www.labsofcwea.com/databases/presentations/?category=25

Tracking requirements will describe the responsibilities associated with several biosolids management practices, such as land application, composting, and disposal. Monitoring requirements for various biosolids management practices will be discussed, including sampling and analytical methods, frequency, and holding times.$10 members, $15 non-members, $5 students

When:
Wednesday, Feb. 1, 2012
11am – 2pm

Where:
Sanitation Districts of Los Angeles County
Conference Rooms E & F
1955 Workman Mill Road
Whittier, CA

Lunch: deli sandwichs, chips, cookies and sodas

RSVP: alecm@jwce.com by 1/27 please

See flyer for more information

Get the latest information you need to know about
co-digesting FOG and food waste from suppliers to
operators. This workshop will provide information
about the state of the regulations, availability and
competition for FOG and food waste, operational
experiences, and considerations that can be
incorporated into new designs.

Who Should Attend:
Operators, practitioners, and managers practicing in
the wastewater, and resource recovery industries
throughout California.
Approved for CWEA Contact Hours:

• Environmental Compliance Inspector (ECI)
• Laboratory Analyst (LAB)
• Operator (OP)
• Biosolids Land Application Management (BLAM)

Earn up to 8.9 CWEA Contact Hours

Wednesday, January 18, 2012
City of LA Hyperion WTP
12000 Vista Del Mar
Playa del Rey, CA 90293

See flyer for more information

Biosolids: Energing Your Gas Production. FOG and Food Waste Co-Digestion Workshop

When: January 18, 2012 – Southern California
City of Los Angeles Hyperion WTP
12000 Vista Del Mar
Los Angeles, CA

View flyer for more information!
For additional information/questions contact Serena Miller at 510-382-7800 x 115 or visit: www.cwea.org/conferences

Haddad is a professor of environmental studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. About 14 years ago, he became very interested in the issue of water reuse.

At the time, a number of California’s local water agencies were proposing a different approach to the state’s perennial water problems. They wanted to build plants that would clean local wastewater — aka sewage water — and after that cleaning, make it available as drinking water. But, says Haddad, these proposals were consistently shot down by an unwilling public.

“The public wasn’t really examining the science involved,” Haddad says. “They were just saying no.” This infuriated the water engineers, who thought the public’s response was fundamentally irrational, Haddad says.

“That’s what I would hear at these water agency meetings,” Haddad says, “these very frustrated water engineers saying, ‘My public is irrational! They are irrational! They simply won’t listen!’ ”

For those unfamiliar with water reuse, it’s a system by which water that has been used in your toilet or sink or shower is purified through a variety of technological processes that make it clean enough to drink. Then it’s reused in the same location: It’s used to water fields. It’s put in reservoirs. It can also be used for drinking water.

From the perspective of the water engineers Haddad was talking with, this kind of reuse was a no-brainer. The benefits were clear, and the science suggested that the water would be safe. Clean Water Action, an environmental activist group, also supports reuse for drinking water, though it thinks there should be national regulatory standards.

But according to Haddad, no matter what the scientists or environmental organizations said, the public saw it differently: They thought that directly reusing former sewage water was just plain gross.

“A scientific answer is not going to satisfy someone who is feeling revulsion,” says Haddad. “You have to approach it in a different way.”

That’s why Haddad turned to a nonprofit called the WateReuse Research Foundation for funding for a study. He wanted to figure out more about the public’s response to reused water, and for that he needed additional people. This was a job, Haddad concluded, for psychologists.

Psychological Contagion

Carol Nemeroff is one of the psychologists Haddad recruited to help him with his research. She works at the University of Southern Maine and studies psychological contagion. The term refers to the habit we all have of thinking — consciously or not — that once something has had contact with another thing, their parts are in some way joined.

“It’s a very broad feature of human thinking,” Nemeroff explains. “Everywhere we look, you can see contagion thinking.”

Contagion thinking isn’t always negative. Often, we think it is some essence of goodness that has somehow been transmitted to an object — think of a holy relic or a piece of family jewelry.

Nemeroff offers one example: “If I have my grandmother’s ring versus an exact replica of my grandmother’s ring, my grandmother’s ring is actually better because she was in contact with it — she wore it. So we act like objects — their history is part of the object.”

And according to Nemeroff, there are very good reasons why people think like this. As a basic rule of thumb for making decisions, when we’re uncertain about realities in the world, contagion thinking has probably served us well. “If it’s icky, don’t touch it,” says Nemeroff.

The researchers led by Haddad wanted to figure out more about how our beliefs about contagion in water work. And so they recruited more than 2,000 people and gave them a series of detailed questionnaires that sought to break down exactly what would have to be done to wastewater to make it acceptable to the public to drink. The conclusion?

“It is quite difficult to get the cognitive sewage out of the water, even after the real sewage is gone,” Nemeroff says.

Around 60 percent of people are unwilling to drink water that has had direct contact with sewage, according to their research.

But as Nemeroff points out, there is a certain irony to this position, at least when viewed from the perspective of a water engineer. You see, we are all already basically drinking water that has at one point been sewage. After all, “we are all downstream from someone else,” as Nemeroff says. “And even the nice fresh pure spring water? Birds and fish poop in it. So there is no water that has not been pooped in somewhere.”

Ridding Water Of Psychological ‘Poop’

So what do you need to do to make reused water acceptable to the public?

Nemeroff says you need to change the identity of the water so that it’s not the same water. “It’s an identity issue, not a contents issue,” she says, “so you have to break that perception. The water you’re drinking has to not be the same water, in your mind, as that raw sewage going in.”

One of the best ways to do that, Nemeroff and Haddad and their colleagues concluded, was to have people cognitively co-mingle the water with nature.

Apparently, if you have people imagine the water going into an underground aquifer, for example, and then sitting there for 10 years, the water becomes much more palatable to the public. It budges even those most unwilling to drink the water.

This, Haddad says, is why people find it acceptable to get their water supply from their local river, even though that river water at one point mingled with the sewage of the town upstream. People see river water as natural.

But, in fact, Haddad says, putting treated water back into nature can make it less clean.

“That’s an interesting twist to all of this,” Haddad says. “When you do introduce a river or even groundwater … you run the risk of deteriorating the water that’s been treated. You can make the water quality worse.”

In any case, say Nemeroff and Haddad, it’s certainly true that our psychological relationship to water and our beliefs about contagion have an enormous impact on water policy in this country. We spend millions and millions of dollars for water that is cognitively, if not actually, free of contamination.

Link to full text article

Where can LA County get more green energy for the future? One source is an extensive power generation project at the Joint Water Pollution Control Plant (JWPCP) in Carson. When completed, the state-of-the-art facility will turn wastewater sent into Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts’ (LACSD) sewer system into as much as 36 megawatts (MW) of clean, green power every day.

When JWPCP flips the switch later this year, the Power Generation Facility, known as the Total Energy Facility, will produce enough electricity to run the entire plant and, at times, sell surplus to the power grid. Turning sewage biogas into electricity is the goal of the Steam Cycle Modifications Project, according to LACSD Engineer Tom Fang who spoke during a March 17th dinner meeting of the Los Angeles Basin Section (LABS) of CWEA.

JWPCP’s Total Energy Facility dates back to the 1980s and is an important source of power for the facility. Steam can be produced at the facility to heat the anaerobic digesters, and methane from the digesters, in turn, is used to fuel the power plant.

What’s unique about the Total Energy Facility is the combined cycle power plant. First, up to three 9.9 MW gas turbines burn digester gas much like a jet engine to directly generate electricity (the Brayton power cycle). The exhaust heat is then tapped to make steam that powers an 8.7 MW steam turbine generator (the Rankine cycle). Known as cogeneration or combined heat and power (CHP), the upgraded facility will have 36 MW capacity and is expected to generate 23 MW on average.  That’s enough power for the entire JWPCP and then some.

Tom explained project planning dates back to late 1990s when LACSD expanded JWPCP to full secondary treatment. As part of the expansion, digesters were added requiring more heat and generating more digester gas.

In 2008 the upgrade took on greater urgency when the former steam turbine generator suffered a catastrophic failure. The reduced capacity meant more purchased power, raising the facility’s electric bill by $2-million per year.

Tom took the audience step by step through the project’s phased construction and major elements. The equipment being replaced in the project includes a steam turbine generator (STG), heat recovery steam generators (HRSGs), cooling towers, condenser, steam-to-steam generator, HVAC Chillers, High Pressure Gas Treatment System, and the Plant Control System. The three combustion turbines were previously upsized in 2001 and thus not part of recent upgrades. Startup is planned in late 2011.

Tom pointed out the project has taken years to become reality, but the payoff for the agency and its customers will be huge. Benefits include energy savings, reliable power and steam for the plant, less dependence on the grid, and avoiding utility emissions – thus fulfilling LACSD’s commitment to cost-effective, environmentally friendly operations.

In January, the project team was honored by LABS with the Engineering Achievement Award for 2010. Tom’s presentation is available on the LABS website at www.labsofcwea.com.

Story tk…

On January 18, the California Water Environment Association (CWEA) Biosolids Committee hosted a specialty conference, Biosolids:  Putting Regulators and Researchers in Touch with YOU… the Practitioner, at the Los Angeles County Sanitation Districts Joint Administration Office in Whittier. Another session was held on January 19, 2011 at the Shannon Community Center in Dublin.  This one-day biosolids specialty conference, which trained 125 water environment professionals, consisted of a series of technical presentations separated by interactive discussions among leading experts and attendees.   The morning session consisted of opening remarks presented by the conference Chairs (Dave Bachtel and Todd Jordan), followed by six technical presentations.  The innovative networking lunch also served as a venue for a discussion of CWEA’s Biosolids Land Application Management Certification.  The afternoon session consisted of five technical presentations, and closing remarks were delivered by the conference Chairs.

A total of nine speakers gave presentations at both venues that covered a wide range of relevant topics, including the following:

 *   State issues update from the California Association of Sanitation Agencies (CASA),
 *   National scientific research review from the Water Environment Research Foundation (WERF),
 *   Innovative look at Biosolids and Greenhouse Gas Accounting,
 *   Discussion of biosolids constituents,
 *   Analysis of specific trace organics, an update on dioxin and radiation biosolids research results,
 *   Overview of microorganisms in biosolids,
 *   Update on chemical research results from biosolids land application, and
 *   Discussion of case studies of urban gardening projects that use biosolids products

Review the presentations and findings from the nationally known Biosolids experts.<http://cwea.org/et_biosolids.shtml>

You’d think that standing in a dank tunnel filled with raw sewage would muck up your holiday spirit. But these London sewermen seem to be having a jolly old time as they remind the city’s inhabitants not to flush turkey fat or baby wipes down the toilet. Singing “only what comes out of you should go into our pipes” to the tune of “Good King Wenceslas,” they make responsible waste disposable seem downright fun.

Thames Water will donate 1p to WaterAid for every hit the film gets on YouTube (up to a maximum of 200,000 views, ending on 31 January 2011) to support the charity’s life-saving work to improve access to safe water and sanitation to the world’s poorest people.

Find out more about the Singing Sewermen and their work at:

http://www.thameswater.co.uk/binit