The institute for Resources, Environment and Sustainability (IRES) at UBC wishes to partner with one or several consulting firms that work with innovative waste water management. The aim is to build a decision making support tool that will enable the identification of viable alternatives of waste water design in different community contexts, recognizing that this is a ‘multi-objective problem’ requiring integration of complex technical design issues with social, environmental and economic perspectives.

Contact person: Professor Gunilla Öberg, e-mail Goberg@ires.ubc.ca, phone +1 604 306 9900

Conventional waste water treatment facilities are major energy consumers, emit green-house gases and pollute downstream water bodies. New and emerging technologies make it possible to create integrated systems that are energy and carbon neutral, recover valuable nutrients while treating the water to potable standards.

Choosing the most sustainable solution in a specific context is however a major challenge for several reasons.

Most innovation in water and wastewater technologies come from small enterprises, usually in the form of advancing problems uncovered in the field and modifications are made and tested by technology firms. Once these next generation technologies are established, however, the approval process for technologies to be implemented in a project is always governed by municipal representatives who frequently farm out this responsibility to consulting engineering firms. The inclusion of innovative technologies is often quashed at this step because of the “reverse reward” system for consulting firms’ compensation (typically a percentage of the total capital cost of the project) so there is a direct disincentive to creating a cheaper solution. More importantly, since it takes more time for an engineering firm to understand and thereby accept a new innovation, the cost to the firm in worker hours is higher and there is less risk to doing the same old technologies that have been done for decades/centuries; it’s much easier for a firm to reject new technology as “unproven” and hide behind the excuse of a perceived additional risk, and just accept the status quo where the old technology can be repeated from a previous project, thereby saving many working hours. Furthermore, the academic research in the field is siloed and often conducted with narrowly defined systems boundaries. As a consequence, knowledge on emerging waste-water technologies is strongly fragmented. The fragmentation hinders advancement of knowledge and implementation of new and emerging technologies. In addition, waste water management is traditionally handled as an engineering issue even though the engineering aspects of sustainable waste water management are intricately tied to environmental, social, economical and political aspects at different scales. This renders impossible an efficient approach to deal with the impending replacement of existing infrastructure and related policy challenges.

Drawing on principles of decision making theory and expertise in computational design we wish to build a decision making support tool that will enable the identification of viable alternatives of waste water design in different community contexts. Partnership with consulting firms that wishes to work with us to meet these challenges is paramount for the success of the project.

Contact person: Professor Gunilla Öberg, e-mail Goberg@ires.ubc.ca, phone +1 604 306 9900

UPDATE

UBC IRES have successfully connected with Noram Engineering to partner on this Opportunity.  The two organizations are now working together on developing the decision making tool.  Contact person with Noram Engineering is Ira Wolf.  He can be reached at iwolff@noram-eng.com.

This opportunity was successfully connected!