:11
Water is, those are fighting words and they cause wars. Water and environmental justice, water and our built environment and certainly water and climate. So, 15 years ago, when we were launching Charting New Waters, the big aha was that climate change was gonna be felt through water. Rising seas for sure, but lengthier droughts, more intense storms and hurricanes, waterborne diseases, crop losses.
05:40
So we kind of know that, at least folks in our circles know that. I don't know if the public at large knows it as well as we want. But to get back to your original question, I established Broadview Collaborative 10 years ago to allow me to help continue those conversations that we were wrapping up, you know, we were wrapping up Charting New Waters, but the work certainly wasn't done.
Angela: Right.
Lynn: And so I wanted to be able to continue to work on that policy and strategy to drive that change that
06:08
the world so desperately needs and I would say deserves. So Broadview Collaborative is generally just me. I oftentimes collaborate with others on projects, but I kind of jokingly, when I started it, this is a side note, when I started it 10 years ago, my brother, as I'm planning it, my brother who's an entrepreneur was thinking about all my growth opportunities. And I looked at him and I said, Ike is his name, I said, Ike.
06:38
My goal is to have no boss and no employees. This was, you know, I wanted the freedom to really be able to focus on the work that I wanted to do and not have to deal with some of those other things that I had had for the first 30 years of my career. But obviously other people are important, but I've done that through collaboration and contracting and that sort of thing.
Angela: Yeah. It's interesting. One of the reasons we started this podcast was to reach more people.
07:07
Right? To get the word out, like you're saying, like in our circles, we talk about that stuff all the time. Right? We talk about what the effects of climate change are and water scarcity and all of those things are constant topics when you're in this space.
Lynn: Yes.
Angela: Even, you know, I mean, for us, we deal with wastewater, but that doesn't mean that we don't discuss water scarcity.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Like, they touch each other.
07:35
Right?
Lynn: Yes.
Angela: And so we're still talking about it. But it's like you said, it's not… it's not really general knowledge.
Lynn: Yeah
Angela: or not understood necessarily. So that is why we’re her.
Lynn: My guess is that, I mean I haven't walked in Orenco’s shoes. But from what I have observed, a lot of your clients are probably in situations where water is
08:02
a challenge for them beyond just their wastewater. So you're helping them think about it holistically probably, and the solutions you bring are not just about wastewater.
Angela: Yeah. Yup. It's about clean water, right?
Lynn: Clean water, yeah. Yeah.
Angela: In the end.
Shawn: Being able to reuse water.
Lynn: Yeah. And affordability and trying to find solutions where maybe a much more overbuilt thing had been suggested to them and like, you know. Right.
Angela:Yes.
Shawn: You don’t need all that.
Angela: Yup.
08:32
Angela: That becomes cost prohibitive in the end.
Lynn: Yeah.
Angela: And not sustainable because of replacement and repair and yeah, all of those things.
Lynn: And oftentimes my guess is that one of the other things that people don't think about when it comes to infrastructure is the speed of implementation. And if you're talking about a huge system, it can take 10 years.
Angela: 10 plus years, yeah, to build out.
Lynn: Right, to build out.
09:00
right plan, get permissions, get the financing, build it. And that's, that's not going to work for a lot of places. So, you know, smaller anyway, we'll get into that later.
Angela: Needing immediate solutions.
Lynn: Yeah.
Angela: Or at least more immediate, not s decade later.
Lynn: Yeah, right.
Angela: All right. So speaking of those things, what do you see as the most serious threat to water in the near future?
09:29
Lynn: Well, you know, one of the things that first comes to my mind is just the invisibility of water. I think people take it for granted. And those of us who work in the water utility world, whether it's wastewater, water supply, stormwater, we've long complained about this, that no one thinks about their water until something goes wrong and it's hard to get people to be good stewards.
09:54
Or to understand why rates need to increase. They just don't understand how the system works and how they impact the system. But in my mind, this invisibility problem goes way beyond the municipal water situation. You know, you hear it all the time. People say water is essential to life, but they don't connect it to their, they don't connect their actions to the water.
Angela: Right.
Lynn: And here's just a simple example. You know, I live in Minnesota.
10:23
It’s a state that prides itself for being the land of 10,000 lakes and it really is a place with lots of beautiful lakes and heck, just in Minneapolis where I live, a big metropolitan city, there's 13, you know, decent sized lakes, more if you count the tiny ones, but there's 13 decent sized lakes and people here love their lakes. They fish in them, they swim in them, yes, we swim in the municipal lakes, they boat on them, they stroll around them.
10:52
In the winter, people are on the lakes, you know, we ski on them, fish on them, ice fishing, fly kites on them, have major art festivals out on them, all this kind of stuff. But I mean, it's our whole identity here, but do people connect their actions to the health of the lakes here? For the most part, no.
Angela: Right.
Lynn: We still have fertilized lawns. We still have some people who don't pick up after their dogs.
11:21
Even when those dogs are out on the lake, you know, in the winter, you know, it's not unusual to find it.
Angela: Yeah.
Lynn: Now I always have plastic bags to pick up what I encounter, but it's maddening, right?
Angela: Oh my gosh. People still leave it on the lake? On the frozen?
Lynn: Yeah. I mean, there's snow and everything, but yes. And I don't know what's going through their mind when it happens, but...
11:44
People still put salt, not as much as they used to, but they put salt on their sidewalks. We have freshwater lakes. If we lived in Maine, it might be different on the coast of Maine, but we don't. We live in a freshwater world. All of our trash and stormwater goes straight into lakes. Now, it's getting much better thanks to regulation, thanks to citizen advocates and volunteer organizations, municipal action, but we've got a long ways to go. You know, in the southeast part of the state,
12:12
heavy agriculture, a lot of limestone, so porous structures under the soil. Private wells are so contaminated with fertilizers that the US EPA has had to step in and tell the state to clean up its act.
Shawn: Wow.
Lynn: And we’re still trying to figure out what that answer is but I'd be willing to bet decent money that the answer is going to be to dig deeper wells, not to ask ag to
12:42
to curb their actions. And I just feel like we have to get past this cultural assumption that clean water is always gonna be there for us. All we need to do is dig a little deeper, build another dam, run some more pipes, build more treatment plants. We just gotta get smarter about using less, polluting less, restoring local hydrological cycles, and using what we have in smarter ways.
Shawn: Yeah.
13:10
Lynn: But you know, as I say all this, all these things tie back to climate change, the human caused climate change. And maybe that should have been the number one thing that I said, but I think these two things kind of go together. This is invisibility and our actions, but also our climate actions. We've got to solve these things together.
Angela: It's interesting when we recently did a podcast with Bob Rubin.
13:39
And one of the things that Bob was talking about was how every one of us needs to have that, you know, that cognition, that understanding of how what you're doing is affecting the planet essentially. But, you know, what are the things that you're doing affecting water, wastewater? What are you putting into the waste stream? What are you leaving out there? Like, what are you doing?
14:10
because it's going to take us collectively making changes and really thinking about our personal effects in order for that change to happen.
Lynn: Exactly.
Angela: Yeah.
Lynn: And Bob's so right. And bringing you back to the first part of our conversation, Bob was a very active participant. That's where I first met him in our Charting New Waters work. So, yeah.
Angela: He's fantastic.
Lynn: Yeah, he's great.
Angela: Don't tell anybody, but he is definitely one of my favorites.
14:40
I can say that. I know. I'm not supposed to pick favorites, but I mean, how can you not?
Lynn: We all love Bob.
Angela: Yeah. I know. I know. So of the new solutions that you see out in the marketplace, what are you most excited about?
Lynn: Well, it's kind of hard to pick a favorite, you know, because there is so much happening and it's really...
15:09
You know, the joke is the future is so bright, you got to wear shades. But sometimes you feel this way around all the... innovations coming along the down the pike, you know, especially if you spend any time with organizations like Imagine H2O or Blue Tech Research or some of these other innovation hubs. And you get to see these early stage ideas and you realize, oh my God, it's very exciting. Yeah. I really, I personally am really excited about a lot of the
15:39
smaller on-site technologies, whether it's for in-home treatment or maybe wastewater treatment and reuse system in the bottom floor of a high-rise building that can allow that building to be off-grid or primarily off-grid. Or even neighborhood scale treatment. These things allow us to be more resilient, allow solutions to go into place faster, oftentimes are saving energy and water.
16:08
Those are the kinds of things that get me really excited. And there's some, there's individual projects and individual technologies, but there's some bigger concepts that drive a lot of this. I think of the living building challenge, which there are a couple, I mean, now there is a growing number of buildings that exemplify this challenge. The first one that comes to my mind is the Bullitt Center in Seattle, kind of on the other coast, I think, of the
16:37
Oh, I'm going to forget the exact name of the building. It's named after a benefactor, but it belongs to the Chesapeake Bay Foundation in Virginia Beach, Virginia. And these buildings are… they’re almost… the goal is to have them be off grid and be able to deal with all their needs pretty much on site or in the locality, but from a water perspective, they use rainwater for their water source. They treat that on site. They...
17:08
In some cases use composting toilets and others use vacuum toilets, which use just a tiny, tiny bit of water to deal with their excrement. I think Bullitt sends its excrement off site, but with a much lower footprint than a typical urban building. Another initiative that I think of that is kind of driving this change and
17:38
setting our imaginations, resetting our imaginations, I guess I should say, is the 50-liter home initiative. And that is a concept that is really, again, set to drive people's imagination. So the idea is that it would be a standalone home that can operate
17:59
on just 50 liters of water a day, which translates to like 12 and a half gallons, you know, for us Americans. I think of a liter as roughly a quart, you know, so. And they do it through deep conservation and reuse, on-site reuse. And it's really, it's a concept I don't think a 50-liter home has been built, but it's driving the imagination. Even like, how do we rethink the dishwasher? How do we rethink
18:28
our showers, how do we rethink, certainly our toilets, toilets are a big user of water just for, you know, toilet, moving crap around, right?
Angela: Yeah.
Lynn: And yeah, pardon my French there. But those are the things that yeah.
Angela: yeah, it would be interesting though, as we, well because wastewater treatment relies so much on the dilution factor, right?
Lynn: Yes.
Angela: So it's not just… it relies on the dilution factor.
18:57
So what happens when that waste strength is driven up, if we start diluting the, the, or not diluting, but if we start taking away more of the clean water and not diluting the waste as much, that's going to drive the strength of the waste up. So we're going to have to rethink how we, how we treat it.
Lynn: That's a hundred percent correct. And, and it also can start because it has a huge impact on the collection system.
19:25
The collection system is very dependent on high volumes, dilute volumes pushing, they can push through easily.
Angela: Yeah, storm water inclusion in some of the places. So that's a, I mean, dilution.
Lynn: So I think as we start to have more of this treatment on site or at least at neighborhood scale, that's one way to address that challenge. And of course, as the waste gets higher strength
19:54
It also gives more opportunity for energy recovery and that sort of thing. You know, another trend and not too run too long with this, but another solution that I am just incredibly excited about. And it gets to what you're talking about. Angela is the separation at the source of the urine from the waste stream.
Angela: Right.
Lynn: Because we're not, if we were doing a video thing, I pull up a chart that shows
20:23
even though urine is a tiny bit of our current waste stream, it has like almost all the nitrogen and phosphorus.
Angela: The nitrogen in it, yeah.
Lynn: Yeah. And which is the things that we work so hard to pull out of the waste stream. Well, yeah. If we just pull it off at the very beginning, then A, first of all, it's a really valuable resource. It can be used with very little treatment, can be used for fertilizer and other things that need those
20:53
molecules and it makes it much easier to treat the rest of the waste stream. So that there's a company, a startup company out there called Brightwater Tools based in Vermont that is, and I'm an advisor, I'm an unpaid advisor for Brightwater Tools and I'm just so excited about what they're doing. I don't think there's any other US company that's attempting what they're doing.
21:22
but they're creating the technologies that make this easier. There's a lot of research that has to go on. There's a lot of regulatory work that has to happen, but they're creating the technologies.
Angela: Yeah. So I guess that kind of leads into my next question, which was tell us about a project or program you're currently really passionate about.
Lynn: Well, you know, I was thinking about this, and again, it's hard to pick a favorite, but
21:51
I think in terms of the place where I spend most of my time these days is around rainwater capture and re-use.
Angela: Oh, harvesting, yeah.
Lynn: Yeah, rainwater harvesting. And we think of rainwater versus stormwater, it's almost all the same, but technically stormwater has hit the ground, rainwater has just hit the roof, and that tends to be cleaner than the water that's hit the ground. And this is a technology that's...
22:18
in some ways been around for thousands and thousands of years. You walk around, that…
Angela: Yeah, it's not difficult to capture.
Lynn: Right, right, right. And for the most part, it's quite clean and it's ready to be used. The – I mean, in today's world where we understand bacteria a little better, we want those cleaned out as much as we can. But hey, people have also lived a long time with bodies that have adapted to that. But one of the things – there's certainly the technologies.
22:47
have advanced for being able to use rainwater. But in the last 20 years, technology has not been the hangup. It's been regulation, and at least for being able to use it for potable purposes, I mean, even for flushing toilets and stuff, but which I don't understand the hangup there. But the state of Virginia has just passed regulations. It's taken them a long time, maybe, well, since the requests first started coming in, it's been almost 10 years.
23:17
They got delayed a bit during the pandemic because departments of health kind of had other priorities for a little while there. But anyways, the regulations have just gone live on November 20th of this year, 2024. And they are the first state in the country, as far as I know, not only to have these rainwater harvest regulations, but specifically laying out what needs to be done
23:44
to be able to use it for drinking water, for potable use in a home or in a business or whatever.
Angela: And what state is that?
Lynn: That's Virginia.
Angela: Virginia.
Lynn: And that might surprise people because you think, oh, that would happen in a place with a lot of water shortage problems or something. But there are different drivers there. To some extent, it's I mean, some of the people using rainwater in Virginia are people who
24:14
are live in mountainous areas and it's really hard to dig a well. And maybe they had a well, but the fracking industry ended up contaminating that well. So those are people that definitely use, you know, want to use rainwater, have used rainwater for a long time, but maybe just kind of under the radar. And in the eastern part of Virginia, groundwater, the land is subsiding
24:43
from groundwater withdrawal. So the extent to which they can offset that a little bit with rainwater. But it was driven, the regulations were driven by one person, really one person and his wife, but it was an auto mechanic who owned a shop that he had gotten a $5,000 water bill because his line had broken underneath his…
25:11
underneath the concrete slab, you know, and get one of those surprise bills, a hundred times what his normal bill would be. And long story short, he realized, I'm mechanically inclined. Here's some instructions for how to build a cistern and a treatment system, which he did, but then he got condemned for using it by the city that he lived in. And so anyways, long story short, he and his wife
25:39
became the big advocates for this change. And it has finally gone live in the state of Virginia. So he can now legally use that rainwater that he's been…
Angela: collecting?
Lynn: built to use for the last, I don't know, eight or nine years. So…
Angela: In Oregon, you can only, I was looking it up. So I was like, what are the laws? So you can only collect rainwater from your rooftop in Oregon.
26:08
Lynn: And western states, you get into the whole doctrine of prior appropriation and are you – does that rain belong to you or not? I know that I don't know all the details but in Colorado they have recently made some exceptions to those rules to open up so a bit more rainwater harvest can happen but for a long time there, you couldn't even have a rain barrel in Colorado.
26:35
Shawn: There's still a lot of places in Oregon you can't do that even though the state says you can.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: The local jurisdiction just puts the kibosh on that.
Angela: Yeah.
Lynn: So in Eastern states that don't have that doctrine of prior appropriation problem or challenge, I shouldn't call it a problem, challenge, it's been more a public health issue. Angela: Yeah.
Lynn: So...
Angela: Yeah.
Lynn: Anyway, but that's something I'm very excited about. And I spend...
27:04
I have a project here in Minneapolis, an old warehouse, a giant, ginormous warehouse that a community organization has is in the process of purchasing and trying to renovate as a community center and, you know, food, you know, solving food desert problems, solving employment problems, cleaning up a lot of toxics around. But one of the things we're trying to do there, I'm helping them on the
27:33
the water harvest and how they might be able to use that for aquaculture or aquaponics inside the building.
Angela: Very cool.
Lynn: Yeah.
Angela: Very fun. Well, is there anything else that you want to share with us or think that people should know or?
Lynn: Oh gosh, endless things. But no, I think that we've come to a lot of territory here. I'm just really thankful for
27:57
the time that you've given it. And I guess the one other thing I would say, I'm not sure how many of your listeners are WEF members, but WEF has recently has a distributed water infrastructure task force that's a mouthful. But that task force, which for the last year has been chaired by, Angela, by your brother, Tristan. And we have recently released a white paper on the...
28:24
potential and the needs and the barriers for, we call it distributed, but that's basically small scale water infrastructure, the type we've been talking about. So I would urge people to try to take a look at that and give some thought to that.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: Absolutely.
Angela: We've also recorded a podcast with Tristan that I believe will be released soon.
Lynn: Okay.
Angela: So they'll get to hear all about that, at least
28:53
from a 10,000 foot view.
Lynn: Perfect. I'm excited to hear that.
Angela: And I'll get a link to that.
Lynn: Yeah. All right, great, great.
Angela: All right, well, thanks so much, Lynn. We really appreciate the time they gave us today and thank you all for listening.
Lynn: Bye.
Angela: We wanna thank you again for joining us today. Before you go, don't forget to subscribe where you listen 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!
