Wastewater in the News

In this timely webinar, we break down what’s been making waves in the wastewater world: AI showing up at treatment plants, wastewater data being used to track public health trends, and sewage spills hitting the headlines. We also dig into emerging tech aimed at PFAS and other tough contaminants, helping make sense of what the news really means for water professionals.

Article Links:

https://www.wwltv.com/article/news/health/whats-in-the-water-wastewater-gives-an-early-warning-on-community-health/289-c08b7448-841f-4cbc-88d9-b3be6572df0a

https://techxplore.com/news/2026-01-optimizing-wastewater-green-hydrogen-production.html

https://mocoshow.com/2026/01/25/millions-of-gallons-of-wastewater-rerouted-after-sewer-line-collapse/

https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.10490?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://www.boston25news.com/news/local/cocaine-levels-nantucket-sewage-50-above-us-average-health-data-reveals/P4QHYTYWUBDG5M23R2OXZUGZWY/?utm_source=chatgpt.com

https://www.waste360.com/pfas-pfoas/gradiant-s-forevergone-sets-new-standard-for-pfas-destruction-with-breakthrough-cost-and-performance

If you have comments or questions about our podcast, you can reach us through this link. To discuss a project or talk to one of our engineers, call 800-348-9843.

Transcript

00:08

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 thank you for joining us again.  Today, you get Shawn and I. Hi, Shawn. 

Shawn: Hey, good to be back. 

Angela: Yeah.

00:37

We're going to talk about wastewater in the news and really just talk about news articles.  What's happening around wastewater.

Shawn: I always find this kind of thing fascinating. (Angela: Yeah.) because there's always stuff that shows up. And sometimes they're like very obscure stories. (Angela: Yeah.) and other times it's right in your face and finding the little nuggets of information is kind of fun.

Angela: What's interesting to me is as we were doing research for this, the

01:07

themes emerge, right? And it seems like a lot of people are talking about the same topic, but not together.  (Shawn: True.) In different forms. So instead of being vague, the first topic that we wanted to talk about is AI in wastewater. 

Shawn: Which is very interesting, actually. 

Angela: Which is very interesting. So Shawn, you found an article, what's it titled? Predictive control…

01:37

Shawn: Yeah, it was Predictive Control of “Wastewater Treatment Plants as Energy Autonomous Water Resource Recovery”, which it's an older article and we'll talk about something that's newer here in a moment. But this other article talked about how they're in process of trying to get communities to have their wastewater treatment plants redesigned to be resource recovery plants instead of just wastewater treatment,

02:04

and how they can create bespoke wastewater depending on what the need is and they can commoditize the outfall of that. So they can remove these nutrients and then end up selling them to other industries to help offset the cost of the plants. Plus they use the biogas that's generated to power the plant and then sell the excess back to the local utility.  So, it's definitely an interesting

02:33

topic. The other thing about it is that in the article, they talked a little bit about how during rain events, there was much higher flows.  So they didn't specifically say it, but they were talking about how aging infrastructure and big pipe sewer tend to have problems with infiltration and inflow. So, I thought that was kind of interesting how they're redesigning plants to try to address some of those. But this newer article that you found was kind of interesting.  

Angela: yeah, So

03:03

the article says, scientists from the Department of Inorganic Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at the University of Malaga participated in an international collaboration that is optimized using AI, the process of producing biohydrogen from wastewater. So it's interesting to me that, you know, there are all of these advancements that are happening to harness

03:33

different clean energy possibilities.  And they're using AI to optimize the processes or to, you know, AI will speed up analysis.  

Shawn: Something I found interesting in that article is, is this is a global thing. It's not localized. So, there's scientists and engineers from all over the globe that are part of this consortium that they're using

03:59

their brain power to try to solve this issue. It's kind of interesting. 

Angela: I think it's super interesting. (Shawn: Yeah.) So speaking of global involvement and data analysis, this is not complicated.

04:16

Maybe it's just not complicated for us. When we go looking for these topics, we do very simple searches for articles in the news. What are people actually talking about right now? I would say, aside from funding, right, there are tons of articles about projects that are happening, funding that's been secured, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, all that. The second most talked about subject is data analysis of wastewater.

04:46

And one of the things that struck me was it wasn't just, it's not just a U.S. thing, right? It's not local. We're not the only ones that are doing this. There's a worldwide consortium that's actually analyzing the data that they gather from wastewater. So there were a ton of articles on analytics coming out of Lincoln that show an uptick

05:16

in measles.  (Shawn: Oh, yeah.) Yeah. (Shawn: Yeah.) And then Shawn had found an article from, I think it was September actually. So after the summer season, they tested the wastewater in Nantucket and discovered that it contained 50 % more cocaine…

Shawn:  Than the national average.  

Angela: than the national average. But one of the articles that I was reading talked about how the analysis of wastewater

05:46

for disease tracking (Shawn: Um hmm) and drug tracking. So it's not just Nantucket. I read an article that talked about how they're analyzing wastewater to determine drug trends. So they're looking at it to see, what drugs are emerging, what are people really using, where, you know, so that we can attempt to help those that are using drugs.  

Shawn: Exactly. This is sort of a thing that developed in COVID. 

Angela: During COVID.

06:14

Yeah, so they were tracking COVID where it was happening, where there were spikes, etc, etc. And now they're using it to track illnesses.  

Shawn: All kinds of things. 

Angela: All kinds of stuff. 

Shawn: Yeah. The interesting part is that they're not using this to necessarily punish anyone or to cause panic or anything else. What they're doing is they're using this data

06:42

to… and they're analyzing and using this data to find trends, number one. And number two, find out ways, the best ways to funnel funds to help support community programs.  If they're seeing a huge up spike in certain types of drug use or that kind of thing, they can funnel funds into educational efforts against using drugs in that particular instance. Or if there is an uptick in, we're seeing an up

07:11

take in certain types of diseases, funneling funds into healthcare and education about how to avoid coming down with this disease and so on and so forth. So very interesting. Like I said, they're not using it to punish anybody. And they're not using it to point fingers at anyone. They're using it for educational purposes. 

Angela: Literally data points. (Shawn: Yes.) Not, like you said, not punishment, not repercussions, just data points, which I found

07:40

find very interesting. But yeah, they're just using the information to manage illness and manage the help that they give, right? Like this article talks about how the data shows that COVID levels in New Orleans remain in the median range.  They're at a medium level while

08:07

Influenza A, RSV, and the Norovirus remain high. (Shawn: Right.) Right. So it kind of shows you what people are getting sick with. That way you can better serve your community. (Shawn: Correct.) Right. Because your treatments are different. So probably what I would rank as the third most articles out there are about sewage spills. 

Shawn: Yes. And those happen. I know they happen a lot. Which is unfortunate.

08:36

And but the big ones tend to make the news… 

Angela: And the small ones… 

Shawn: and the small ones tend not to necessarily. (Angela: Yeah.) At least they're kind of buried maybe in page three or four. 

Angela: And you do see the gamut. Like I saw there was one article about a very small, it was like seventeen hundred gallons, which is a lot. (Shawn: Right.) That's not a small...  (Shawn: Right.) I mean, think about that in terms of gallons of milk.

09:06

But we're talking about raw sewage. (Shawn: Right.) So… but in terms of a spill, 1700 is not a lot compared to the other spill that they're talking about, right? Not spill necessarily, but there was a, it's called the Potomac Interceptor. It's a sewer line that runs in DC and 60 million gallons a

09:36

day go through this area and there was a collapse.  (Shawn: Yeah.) Aging infrastructure.  mentioned it at the beginning when we were talking about AI. So there was a collapse and they've had to divert that wastewater once they found the collapse. Right. It spills.  You find the collapse…  

Shawn: It's kind of interesting reading that article because it talks about how the engineers

10:05

were able to reroute it back to another section of the collection system. They said that the... they confirmed that it's capturing most of the wastewater. 

Angela: That was... I probably read, I'm going to say five articles on this topic because I was searching for how many gallons had spilled. (Shawn: Yeah.)

10:34

And the focus of the articles is definitely how many gallons are bypassed, how many gallons go through, how many gallons the pumps pump. But I did not find… none of the articles that I read spoke about how much was spilled. I mean, we couldn't deductively figure it out. I'm not going to point fingers or name numbers, but 60 million gallons a day, you do.

11:04

They discovered it on Saturday, blah, blah. How long did it hit? da, da, da. 

Shawn: The sad reality is these happen every day somewhere. 

Angela: Yeah. So that was Saturday of this week and today is January 27th? (Shawn: 28th.)  that was Saturday. So that was four days ago.  And then there was another spill that was a hundred thousand gallons in Houston.  Right?

11:32

Spills happen all of the time.  Aging infrastructure, all of those things.  So yes, they have great recommendations for things to do if you come into contact with it. 

Shawn: I'm sure they do. 

Angela: I was like, oh, well, that's not fun. 

Shawn: The biggest thing you can do though is stay away from it. 

Angela: Stay away from it. If there's a spill, if you think that there's a spill, it did thankfully for those in DC, (Shawn: Mm hmm.)

12:02

It happened downstream from the water treatment plant. So, their water, their drinking water plant was not affected, so they didn't have to they didn't go on boil notice, which, happens. 

Shawn: Yes, it does. 

Angela: You'll see articles often in the summer when spills happen that people go on boil your water notices.  

Shawn: Mm That's never fun. 

Angela: No, it's never, ever fun.

12:31

We did have one more article that we wanted to talk about.  It gets an honorable mention because it's cool. 

Shawn: Actually, it's really cool. 

Angela: Yeah, it's cool.  It's going to be fantastic when it comes to fruition and becomes usable.  But, we're talking about ForeverGone. 

Shawn: Yes. And not to specifically plug a company because we don't have anything to do with them. 

Angela: We have nothing to do with them.

13:00

Shawn: There is a company that makes a black box solution called ForeverGone and it addresses the destruction of PFAS, which anybody who has studied or knows much about forever chemicals knows that they are notoriously hard to get rid of.  They hang around forever and that's why they're called forever chemicals. But there is a company that's making a solution that's, it's a modular solution, I guess, maybe somewhat portable. I haven't gotten all the details on it yet.

13:31

but they do make a solution that uses proprietary forms of ionization to destroy forever chemicals, and not just the big ones, a lot of them. And they get 99 to 99.9 % removal with no discharge of chemicals, which means it's gone. 

Angela: So what's cool for this, for us, is that the tech is getting there. (Shawn: Yes.)

14:00

You know, here at Orenco, our goal is always to protect the water. The water is what matters to all of us at the organization and removing forever or PFAS forever chemicals will be on the heels of PFAS if this type of tech comes to fruition. (Shawn: Yeah.)

14:28

But removal of that kind of stuff from the water ways is extremely important for the protection of the water and everything that lives off of it. 

Shawn: Especially since in lot of larger urban areas, they're finding concentrations of PFAS and PFOS at several hundred to thousands of times higher than acceptable limits.  Not good because these things cause, you know, things like cancers.

14:56

Angela: And it's everywhere. 

Shawn: It's everywhere. 

Angela: It's everywhere. 

Shawn: Now, that's not to say that there's only three states, I think, that they found that there were not high concentrations of these chemicals. Arkansas, Hawaii, and one other.  Every other state apparently has some place in it that has high concentrations of these chemicals.  The good part is that not every place in every one of those states

15:24

is high concentration.  Some places like even the testing they did here locally in the Roseburg- Sutherlin area, they have non-detect. So, there are…

Angela: We're doing good. We're okay.  

Shawn: But there are areas in each one of those other states that have high concentrations and that needs to be addressed. 

Angela: Yes, it does. And so the tech, technology advancements in that area are...

15:52

coming quickly. 

Shawn: Yeah, it's very encouraging. 

Anela: Yeah, and it's very encouraging. So that's what we've got. That's what's happening in the news.  Lots of technology, lots and lots of technological advancements, which we love because we're water nerds. 

Shawn: That's right. 

Angela: And we love to see technological advances.  So thank you for listening.  Pay attention and we'll see you next time.

16:19

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.  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.