OWM is an approach to foster water sustainability.  By taking into account all resources and where they intersect water, land, energy, agriculture, manufacturing and transportation  we can meet challenges more holistically with better results overall.  OWM will help clarify roles and responsibilities, accountability, reduce conflict, and improve integrated management of resources to provide for future generations.

The OWM network national meeting is being supported by a partnership among the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF), the Water Research Foundation (Water RF) and the WateReuse Foundation. One of the goals of this meeting will be to inform and be informed by the growing body of research being conducted and considered in this arena. (WERF, Water RF, and Water Quality Research Australia will announce the awardee for an RFP on institutional barriers to OWM later this month.)  For more information contact Lorraine Koss at 202.533.1819, or email lkoss@uswa.us.

Kim Marotta, MillerCoors Director of Sustainability, accepted the award for MillerCoors and acknowledged her co-partners in the effort, The Nature Conservancy and the Idaho Silver Creek barley farmers. “Together, our national organizations and the farmers in this project have made a real difference in watershed stewardship, hundreds of miles away from the ultimate purchasers and consumers of our MillerCoors products.” The company’s comprehensive water strategy, which has also seen great success in reducing the water footprint in its breweries, presents an action plan for the company’s water future. “When we invest in water, it’s about more than capital investments,” explains Marotta. “Our employees have been a driving force in our success, 80 percent of the solution is driven by our breweries embracing water sustainability.”

“More barley crop per water drop, is the way I like to characterize how MillerCoors is leading the way with footprinting stewardship and education. MillerCoors deserves the 2013 U.S. Water Prize for more than the efficiency changes in their facilities,” describes Grumbles. “It’s the innovative reach beyond and up the agriculture supply chain that caught our attention.” The company is working with barley growers in Silver Creek Valley in Idaho to help increase water conservation. It’s paying off. They’ve noted a 20 percent reduction in water use.

The Freshwater Trust (TFT), an Oregon-based, national non-profit, wins the Prize for its cutting-edge, collaborative work to save rivers and streams in the Pacific Northwest. For seven years, their program has been enabling regulated entities to achieve regulatory compliance by restoring rivers and streams. The program includes new tools such as market-based trading to create incentives and efficiencies to keep cleaner, cooler water flowing. “We’re insuring it’s not a shell game,” described President Joe Whitworth when accepting the award. “We’re avoiding massive expenditures, by having watershed-based parameters in the system that offers transparency and is verifiable.”

TFT-patented software calculates and quantifies the ecosystem services nature provides and then turns them into credits that can be purchased and traded by wastewater treatment facilities and power plants to achieve regulatory compliance on impaired waterways. Their work is done in partnership with water agencies, irrigators, regulators, and farmers and gets away from traditional, costly “built” solutions such as cooling towers or narrowly focused restoration projects on limited acreage. They are also “scaling” their ideas. They’ve developed “Streambank,” a patented web-based platform that allows more efficient implementation of restoration work, covering the nuts and bolts such as funding, procurement, permitting, and such. “The key to much of their success,” explains Grumbles, “is collaboration. President Joe Whitworth, and his team, are very good at convening regulators, agricultural producers, and the energy sector to get better environmental results than traditional command and control strategies and concrete structures might offer.”

Executive Joanie Mahoney accepted the award for Onondaga County. “As the first County with a consent order to use green infrastructure, we knew we were going to be a model,” explains Mahoney. “Receiving the U.S. Water Prize affirms that we made the right decision.” When faced with the task of reducing the frequency of combined sewer overflows Onondaga County officials had a choice: spend millions on building new wastewater treatment plants or try an alternative approach, a new, greener, method for stormwater abatement. They convinced the federal court to amend the consent order to allow a more balanced approach where green and gray (pipes in the ground) infrastructure complement each other. It was a bold step that saved $20 million in projected savings and paid off in lots of social benefits beyond the dollars saved.

Onondaga County’s Deputy County Executive Matthew Millea who joined the County Executive in accepting the award spoke to the common threads running through all the award presentations: collaboration and courage. “Executive Joanie Mahoney has been a prime model of these attributes,” explains Millea. “She was determined to do the right thing for the County despite numerous obstacles for using green infrastructure to complement gray.”

Public private partnerships were an essential ingredient for their success. Onondaga County built a team that includes Syracuse University, the local business community, environmental organizations and others. Focused public education campaigns engaged and involved the community as their pride in the program continues to grow right along with the green roofs, urban wetlands, parks and bio-swales. Harvesting and reusing stormwater for ice making at the professional hockey arena, is another creative feature along with permeable pavement. “The secret, which the U.S. Water Alliance wants to shout out around the country,” explains Grumbles, “is to think beyond the traditional, risk-averse strategies and build collaborative teams for integrating and innovating on some of water’s most challenging opportunities.”

The U.S. Water Prize, first launched in 2011, is organized and administered by the U.S. Water Alliance. Through the prize, the national non-profit underscores the value of water and the need for one water integration, innovation, and collaboration among environmental, business, utility, and community leaders. Sharing these goals, sponsors joined together to make the celebration possible including: CH2M HILL, Veolia North America, Brown and Caldwell, ARCADIS, CDM Smith, and MWH-Global.

PHOTO – 2013 U.S. Water Prize Winners: (R to L) David Primozich, TFT; Kim Marotta, MillerCoors; Ben Grumbles, USWA; Joe Whitworth, TFT, Matthew Millea, Onondaga Co. (NY)

According to U.S. Conference of Mayors’ report and press release, local government investment in public water and wastewater infrastructure and services has reached an all-time high in 2010 at $111.4 billion, compared to spending $7 billion in 1972 when the Clean Water Act was passed. Public spending on water and wastewater over the decade 2001 to 2010 was $864 billion. Spending on water at the local level continues to grow at a faster rate than several standard national economic indicators.

The rate of growth in public water spending over the decade exceeded the rate of inflation for both capital and operations and maintenance investments. Public water spending increased 60% over the decade compared to 37% growth in GDP over the same period. Average year-over-year growth in public water spending over the decade was 5.99%.

The report recommends that “a fresh look at local affordability and national water policy is both necessary and timely.

You can download the report HERE

“This year’s America’s Most Endangered Rivers report underscores the problems that arise for communities and the environment when we drain too much water out of rivers,” said Bob Irvin, President of American Rivers.  “The Colorado River, the #1 Most Endangered River in the nation, is so over-tapped that it dries up to a trickle before reaching the sea. We simply cannot continue with status quo water management. It is time for stakeholders across the Colorado Basin to come together around solutions to ensure reliable water supplies and a healthy river for future generations.”

The 2013 list of America’s Most Endangered Rivers also highlights other rivers across the country threatened by outdated water management.   The Flint River in Georgia is going dry due to excessive agricultural withdrawals in its southern reaches, as well as increasing municipal demands. The San Saba in Texas is running dry due to excessive agricultural withdrawals. The Little Plover in Wisconsin is at risk due to withdrawals from high capacity wells. All ten rivers and their key threats can be viewed HERE.

The annual America’s Most Endangered Rivers report is a list of rivers at a crossroads, where key decisions in the coming months will determine the fate of the rivers. Over the years, the report has helped spur many successes including the removal of outdated dams, the protection of rivers with Wild and Scenic designations, and the prevention of harmful development and pollution.

Lorena Rios-Mendoza, an environmental chemist at the University of Wisconsin-Superior, is working with a team of researchers led by Sherri “Sam” Mason, a SUNY-Fredonia chemistry professor and researcher at the forefront of research on plastic pollution within freshwater ecosystems, including the Great Lakes. The team of researchers studying the Great Lakes wasn’t surprised to find plastic pollution, especially in Lake Erie, the smallest (by volume) and shallowest of the five lakes. They did find something interesting when comparing their results to the research in oceans. The concentration of PAHs (polyaromatic hydrocarbons) in Lake Erie is twice as high as what is found in the world oceans. “This makes sense because the oceans are so much larger – there’s a dilution factor,” Rios-Mendoza said.

Another unexpected finding was the predominance of bead-shaped micro-plastic particles (less than 1 millimeter in diameter). In the world’s oceans, there has been a higher percentage of debris ranging from 1-5 millimeters in diameter. Mason believes the smaller plastics in the lakes are due to the larger ratio of shoreline to open water, creating an abrasive action to break down the plastic. “The cosmetics industry uses plastic micro-beads in soaps, toothpaste and other products. Because the products are not designed for ingestion, they don’t have to test for this. It’s completely unregulated and may be a significant source of micro-plastics finding their way into the environment,” Riso-Mendoza says.

Mason and her team will move forward with targeting the sources of plastic pollution and gaining better knowledge of the degradation process. More research is needed to compare the amount of plastic pollution from one lake to the next, but Rios-Mendoza explained that it takes more than two hours of towing the fine-mesh sampling net in Lake Superior to recover the amount of plastic in a 30-minute trawl from Lake Erie. The team plans to sample the St. Lawrence River and Lakes Michigan, Ontario, and Erie this summer, and as funding allows, to carry out more systematic studies of all five lakes.

You can download the report HERE

“So far, our innovation promises to be an environmentally friendly means for extracting antibiotics from the surface waters that we all rely on. It also has potential to provide for cost-effective antibiotic recovery and reuse. Next, we want to test our system for selectively filtering out hormones and heavy metals from surface waters” said David Wendell, assistant professor of environmental engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

This new technology could have a major impact on both the health of the aquatic system and of humans. Antibiotics in surface waters can be harmful in killing helpful microorganisms, negatively impacting the endocrine systems of birds, fish and other wildlife and breeding resistant bacteria, thus degrading the environment and food chains.

Surprisingly, this filter employs one of the very elements that enable drug-resistant bacteria to be so harmful, a protein pump called AcrB. Wendell explained, “These pumps are an amazing product of evolution. They are essentially selective garbage disposals for the bacteria. Our innovation was turning the disposal system around. So, instead of pumping out, we pump the compounds into the proteovesicles.” One other important innovation was the power source, a light-driven bacterial protein called Delta-rhodopsin which supplies AcrB with the pumping power to move the antibiotics.

You can download the report HERE

Thermoelectric power plants produce electricity by boiling water that generates steam to drive the turbines. These plants provide 90 percent of the electricity consumed nationwide and an even greater percentage in the Northeast. Cooling the waste heat generated during the process requires that extraordinary volumes of water be withdrawn and makes the thermoelectric sector the largest user of freshwater in the U.S. water withdrawals are either returned to the river at higher temperatures or evaporated in cooling towers. Rivers can help mitigate these added heat loads through the ecosystem services of dilution, attenuation and conveyance; essentially acting as horizontal cooling towers as water flows downstream. Says Stewart, “Our modeling shows that, of the waste heat produced during the production of electricity, roughly half is directed to vertical, evaporative cooling towers while the other half is transferred to rivers.”

The researchers quantified the various dynamics using a spatially distributed hydrology and water temperature model developed at UNH known as the Framework for Aquatic Modeling in the Earth System, or FrAMES model, coupled with the Thermoelectric Power and Thermal Pollution Model developed by collaborators at CCNY. The combined models showed that there are roughly 4,700 river miles in the region potentially impacted by power plants. The study found that, in general, the impact to river temperatures, and thus fish habitat, is “considerable” and disruptions in river flow “minimal,” in part because so many of the region’s power plants are located well down river near coastal areas. But the study also noted that in the face of increasing energy demand and changing climate, “it is essential to assess the capacity and associated environmental trade-offs of heat regulating ecosystem services that support the electricity sector.”

Source: Science Daily

The restoration projects also create “Green Jobs”. In the Mexican city of Miguel Alemán, a temporary employment program is set up where locals are paid by the Mexican government to clear the land of the tenacious salt cedar. Since upstream dams and diversions siphoned away the Colorado River’s water the salt-tolerant invasive plant has taken over considerable areas of the delta. Salt cedar changes the hydrology and ecology of riparian systems. It has one of the highest evapotranspiration rates of any riparian shrub, removing water from the soil and releasing it through the leaves. Salt cedar can cause a water loss up to 13 acre-feet per year.

Pronatura-Noroeste is the Mexican conservation organization that is working to restore the delta. They have nurseries that include an eight-acre demonstration plot, where trees of various types and heights are monitored. Last year, the nursery produced 80,000 trees, half of them mesquite, a quarter of them willow, and a quarter cottonwood.  Re-creating riparian habitat by planting these native trees is a core activity to restore the delta after the salt cedar is removed.

You can download the report HERE

Take pipes, for instance. Different shapes, sizes, and materials with different strengths and weaknesses are available in the marketplace. My own view is that a “pipes of all types” approach makes sense nationally but locally some choices will prove to be smarter than others. Recent reports are highlighting the importance of choosing the right pipe for the right job and doing so in a manner that embraces competition rather than routine repetition. Smart selection, through open competition and upfront life cycle analysis, should then lead to sustainable asset management. Add it all up to save water, energy, and money over the long haul and prevent headaches along the way.

Why is all of this important? Civilization runs on water and yet the water and wastewater infrastructure that runs below us is often out-of-sight and out-of-time. Communities increasingly face (or choose to ignore at their peril) the growing need to fix the leaky, creaky pipes. The American Water Works Association’s (AWWA) 2012 report, Buried No Longer: Confronting America’s Water Infrastructure Challenge, underscores the urgency of the underground drinking water situation. The report estimates a $1 trillion or more price tag to maintain our current level of service, including growth over the next 25 years. The U.S. Conference of Mayors also points to the AWWA report and the fact that over 300,000 water main breaks occur each year, costing $50 billion in lost water and energy and repair bills. A century ago communities used thick cast iron pipes. Now, many of them are failing due to corrosion—a natural process involving exposure to air, water, and soil.

It’s important to ask about innovative financing and “true value pricing” in response to infrastructure needs and gaps but here’s another important question to ask: What’s the best material for necessary pipes in the first place and in the replacement stage? There’s no single, right-or-wrong answer, particularly when you pit ductile iron and polyvinyl chloride (PVC) pipe against one another. Cost, durability, performance, safety, and ease of maintenance, repair, and rehabilitation all factor into making the right choice for water piping infrastructure in a particular community in a particular watershed. For each, key factors include life cycle analysis, susceptibility to corrosion, availability of engineered coatings and linings, overall durability, hydraulic pressure capacity, and replaceability. There’s an ongoing debate about the pros and cons of each, often centering on size, hydraulic capacity, and resistance to corrosive soils.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors’ April 22, 2013 report, Municipal Procurement: Procurement Process Improvements Yield Cost-Effective Public Benefits a argues that open competition for piping materials would spur innovation and substantially reduce the reported $2.28 trillion in investment required for new piping in the U.S. over the next 20 years. The report urges cities to take a lead role in modernizing infrastructure procurement practices: “An important step in effectively managing assets is to create an open procurement and selection process which allows for all appropriate materials to be considered and accurately and fairly compared….Procurement habituation in pipe material consideration combined with a failure to take advantage of the open bidding process impedes competitive cost savings.” It’s a controversial topic but the Conference of Mayors is making the point that in some localities “habituation” (following habit ritualistically without looking at new materials and services) has taken root, diminishing opportunities for a more open and competitive procurement of sustainable goods and services.

The U.S. Water Alliance, which employs me, recognizes the importance of pipes and other “gray infrastructure” and the role of materials in sustaining such infrastructure. It’s all important to the broader effort of shaping an integrated national “one water” vision. Our organization is also firmly committed to supporting the increased use of green infrastructure, such as enhanced or conserved wetlands, floodplains, and engineered approaches like check dams, swales, and rain gardens. These techniques help to keep rainwater out of sewer systems to avoid polluting overflows into surface waters. They can also reduce flooding that harms not only water quality but also the “gray” or engineered infrastructure that supplies drinking water and handles wastewater. Both the U.S. EPA and States around the country have begun encouraging local solutions to include green infrastructure as part of a more cost-effective approach to sustainable water management. U.S. Water Alliance supports continued investment in green infrastructure and smart selection of the materials to maintain the green and the gray to sustain the blue.