Discarded glass bottles are getting another job: filtering water. Sand and activated charcoal can become fouled over time. John Wilson, CEO of Johnson Screens, explains how recycled glass offers another option for filtration—and an opportunity to reduce biofouling, the buildup of microorganisms on filter media. The company’s GreenFil media is…
Protecting Philadelphia’s drinking water means looking far beyond the city limits. With 98% of the Schuylkill River watershed outside Philadelphia, keeping pollution away from drinking-water intakes depends on understanding what happens upstream—and working with the communities there. Day In The Life is a series showing how utility workers keep America’s…
Drilling deeper for groundwater changes the engineering demands on a well. As drought puts pressure on water supplies in the western U.S., some communities are looking farther underground. John Wilson, CEO of Johnson Screens, explains how that search requires reconsidering the materials and design of the equipment installed below the…
In complex water infrastructure projects, risk often translates directly into dollars. Collaborative delivery helps manage those costs by bringing utility owners, designers, and contractors together early to identify potential risks and determine how each party can best address them. Jessica Adams Weber, Vice President at HDR Engineering, explains that understanding…
Getting water from underground aquifers or waterways into a treatment plant means responding to changing conditions, protecting equipment, and caring for the environment at the source. The systems that collect and filter that water have to adapt to achieve those goals. In this episode, John Wilson, CEO of Johnson Screens,…
💧 H2O INTRO 🤝 Meet Frank Venegas, Water Technician for the Quechan Indian Tribe Accounting for water on a Colorado River reservation means tracking far more than what flows through household taps. Venegas monitors the water entering the reservation and how it is used across agriculture and the domestic system.…
Higher pressure can change which chemical feed pump a water treatment plant needs—even when the existing pump is working fine. A design that lets operators switch pumping technologies without replacing the entire unit is demonstrated by Rob Gledhill, president and CEO of Blue-White Industries. The new 2-Series platform accepts both…
More than 6,000 doors knocked. Lead Free Memphis is showing how face-to-face outreach can turn a complex water infrastructure program into information families can use. LaTricea Adams, founder, CEO, and president of Young, Gifted & Green, launched the initiative in 2017 after seeing how Flint Rising reached residents during the…
Routine pump maintenance can interrupt chemical feed and consume time that water treatment operators already have too little of. Designing around that reality means looking beyond pumping performance to how equipment is cleaned, repaired, and adapted when conditions change. In this episode from WEFTEC 2026, Rob Gledhill, president and CEO…
A floating ball can help trace what’s entering a sewer by measuring changes in the wastewater. SewerBall tracks four indicators as it travels: temperature, conductivity, pH, and redox potential, a measure of oxidation-reduction conditions. Together, those readings help reveal changes from the sewer’s baseline water quality, explains Charles Kruse of…
Collaborative delivery isn't just for billion-dollar water infrastructure projects. It can also help utilities modernize existing facilities, upgrade technology, and make improvements within their available budgets. While alternative project delivery methods are often associated with major drinking water and wastewater treatment plants, the same approach can be scaled to smaller…
Ice crystals can scrub debris and biofilm from inside water pipes. The process starts with drinking water and food-grade table salt. As Kevin Shipp, P. Eng of SUEZ explains, that brine is chilled until ice crystals form, creating a slurry that can be pumped through hoses into drinking water lines…
Making NASA’s Earth science useful starts with understanding the decisions people need to make. Rebecca Peters, Earth Action Lead at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, describes an approach that begins with users and decision-makers, rather than with a dataset the agency wants to share. The first questions concern scale: What…
The view of Earth’s water is shifting from scattered snapshots to a connected picture of the entire system. Rebecca Peters, Earth Action Lead at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, says stronger computing power and sharper satellite observations are allowing scientists to examine how rainfall, groundwater, soil moisture, rivers, and reservoirs…
💧 H2O INTRO 👤 Meet Sara Hughes, Senior Policy Researcher at RAND and Professor of Policy Analysis at the RAND School of Public Policy. More than 2 million Americans still live without running water or a working toilet at home. Researchers have spent years documenting where these gaps exist, what…
Replacing lead pipes one house at a time is slow and disruptive. Milwaukee is reorganizing the work neighborhood by neighborhood. Patrick Pauly, superintendent of Milwaukee Water Works, says the city developed a prioritization plan that groups replacements by census block group, allowing contractors to work more efficiently and reducing repeated…
Pipes for water systems can lose capacity or go uninspected for decades, leaving utilities with an incomplete picture of what their infrastructure can deliver. This episode looks at two technologies that SUEZ is bringing to North America by leveraging its global deployment experience. The first is ice pigging, a process…
Inside Westminster’s wastewater laboratory, chemistry reveals what the eye can’t see. Samples taken before, during, and after treatment show what’s entering the plant, how effectively the process is working, and what remains in the treated water before discharge. Tests measure suspended solids and oxygen demand—indicators of how much material remains…
What if a farmer, conservation manager, or utility operator could question decades of NASA water data in plain language—and get information tailored to a real decision? Rebecca Peters, Earth Action Lead for NASA, explains how the agency is working to move Earth science from vast public datasets into tools people…
Water helped create the spectacular red rock formations at Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. But the story goes back hundreds of millions of years. The towering sandstone formations began as layers of sediment deposited in ancient environments, including rivers, streams, and sand dunes. Over millions of years, those…
Digging up a sewer can mean paying to rebuild the street above it. In New Orleans’ French Quarter, Manhattan, or downtown Chicago, replacing wastewater infrastructure means finding room for excavation while managing lane closures, traffic, and access to homes and businesses. Joseph Talley of Imerys explains why repairing structures in…
Hydrogen sulfide gets the blame for eating away at concrete sewers. But there’s another step in the chemistry. Joseph Talley of Imerys delivers a crash course: bacteria breaking down waste under low-oxygen conditions generate hydrogen sulfide, which can escape from wastewater into the air above it. On moist sewer surfaces…
The best water infrastructure solutions often start with listening to the people facing the problems. For water technology and equipment companies, understanding the challenges utilities, engineers, and contractors encounter can be just as valuable as developing new products. That's what Will Brannon of U.S. Pipe says he discovered through the…
What’s actually eating away at the concrete inside our sewer systems? The answer takes us into a world of bacteria, sulfuric acid, and chemical reactions happening beneath our streets. In this episode, Joseph Talley of Imerys provides a deep dive into the chemistry of wastewater corrosion. He breaks down how…