The Wastewater Treatment Nexus: Energy, Nutrients and Water with CEO of ThinkTIM Marc Wehmeijer | The Living Revolution

Wastewater is a gold mine for energy, nutrients and water. Marc Wehmeijer dispels myths about breaking in to the wastewater industry, and takes us on a tour of the global wastewater treatment landscape from the deserts of Durango, Mexico to the Swiss Alps.

Marc Wehmeijer is the CEO of ThinkTIM, a company that designs, manufactures, installs and services wastewater treatment recycling units. Wehmeijer advocates for the use of artificial wetlands as treatment methods and to promote biodiversity. He emphasises wastewater as a 'microbiological zoo', detailing how we can extract phosphates from wastewater and use excess sludge to produce energy. 
Additionally, he promotes segmenting wastewater treatment processes with the end use in mind - for example, not using portabilised water for crop irrigation. The key message of wastewater treatment being: decentralise, segment and capitalise to the full extent!

The Living Revolution brings you scientists, industry leaders and entrepreneurs working on engineering biology to solve the world’s most pressing challenges. Listen in to hear the trials and successes of the bioeconomy.

This podcast is produced by Sara Knurowska. The full transcript can be found using this link.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Marc Wehmeijer and The Living Revolution
• 0:42 Key vulnerabilities in the water sector
• 1:58 The value of wastewater as water, energy and nutrients
• 4:35 Process of wastewater treatment and wastewater recycling
• 8:10 Artificial wetlands and why we need to segment wastewater treatment and release into natural water bodies
• 11:55 Decentralising wastewater treatment
• 14:21 Recycling wastewater in arid land and wastewater treatment in Mexico
• 18:25 Is it difficult to break in to wastewater treatment and key infrastructure services? Short answer: no!
• 20:08 Reasons for installing a wastewater treatment plant.
• 21:49 What does it mean to price water appropriately?
• 22:22 ThinkTIM's best customers
• 23:59 Decentralised wastewater treatment necessary in sparsely populated areas.
• 25:46 Is the policy on the side of wastewater recycling?
• 30:20 The future of decentralising wastewater treatment.
• 34:03 Mexico City's future wastewater treatment.
• 35:34 Advice for those of you wanting to enter the wastewater industry
• 38:08 How biotechnology can be utilised alongside artificial wetlands to treat wastewater.
• 39:22 Outro

Transcript

0:00

Join me with CEO Mark Wehmeijer of ThinkTIM, a company that designs, manufactures, installs and services wastewater recycling units. We had a conversation about the regulatory, commercial and technological landscapes found a middle ground where centralised and decentralised systems can work together to provide the best quality water. I'm Sara Knurowska and you're listening to The Living Revolution. The Living Revolution invites scientists and entrepreneurs and industry leaders to picture the future of our world, whether it be in ensuring food security or making green tech a reality. We've got you covered. Listen in and enjoy this episode. In terms of water, what are the key vulnerabilities we are facing? Climate change, obviously increases the volatility of the availability of water. And then civilization that increases, tends to increase the consumption of water. I'll give you an example. In Mexico, we still run on water that is in most homes, distributed by gravity. Now, the moment no pressurised water supply, be that from the municipality, or be that at your own home with a pressurised water distribution, your water consumption multiplies by a factor of 50% or double. When you then have shower heads that are not sustainable or environmentally friendly, or water efficient showerheads that are consuming 3, 5, 10 litres per minute, but rather 20, your water consumption per person per day increases substantially from potable water switching to wastewater. Wastewater, and that is the good news. The world has finally understood that wastewater is a tremendous source of value. Not only water - that Israel already understood in the seventies with their miracle of growing oranges in the desert, Jaffa Today, Israel is recycling over 80% of its wastewater in irrigation. Number two is Spain, with around 38% activated sludge, which is a predominant process to treat sanitary or processed waters with high organic loads, be it in anaerobic wastewater treatment or an aerobic wastewater treatment where you produce sort of an excess sludge, that sludge obviously serves to produce energy. Thirdly, today, wastewater treatment plants are equipped in the US, but more so in Europe, where we are probably quite advanced in terms of technology development in that field to extract nutrients, which is phosphates and nitrogen, and their respective compositions. Talking about water energy and there we are again with the food water energy nexus. Wastewater is a source of energy, source of water to be reused in irrigation today. But in the future, it will certainly be portableised. That is, as you rightly pointed out in the beginning. Therefore, we first need to overcome regulatory hurdles. And wastewater is the source of organically produced fertiliser from an organic source as opposed to a petrochemical or mines, which is our main sources of fertilisers today. Because everything that's nitrogen is from petrochemical sources, and everything that's phosphate is the the big mines in Morocco. So to reduce dependence on the mines in Morocco, for example, which are, I think, supplying for something like 70 or 80% of all phosphates worldwide, we can reuse phosphates that are also naturally available by extracting them from wastewater. How does a typical recycling unit look like? Yeah. How pure is the water after it goes through one cycle of being recycled, for example? Well, what you have in wastewater treatment is you have a typical. A typical wastewater treatment process secondary, and tertiary treatment, and advanced treatment. Pretreatment is basically mechanical, the mechanical removal of solids that are not degradable. Yeah. And that's not toilet paper, which is not a problem, but it is plastics. It is anything, really, you know, I mean, the worst. Our worst enemy are those wipes. Kleenex? Exactly. Prior to the pandemic, they were only used for babies, and today, everybody is using them. And it is the worst enemies for utilities because it clogs pumps, destroys pumps, it clogs pre treatment systems, and it's a lot of waste because it's not degradable. Then, primary treatment is sort of obsolete. You don't really need it there. We are referring to primary settling tanks to remove part of the organic load that can be very efficient for a large wastewater treatment plant that uses, that passes this primary sludge to a digester to produce methane, and to reduce the size of the biological reactor because it reduces your retention time, and it also optimises energy use. But that's only applicable to large wastewater treatment plants. Secondary treatment is our biological treatment or our biological reactor, which is basically an activated sludge treatment, which can be, can have different configurations. It can be anaerobic, anoxic, aerobic. It will always have. It should always have an aerobic stage. But combining them with anaerobic or anoxic is very efficient. But because you have a more robust biological process, and on top of that, you obtain nutrient removals that are above 50%. In our case, it's even above 70% because nutrients. It's the least that you want in your treated effluent, because nutrients, they provoke, which is one of the biggest challenges worldwide. Very applicable also to the Baltics, for example, to the Baltic Sea, which is eutrophication. You never want nutrients in water. You always want it in soil. Then we pass on to tertiary treatment, and tertiary treatment is basically disinfection, filtration to reduce suspended solids still more. And then we are rather referring to advanced want to reduce the percentage of nutrients even more by means of chemical dosing, remove our so called emerging contaminants, which are hormones, synthetic molecules and microplastics and so on and so forth. To really have a treated effluent that. That without any doubt you can discharge to a natural water body, we again need to distinguish between, as of when is it worth to do it or not? Because I very much believe in natural processes, which is the reason why we got involved in artificial wetlands, artificial or constructed wetlands or tertiary wetlands. It's not a business, really, or it's difficult to make it a business because it occupies land, and land is increasingly valuable. Increasingly valuable. And this, as in our case, as we are promoting it as opposed to a secondary wetland. Secondary constructed wetland is like four to five times smaller in terms of land use or footprint than a secondary constructed wetland. But where I'm going at is that it is most efficient to polish the treated effluent of a biological reactor naturally by the five kingdoms, which is microorganisms. Microorganisms, And the fifth one is algae. They are very, very efficient agents to treat wastewater, or the treated effluent of a wastewater treatment plant, biologically very cheap, while you ferment you ferment biodiversity. So that's a little bit my vision, let's say how wastewater should be treated. And what I want to say with all this is as well, that we always need to take into consideration cost and investment. Why? Because why should we, like in Orange county, treat wastewater or polish wastewater, ultimately with reverse osmosis, then re inject that completely potabilized water into an aquifer for it then to be reused in irrigation of crop. That doesn't make sense. That's stupid. Treated effluent out of your secondary or tertiary treatment is more than enough to be reused then for the irrigation of certain crops, apple trees, as they have in California, or cotton, maybe not rice. I'm not an expert, but it's certainly good enough to irrigate oranges. So, to further segment the wastewater treatment processes so that different, I guess different levels of purified water go to different uses. Right? This is what you're proposing constructed wetlands as tertiary treatments instead of secondary treatments. These would then be used for the most potable or the most pure water, instead of water used for irrigation. No, it's em - the tertiary wetland is a way to polish in a very efficient way. Investment may even be a little higher than the investment into a traditional tertiary treatment, but operating costs are way lower. Take the example of Switzerland. Switzerland has plenty of wastewater treatment plants. There's hardly. And this may be a good way to pass on to decentralisation of wastewater treatment and recycling, as opposed to centralization of wastewater treatment and recycling. Switzerland has a very decentralised way of treating its wastewater. Practically every municipality is connected to sewerage and eventually a wastewater treatment plant. I'm not saying that every village has its proper wastewater treatment plant. Although, that is today something feasible as we have it with our prefabricated wastewater treatment plants. Switzerland is a very resourceful country in terms of water. So it has plenty of waters, rivers, little streams, wetlands, lakes, natural systems. So if you discharge to those natural water bodies, you automatically, or you extremely cheap because they didn't even do the investment into their rivers and lakes, but they're being treated naturally, while again, you ferment biodiversity. And people tell me that they visit Switzerland because it's so beautiful, because of its lakes, rivers and streams. In this case, what are you discharging into, the natural systems or the rivers? What kind of water are you discharging? You discharge typically treated water that has gone through some tertiary treatment, but sometimes even only treated water that has been only, that is coming directly out of the biological reactor. And maybe they disinfected a little bit because of the chloroforms. With that, you're done. That's the principle also of our product. Our product has been developed because septic systems do so much harm in water bodies. What septic systems are you talking about? Cesspools, septic tanks, biodigesters, lagooning, any type of what we call primary treatments does harm in water bodies. Now, it's very different comparing Poland with Durango, or Coahuila, or Chihuahua, or some Arizona, which is very arid land. And it's not a problem to install a septic system in arid land with an appropriate leach field because it's so far away from a water body. But it's stupid. It's still stupid because you wave or you miss the opportunity to recycle in this arid land, which is typically subject to water stress to reuse the treated water and irrigation. That was my motivation when arriving in Mexico to get involved into wastewater treatment, and more so into Because in Mexico, you have regions where you have a lot of water and you have regions where you have very little water. And all over Mexico, water infrastructure is very deficient. Lack of sewerage lines, wastewater treatment plants, they say that 20% of wastewater treatment plants actually work. Half of them work. No, half of this, 10% works as an efficiency of 60%. And 80% of the wastewater is inappropriately or not treated and does a lot of harm in the environment. What are the boundaries between what you would consider treated water and untreated water? Raw wastewater. And that's on one hand, that's wastewater from a human source. And then you obviously have industrial wastewater, raw wastewater from milk, cheese, beer, spirits, fruit, vegetables, any processing, and obviously also industrial wastewaters All that is doing a lot of harm in the environment. So then we pass on to wastewater that is inappropriately treated, which is basically those primary treatments. You have a hole or you have a tank, and you treat it without the addition of oxygen, and you will get. And you will produce a lot of methane, which they say does also harm in terms of climate change. And you produce a treated effluent that still does a lot of harm in the environment. And then thirdly, you get to treat it. Wastewater in a secondary process where you will always add oxygen, where you have fine bubbling, where you have diffusion. Here, no oxygen, diffused oxygen. That increases your dissolved oxygen values in your reactor, and that way activates. That's why we talk about activated sludge process, because we activate the metabolism of aerobic bacteria. So that will be much more appropriate, because treating it more, sometimes can even do harm. Two natural systems. The example here would be the lake of Luzerne, where I was born and raised. The lake of Luzerne is too clean. I didn't realise that's possible. Does nothing grow in it? No fish. And is this something that happened over the years? Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. Because in the backyard of Luzerne, in the countryside, we have other lakes that were suffering a lot from eutrophication, because farmers. And that's no, I'm talking about the eighties, but it's up until the daily practice in Switzerland And at the time, they brought out manure too close to the lakes, which provoked that they were completely eutrophic, eutrophicised, they installed aeration systems in these lakes. That's how they recovered them. I understand that they're still installed, but they I don't know how regularly or if they still put them in operations once in a while. I assume that breaking into something like key infrastructure services like wastewater treatment or even energy, is quite difficult to do privately. For example, here in Europe, breaking into the wastewater treatment industry would be very difficult because it's all, well, one, centralised. Two, the systems are all interconnected and well placed. No, no, not at all. Not at all. There are still plenty of septic systems. I mean, take this company, this Slovak company that is today using the technology that has originally been developed in the Czech Republic, which is an upflow filtration technology. That's for the clarifier, the last stage of the secondary treatment. They sell together with their sister company in Lithuania, more than 10,000 units in 30 countries per year. It was very interesting. That's very interesting because it's an Eastern European company and there's many, many competitors in Eastern Europe. So these 10,000 units, that's. The Lithuanian company is selling 80% nationally, while the slovak company is exporting most of it. But where I'm going is that the. Despite the fact that this product exists since 20 years, there's still a lot of work, and there's a lot of work to do still in Southern Europe. That depends on septic systems, too. Now, where am I going? The success? Why do you install a wastewater treatment plant? For four reasons. Regulatory, economic reasons. Then I call it environmental conscious consciousness. Marketing forments sustainability, social responsibility, blah, blah, blah. and four, because you simply lack water. That's your prime motivations to invest into a wastewater treatment plant. Now, you know how we are in Europe. I mean, we're obviously very conscient and. But ultimately, we are much more driven by the second factor, which is economic. In a few words, the success of this product is not because there has been regulatory pressure, of course, but people were not forced to replace their septic systems by small wastewater treatment plants. Regulations were just a little stricter in terms of the design of septic systems. And secondly, the economic factor is that a septic system, you need to service, and it doesn't produce any value for you as an owner of that septic system, because you need to contract a service for desludging every year or three, which is cost. No, ultimately, it's the same story, like a photovoltaic installation or a solar heater. Eventually it will be paid back. And yes, water is a huge, has a huge disadvantage in comparison that is geared to energy efficiency or energy generation, because water is not appropriately priced. And there's people that claim, okay, there's a right for water. Yeah, but how much? 150, 250, 500 hundred litres per person per day? No, 30 maybe. But everything beyond that should be priced at market rates, which is investment, as well as the operation of the wastewater treatment plant has to be covered. So who are your key customers that are buying from you? Our best customers are architects. Architects in Mexico, they are not only driven by economics, they also have a different ambition. They want to leave something for future generations visible. No, a visible imprint. They're artists in that sense. They're very broadly, they're very competent because they are good in, they know a little bit of everything and obviously a lot about architectural design. So they're conscient and they're interested. And we have the privilege in Mexico to have a great generation of architects, and that's generation X. Up until the millennials, let's say, that feel obliged to design appropriately. Designing appropriately today is environmentally conscious design for construction. So that is certainly our preferred clients. The public client is also very, very interesting. Take Eastern Europe today. In the Czech Republic, for example, they offer incentives to homeowners, and that's economic incentives to install because it is so much cheaper and so much faster to resolve a wastewater treatment issue in a small, remote provincial decentralised wastewater treatment, rather than connecting all these homes in a fairly, in a not dense population, it is so much more efficient to treat that wastewater in a decentralised way. I'll give you an example. Last year, I found out about a home, a farmers house in Switzerland. And Switzerland may not be a good example because construction costs being so high, but it's very popular by a farmhouse. And the authorities forced the homeowner which was two kilometres away. Now, that's an investment of 100,000 Swiss francs. And they could do it with a small wastewater treatment. They could resolve the issue with a small wastewater treatment plant, cost 10,000 Swiss francs. And the deployment is obviously so much faster because with land ownership expropriations, and the process of building a sewerage line is very, very, I mean, takes a lot of time with permits and everything. And on top of that, I mean, take Switzerland again, as an example, the sewerage lines, they have all been installed 50 years ago or 40. So they all need to be attended, renovated, massive cost that is only justified by what we've been talking about in the beginning, which is the intrinsic value of wastewater in terms of energy, in terms of nutrients, in terms of water. Would you say then that the regulatory of the policy environment currently is on the side of wastewater recyclings? No. No, it's not. In what ways does it have to change or how does it make it difficult? The authorities do not trust the individual to start with. Fortunately, we are not that bad in that respect. In Europe, one, somebody is allowed to have a small waste water treatment plant in its backyard. In the US, that is more or less prohibited. You can buy a gun on every corner, but you cannot have, no, you cannot have a microbiological zoo in your backyard. Imagine you need to connect all those relatively large lots to sewerage and then to the municipal wastewater treatment plant. The US cannot pay that under its philosophy and operated infrastructure. So the US must change eventually. So that is one example where regulation certainly doesn't help. And maybe there's also lobbying. The wastewater treatment industry is massive, but it does a lot of harm. And there, I'm not referring to all those companies that make zillions on fake. To me, sometimes fake innovation, because I often refer here in Mexico to our main technology is God's technology because it's the microbiological, it's the biological process, and then. Oh, I mean, but we obviously also talk about AI in wastewater treatment and so on and so forth. It was really not a priority organisation. Remote control, online monitoring of biological, as well as electrical and electromechanical parameters and so on and so forth. This fake innovation is that such as what's which is something you put on the tap that supposedly filters your water for you extra these hard water, those types of things. Right? Yeah, great example. You know, I mean, I'm also saying, no, we settled 70,000 years ago and for 69, no, 69,900 years, we've been drinking contaminated water. Some of us it have made stronger, most of us it made stronger rather than weaker. And I know of the tremendous implications of wastewater. No? And that it is a sanitary issue and so on and so forth. No, I'm not. Don't get me wrong. this is not an absolute statement. Turning to the wastewater treatment industry, one is investment, and that's okay. We have to make sure that the economy is running. That is important, but you need to look at it also from the concept of what is appropriate, what is adequate. No? it is inappropriate to potabilize in the last stage with reverse osmosis known the treated wastewater to then re-inject into an aquifer as the example in the beginning on Orange county. Doesn't make sense. It's inappropriate, it's too costly. Yeah. But other things, no? The wastewater industry produces is a lot of gases. No, we ferment climate change, then many use chemical agents. With the chemical agents to complete the wastewater treatment. With the chemical agent, you end up with a sludge that cannot be composted and be reused as a biological fertiliser. And thirdly, that industry is producing a lot of, is responsible for a lot of energy consumption and environmental footprint with all the and all the maintenance and repair parts that need to be attended all the time. When running a wastewater treatment plant correctly. What in your mind is the future of the decentralisation of wastewater recycling? Because you've talked a lot about individual consumers and let's say a village house. But what about people living in densely packed cities? I mean, large cities obviously need a large wastewater treatment plant, no doubt whatsoever. Yeah, because it's the most efficient way to produce value. Ultimately, it's not that easy operating a big wastewater discharges from hospitals mechanical workshops smaller and medium and big size industries and obviously households. It's very difficult to make sure that your biology is working correctly when you get such a diverse mix of contaminants. But I will not question, I will not question centralised wastewater and much less with all the possibilities we today have in producing that value, be it in terms of energy, be it in terms of nutrients, or be it in terms of water. Take the example of Mexico City. Mexico City has a population of 9 million people. When you add the suburbs, which are in another state already, we're probably talking about 24 or 23 or 25 million people. We consume our potable water sources are provided by wells in the city. These wells have provoked that the city has how do you say has sunk. Because we have extracted excessively these wells. And today we're pumping from up to 2000 metres deep, if I'm not mistaken. And then we have a second important source, which is a system, a water system, which is called gutamala, that provides for around 30% of water supply in the metropolitan zone. Now, this water is being distributed primarily via gravity to households in that supply. We lose 40% of the water, half of it in potable water supply, which is the public water supply distribution, and the other half at the households with running toilets, for example, bad quality, cheap toilets that are running all day long and nobody acts. Then we recollect all that wastewater again, including the potable water, or sorry, the rainwater, and we bring it out of the city, which is to a place that is like 80 kilometres away, to treat it in one of the biggest ways for a treatment in the biggest wastewater treatment plant of Latin America, with a population equivalent of I think 11 million people. That's the capacity. That's okay if it would work, but it's also nonsense. Wouldn't it be much smarter in a green city like Mexico City? Because it's green, people don't know, but it's a green city. Would it not be much better to have at least some tiny wastewater treatment plants, or medium sized wastewater treatment plants, or nicely distributed wastewater treatment plants throughout the entire metropolitan zone to reuse the treated water in irrigation at the point of consumption, reducing that way? Also, the aforementioned loss of 40% by half. Remember that worldwide, around 80% of water is consumed in irrigation. The rest is industry and households. Or 30%. Sorry, no, I think it's about around 80%. Or if not, then it's 70. Where I'm going is that the 70% is also a relative value, because a lot of irrigation is very inefficient irrigation, so it will recharge aquifers. But you see the concept that the answer ultimately, Sara, is there's not one solution. There's many solutions, and ultimately it has to be a combination If you had to give advice to someone who wants to work in, I don't know, wastewater treatment in the future, at any level or in the water industry, what advice would you give them? Always give first priority to natural ways of treating wastewater because these solutions, they're around since, you know, in the middle ages, they separated solids from liquids because they didn't have fertiliser made in Saudi Arabia. So they used the solids as fertilisers and the treated water? The treated water was ended up in some sump, a wetland, And was treated. Around the same time, here in Mexico City, this was a lake, and in this lake, they had three islands. On this lake, there are three islands which were reserved to sacred buildings - the pyramids, temples. Around those islands, they were connected with what we call chinampas. A chinampa on the Chinampas is a floating island. It's a floating wetland. That's where people lived and produced food. And as these floating wetlands, they were floating, there was a lot of rooting, a lot of roots that formed surface for bacteria to grow on and treat the wastewater produced on the chinampas by people and animals and priests and kings. To keep it short, saying that the Aztecs, they had a way more advanced and way more intelligent way of managing water than the Spanish that didn't get it and destroyed everything. You can go back hundreds of years, or you go back 30, 40, or 50 years, mentioning Biosphere2. I don't know if you have the document. I've seen the documentary, and if not, I highly recommend it to you, which is an experiment in New Mexico in early nineties. We know how to treat wastewater and produce value in a very basic way as well. Also, the solution, again, it should be technified, yes. But we should make best and most efficient use of our most efficient technology, which is biological processes, natural processes, natural treatments. The beauty of microbiology, the endemic But I'm not against, not against at all of adding exogenous microorganisms to a wastewater treatment process. So biotechnology is a massive opportunity in our field. Take a fat or grease trap. We should use microorganisms, specialised in the treatment of fats and oils to do that job, because nature cannot do it. And the wastewater treatment plant, the municipal wastewater treatment plant is suffering a lot from excess soaps, breezes, and fats that it receives. If you enjoyed this episode, give us. A follow and share with your friends.