Stagnation in the sewers: what's stopping innovation in sewage treatment

By the time World War I rolled around, most American cities could boast tremendous sewer networks. Sewage treatment, however, wasn't part of the picture -- most sewers simply outflowed into the nearest waterway. And you can imagine how America's waterways stank. Congress began seriously funding sewage treatment research in the fifties, but it wasn't until the seventies when the government finally decided that a civilized society is one that manages its waste.

Since then, America has invested $250 billion [1] into its sewage infrastructure, typically building on centralized plants based around primary and secondary treatments [2]. And while this 1950s and 60s-era process does an adequate job of separating waste from water (and more recent tertiary treatment helps further cleanse it), this process is expensive, land-intensive, energy-hungry, and glisteningly ripe for innovation.

But there hasn't been any incentive to innovate.

It's not for lack of new ideas. Take semipermeable membranes [3], for instance, that use reverse osmosis to separate water from the particulates suspended in it. This system eliminates the need for settling tanks, for one thing -- dramatically reducing the land necessary for a treatment plant. But beyond semipermeable membranes are nano-particulate membrane bioreactors [4] that add a layer of bacteria to digest organic material as it passes by. And it's hard not to get chills while reading about the solar-aquatic sewage plants [5] that rely on bacteria, shrimp, fish, and plants to cleanse wastewater.

And those are just the ideas that make do with our current (and flawed [6]) toilet and sewer infrastructure. The next generation of sanitary management could eliminate this expensive and unsustainable infrastructure altogether, from composting toilets [7] to poop-powered fuel cells [8]. Sewage treatment is indeed poised to leap into the future.

But there's little incentive for America's wastewater industry to make it move.

I learned this from Ed Clerico [9], president of Alliance Environmental, a consulting firm that focuses on water resource management and green building concepts. At a lecture I attended a few weeks ago, Clerico discussed water reuse in New York City. And he fascinated me with his description of an industry that seems almost explicitly designed to resist innovation.

As Ed told me then and in a later conversation, there are 16,000 wastewater entities [10] in the US. Each one is staffed by men and women -- some elected, some appointed, some volunteers -- tasked to determine which wastewater management technology is most appropriate to staunch the estimated 80-100 gallons of water [11], two quarts of urine [12], and half pound of poop [13] flowing inexorably from every single person in their district every single day.

But when it comes to poop, the average American is slightly less neurotic than when it comes to terror. So like a Boston bureaucrat in the face of a Lite Brite set [14], a wastewater decision maker lives in fear of making the wrong decision. Despite their best intentions to save money, land, and energy, a wastewater decision maker knows that if he or she embraces alternative technology and something goes wrong, it's his or her ass on the line -- and his or her driveway on which the local media will camp out. The public only cares that its poop disappears. Once that toilet flushes, no one wants to think of it ever again -- and woe betide the person who forces them to do so.

This public mandate is a tremendous disincentive to try anything new.

And the structure of the industry supports this inertia. Most of the 16,000 wastewater entities in this country are very small, responsible for towns, townships, or even individual housing developments. Because of this fragmentation, the industry relies heavily on engineering consultants. In fact, as Clerico tells me, only the very biggest wastewater entities are actually self-sufficient. Consultants drive the industry.

A cynic would note that the more capital-intensive and equipment-oriented the solution, the more money the consultant makes.

Less cynical, though, is the simple realization that business goes where money is. With demand almost entirely reserved for traditional wastewater infrastructure, there's little reason for consultants to invest in developing anything else.

Thus, though wastewater entities and wastewater consultants both surely recognize the need for innovation, the former can't demand it and the latter can't supply it.

If this were ten years ago, the story would end there. But there's a ray of sunshine bursting through the cloudy surface of the settling tank: the hope that the green building movement may extend to sewage.

Our culture is finally beginning to reevaluate waste. We're finally recognizing externalities: energy and resources consumed, and byproducts produced. And this could change the incentives driving wastewater decision makers. Soon their mandate may not be limited to sewage flowing in and water flowing out. Soon, they could be free to consider the most efficient means to that end.

This is what is necessary to break the status quo: a public demanding innovation, giving wastewater decision makers the confidence to embrace it and wastewater consultants the incentive to supply it. Because while a civilized society manages waste, an advanced society does something about it.