In this year’s edition of Water’s Next, you’ll read about the people and ideas that are making a difference in Canada’s waterscape and beyond—from Josephine Mandamin’s personal pledge to raise awareness of Great Lakes protection, to iDUS Controls’ second generation of efficient irrigation technology, to Clearpath Robotics’ unmanned monitoring robot, to WEHUB’s online water data dissemination program.

Congratulations to the featured nominees for their hard work and commitment to making safe, healthy water resources a priority! For the full list of honourees, see below. Use the navigation bar to learn more about this year’s featured profiles.

People

Josephine Mandamin (Ontario), First Nation elder and founder of the Women’s Water Walk

Brent Wootton (Ontario), director and senior scientist of the Centre for Alternative Wastewater Treatment, Fleming College

Terry Rees (Ontario), executive director of the Federation of Ontario Cottagers’ Associations

Kevin Freedman (Manitoba), founder of the 25-Litre Water Challenge

Karen Bakker (British Columbia), Canada Research Chair in Political Ecology, University of British Columbia

Innovation

Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets (Alberta)

The iDUS G-100 (British Columbia)

The Snug Cove Wastewater Treatment Plant (British Columbia)

The ROC Barrier (Ontario)

Education for Water Stewardship Program (Manitoba)

Businesses

Clearpath Robotics (Ontario)

Vinci Consultants (Quebec)

Golder Associates (Global)

Aquality (Alberta)

Coca-Cola Corporation (Global)

Projects

The National Water and Wastewater Benchmarking Initiative (National)

Algoma Orchards (Ontario)

The POLIS Water Sustainability Project (British Columbia)

The Water and Environmental Hub (Alberta)

Toronto’s Wet Weather Flow Master Plan (Ontario)

Regular Water Canada subscribers will receive a print version of Water’s Next 2012 with their copy of the January/February issue, hitting mailboxes the week of January 9.

Just two weeks before his interview with Water Canada and over a decade after the project’s initial planning phase, Dr. Leland Jackson proudly observed the first running test stream of the Advancing Canadian Wastewater Assets (ACWA) project. “We made a few adjustments, but what had been designed worked pretty well,” says the University of Calgary biology professor enthusiastically.

Designed to mimic natural systems, 12 experimental streams built near Calgary’s Pine Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant will provide an environment to test new treatment technologies and examine the effects of wastewater by-products on the health of aquatic organisms. “They’re as close to being identical copies of one another as you can get,” Jackson explains. “In the absence of true replication, it could be argued that the results are about the stream and not the effluent. It helps to have standard sizes.”

The site is a researcher’s dream come true, but getting to this point hasn’t been easy.

For a project that’s in the beginning stages of construction, ACWA already has a long, complicated history. After a full-scale design and a projected budget of $62 million, issues of funding and politics delayed the project for several years, causing the team to reevaluate. In February 2011, the Canadian Foundation for Innovation gave ACWA the $10.4 million stamp of approval, joining other project funders Alberta Advanced Education and Technology, the City of Calgary, the University of Calgary, and a $1-million in-kind contribution from scientific suppliers. Now, ACWA is operating under a budget of approximately $29.4 million.

While an interdisciplinary team—ACWA boasts engineers and biologists—can have its benefits, it can also cause complications, making a big job of coordinating research themes. “We tend to think a little differently about solving problems,” Jackson admits. For example, new technologies can be evaluated over a relatively short period of time; however, it may take months to years to see changes in the organisms used to determine the ecosystem-level consequences.

Despite the complications, however, Jackson sees the collaborative approach as a major plus.

Translating the knowledge also poses a challenge. “We want to figure out how our results can be used to affect policy. Public education is also very important. We’re working on a knowledge transfer strategy.” Jackson lists several partners, including the City of Calgary, the Canadian Water Network, and Environment Canada.

Ultimately, it’s about testing and proving the safety and efficacy of new technologies. “People are not going to want to switch to a new process if it’s not proven,” says Jackson. “We want to be able to show the old way beside the new way, and demonstrate the positive environmental benefits.”

While the project has already had a long, complicated history, now the real work can begin. —Kerry Freek

“An important innovation for recognizing ecosystem-based thinking.”

In the late 1990s, David Main and his team at AECOM realized that Canada had only anecdotal information about water and wastewater utility performance. They also realized they could correct the deficit. “We rolled up our sleeves and began,” Main remembers. “It turned out to be more complicated than we initially thought.”

Years later, the hard work has paid off. Today, the National Water and Wastewater Benchmarking Initiative (NWWBI) boasts 45 Canadian water and wastewater utilities, cities, and regional organizations, which represents approximately 70 per cent of the nation’s population.

Through the program, members work closely with AECOM to conduct hundreds of detailed site visits and rigorously maintain accurate data for over 70 performance indicators in water treatment and distribution, wastewater collection and treatment, and stormwater systems. Going beyond scorecarding is a major goal, says Main. “It’s a powerful information base. We use it to make decisions around daily operations.”

One of the more complicated tasks has been coming up with specific definitions to ensure that participants are on the same page. “This project is 90 per cent communication,” says Main. “Our benchmarking has a common glossary, so nobody has to spend time explaining what they mean by certain terms. This way, somebody in Burnaby can speak to someone in Waterloo and get started right away—it’s all the same language and the same numbers.”

Having a national network of peers, says Main, is invaluable. At least once per year, these peers meet each other at a three-day workshop to review case studies and discuss annual results. As the NWWBI becomes more popular, he adds, part of the challenge is keeping the workshop from becoming a conference.

Outside of its membership, the NWWBI has proven extremely useful. When the Canadian Council of Ministers of Environment (CCME) began to work on regulations for the Canada-wide Strategy for the Management of Municipal Wastewater Effluent, not much data was publicly available. One NWWBI participant suggested providing blind access to the database so the CCME could see what existed. “That worked very well,” says Main. “We now cooperate with Statistics Canada, the Canadian Water and Wastewater Association, and provincial associations to make sure they have access.”

Despite sharing information with these partners, Main says there’s value in remaining unregulated. “If you make participation mandatory, you get utilities that don’t want to be there and increase the chances of getting bad data,” he explains. Currently, members pay a flat subscription fee, which includes the results, the workshops, and access to a help desk.

“The onus is on AECOM to keep the vision of the project going. As long as we’re providing a valuable product and service, the utilities will be interested.” — Kerry Freek

“A hugely important effort run by industry, but taking on the status of a truly national program.”

When Algoma Orchards outgrew its Whitby, Ontario location four years ago, the company moved to a larger farmland in Newcastle that offered a limited water supply. With no municipal water source, the land itself had just a few wells to sustain the entire orchard, juice and cider operation.

“We found ourselves in a position to enter the apple juice business in addition to having the orchard,” says Kirk Kemp, president of Algoma Orchards. “We were in need of a solution to make the most of what little water we had.”

“We wanted to clean the water enough so that it could be released back into the environment, so we thought, ‘why not go one step further so that we can reuse it?’”

With that in mind, the company was able to secure a $750,000 grant from the provincial government’s Economic Development Fund to help with construction of the juice plant, a portion of the recycling facility, and to cover some economic development costs.

After consultations with other groups that just didn’t seem to understand Algoma’s needs or the scope of the project, Algoma was connected with Toronto-based ALTECH Technology Systems by a mutual colleague who thought that the team could make the orchard’s innovative water reuse system a reality.

“He’s like a nutty professor, in the nicest possible way,” says Kemp of ALTECH’s president and CEO Alex Keen.

The concept is simple: remove solids and bacteria using a SWACO filter and HydroClean® system to make it potable, then add a dash of chlorine as a failsafe. This system treats and upgrades 40,000 litres of wastewater per day, then mixes 80 per cent of that recycled water with well water, storing it for reuse in four on-site tanks.
It was so innovative, in fact, that when ALTECH was ordering supplies from Microdyn-Nadir in Germany, Stefan Krause, manager of MBR applications, decided to come to Canada to see it for himself and offer assistance.

“It’s an off-the-wall application, and maybe a prelude to where water treatment should go,” says Keen.

He stresses that without the immense level of trust between Algoma Orchards and ALTECH, the project would not have seen the light of day.

Keen says that assessing Algoma Orchards’ needs compared to the property’s existing functionality was “kind of a rock and a hard place situation.” In terms of scope and innovation, he says, “trust was a very important factor.”

With this project completed, the team at Algoma Orchards has already begun moving into new realms, partnering with EnerNOC’s DemandSMART program to reduce their operations’ energy use during peak times and planning the installation of a solar roof next spring that will generate 500 kilowatts of power.

Kemp speaks proudly of these accomplishments and goals. “It certainly separates us from our competitors,” 
he says. — Jessie Davis

“Cutting-edge water conservation in a sector that is typically both water dependent and water intensive. This orchard is showing real leadership.”

The researchers and academics behind the University of Victoria’s POLIS Water Sustainability Project have their jobs cut out for them. Their mandate is to provide policy makers with the best available research and help them translate it into effective policies, but while the project has achieved some important goals in the years since it was formally launched in 2003, the biggest battles may lie ahead. “In the next five to ten years, water and watershed governance is going to have to change more than it has in the last 200 years,” says project leader Oliver Brandes.

The Water Sustainability Project (WSP) grew out of the University of Victoria’s POLIS Project on Ecological Governance, which was established in 2000 by the Eco-Research Chair of Environmental Law and Policy. Its mission, according to Brandes, was to fuse together the spirit of activism with the discipline of academia. “Water was rapidly emerging as an important issue on the global, the national and the regional scene,” he says. “We wanted to take a holistic perspective.”

That perspective isn’t just represented in papers and presentations. In fact, a key element of the WSP is its commitment to providing practical demonstrations of the theories that its three core research areas—water conservation and the soft path, the water-energy nexus and law, policy and governance—seek to explore. “It’s about trying not only to introduce new ideas and concepts, but showing how they would manifest in a concrete way,” says Brandes.

It’s not just a one-way street. “Theory informs practice, but equally so practice informs theory,” Brandes says. “Proof of possibility is an important part of what we’re trying to convey, but it also lets us test and explore some of the reasons why we’re having difficulty being more conservation-focused and how we can address the more complex governance problems that underlie that.”

Those complex governance problems are often a function of the fact that water policy doesn’t fall neatly under one political jurisdiction. Instead, it frequently cuts across all three—federal, provincial, and local—as it does with the water modernization act that the Province of British Columbia is currently pursuing. It is in complex situations like this where the WSP excels, serving a function that traditional single-issue NGOs or single-constituency interest groups are often unable to perform. “One of the things that make us unique is that we can work across scales. We can deal with issues on the local, the regional, and the provincial level,” says Brandes.

In dealing with those issues, the WSP insists on remaining steadfastly apolitical. “We don’t really have an axe to grind,” Brandes says. “We’re not about criticizing. We’re about understanding the nature of the problem and its root causes.” Instead, it seeks to inform what he calls the community of thought leaders. “We want to make sure that they’re empowered. In a democracy, the prelude to action has to be deliberation and discussion. And in a number of communities there is a much more sophisticated understanding of what the barriers and challenges are and how we overcome them.” The POLIS Water Sustainability Project deserves a good deal of the credit for that. —Max Fawcett

“POLIS manages to bridge policy and grassroots action. Such plurality of perspective is necessary for any market transformation.”

When then-Minister of Environment Jim Prentice announced the federal government’s desire to keep more accurate and up-to-date information around water and water data in 2010, the University of Lethbridge jumped at the opportunity to get involved. The result is an open-source web platform called the Water and Environmental Hub, or WEHUB for short.

The WEHUB website will offer searchable, customizable data interpretation through its application programming interface (API), which will allow users and organizations to build applications for managing the data to suit their needs, with the potential to share those applications and findings with other users.

“We reached out to our good friend and partner (WEHUB’s executive director, Alex Joseph) at Cybera to serve as primary contact in WEHUB’s creation,” says Daniel Weeks, VP of research at the University of Lethbridge. “Alex is the key player in this process.”

Cybera is a not-for-profit organization that works to facilitate technological innovation in the province of Alberta through the use of cyber infrastructure. At the end of March 2012, WEHUB itself will officially become a not-for-profit.

“A lot of organizations have already been aggregating valuable data, but they don’t have the ability to manage or publish it,” Joseph says. “We want to plug directly into organizations’ data banks so that users can aggregate and interpret data on demand from the organization via WEHUB.”

This goal of total collaboration is a couple of years away as software must be upgraded across various organizations and as phase one of WEHUB’s development is completed in 2012. Phase two is still in need of funding, but Joseph is confident that existing leads will be confirmed by the end of 2011.

“Phase one included development of the platform, adding data and facilitating the development of applications,” Joseph says. “Phase two will be to connect with more provinces and engage more organizations to include their data and build applications.”

Joseph estimates that there are thousands of custom applications possible.

“We’re making the data available through API, making it easy for smartphone and web developers to build these apps and even embed the data in their sites,” he says.

For example, a watershed organization might produce a yearly report, collecting data from various sources throughout the year. By the time that report is released, most of the data will already be outdated. A custom application would allow the organization to connect and interact with other groups, live data sources, policy makers and community members in real time, spending less time and energy on research while providing current, relevant information in its reports.

“There have already been projects identified to enable better water management and watershed planning,” says Joseph.

“The missing piece has been that data infrastructure to bring different organizations and community groups together.” — Jessie Davis

“This project will go a long way to providing a clearer line of sight to water quality, to the need for more rigorous testing, and to the need for more robust policy.”

The last thing a city with world-class ambitions wants is to be recognized for its polluted waterfront.

So it was in 1987, when pollution led the City to post warnings along Toronto’s beaches, earning the city a spot on the International Joint Commission’s list of 43 Areas of Concern in the Great Lakes basin.

With 2,600 storm sewer outfalls and 80 combined sewer overflows, Toronto’s water pollution problems were legion, particularly after sudden or heavy precipitation.

The City took action in 2003 with the Wet Weather Flow Master Plan, a 25-year, $1-billion strategy to tackle polluting stormwater overflows and protect Toronto’s natural waterways.

The plan recognizes that wet weather flow is best managed on a watershed basis through a hierarchical basket of measures starting with “at source” followed by “conveyance” and then “end-of-pipe.”
Already, four large stormwater management ponds have been built at the mouth of the Humber River, trapping, filtering, and cleaning stormwater. Close to the crowded downtown core, a storage tunnel intercepts stormwater and combined sewer overflows, while underground tanks accomplish much the same along the eastern beaches.

Crews have stabilized banks and stimulated new growth along Highland Creek near the Scarborough Bluffs. They recently completed a stormwater management pond at Earl Bales Park in the city’s north end. Not only does this stand to treat runoff and improve water quality in the West Don River, which feeds the larger Don River and, ultimately, Lake Ontario, but the city will reuse collected stormwater to supplement the irrigation and snowmaking needs of an adjacent golf course and ski hill.

An environmental assessment is underway, meanwhile, for the Don and Central Waterfront Project. With planned underground storage tunnels and tanks and a treatment facility, this signature component, alone, will address some 50 combined sewer overflow discharges to the Lower Don River and along the inner harbour.

Over its 25-year scope, the master plan calls for some 180 stormwater ponds and 90 underground and sub-surface storage tanks and tunnels, along with other, softer stormwater diversion measures such as basement flooding prevention and mandatory downspout disconnections programs, both of which are already underway in key areas of the city.

Some critics have asked why the city isn’t separating storm and sanitary sewers. Michael D’Andrea, the city’s director of water infrastructure management, says the master plan acknowledges that stormwater becomes contaminated when it lands on our modern concrete jungle and mixes with animal feces, exhaust and fluid residues from vehicles, and other pollutants.

The master plan views the ecosystem as a whole and budgets the work into manageable slices costing roughly $40 million per year. Thus far, city council has expressed ongoing support for the overall approach and planned measures. Political buy-in is vital because water and sewer projects are largely financed through water revenues, and other infrastructure demands and emergencies can put pressure on longer-term projects.

Asked what makes the master plan stand out from other stormwater projects, D’Andrea cites its comprehensive, multifaceted and hierarchical approach. “We’re looking at what you can do on individual lot parcels from a stormwater standpoint followed by what you can do with the road allowance and, ultimately, at the end of the system, so that it’s integrated on a watershed basis.” — Saul Chernos

“The sheer scale, both financial and temporal, of this master plan deserves the country’s attention.”

One of the major challenges we face today is developing a good understanding of the current condition of our water resources. For decades, we’ve used a variety of methodologies to gather crucial information, many of which require labour-intensive tasks, and some of which are risky. Still, there are information gaps.

When a University of Waterloo professor of hydrology saw the opportunity for automation in water data collection, he enlisted Clearpath Robotics, a local company specializing in the design and manufacture of unmanned vehicle solutions, mainly for industrial research and development purposes.

Founded in 2008, the Kitchener, Ontario-based company built the prototype and moved on to new projects, but kept receiving inquires for marine vehicles. “We had zero marketing, zero sales, and people just wanted automation on the water so badly that they sought us out,” says Matthew Rendall, the company’s CEO. “We started recognizing a pattern. If we were able to attract business without proactive investment, imagine what we could do if we put resources on this project.”

The team immediately began to consider whether the product was viable in the water sector. They began to learn where data challenges exist and shape what was possible. “We didn’t realize the magnitude of the opportunity,” says Rendall, “but everyone sees the merit of automation in their fieldwork.”

The result is the Kingfisher M100, an unmanned surface vessel designed for environmental and civil engineers. The robot can reach areas that researchers might not be able to survey in a traditional “tinny,” either due to safety concerns or inaccessibility. Users can plan their surveys (the product can be customized to sample for myriad parameters) in advance or on-site. The program is user-friendly: it’s powered by GPS and an interface developed with Google Maps. Once the parameters are set, users can launch the Kingfisher, hit the start button, allow the robot to do its work, and analyze the samples for results. Remote control is also an option, which allows users further customization.

A fast, agile, accurate robot that may also reduce survey costs by almost 50 per cent, freeing up budget to allow researchers to further develop analysis? To early adopters, it seems like a no-brainer. In less than two years, Clearpath has secured accounts with over a dozen of North America’s top technical institutions, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of Waterloo, the University of Calgary, York University, and the University of Ottawa are using the M100 specifically to accelerate their surface-water research programs.

In 2011, Clearpath’s facilities grew by 10,000 square feet, including a 5,000-square-foot manufacturing space. Additionally, the company received a grant from the Ontario Centres of Excellence to help develop the next generation of the Kingfisher. “The demand is unquestionable,” says Rendall. “So much of our greatest national resource is left unattended. We’ve got to make sure we monitor it properly.” — Kerry Freek

“The Kingfisher has global market appeal and is a powerful tool for water resources management.”

Human settlements are naturally concentrated around water bodies, but as cities develop, they can negatively impact the water environment upon which their very prosperity depends. Urban activities not only cause pollution of local water bodies, they also affect the absolute availability of water through a combination of microclimatic and population-driven factors. In an environment where government support for water efficiency projects is lacking, it is critical that private companies and service providers take a role in the promotion of environmentally responsible practices.

Vinci Consultants, a small company that is wholly dedicated to improving the way that water is managed in Quebec, Canada, and throughout the world, believes that cities and extra-urban developments can’t be viewed in isolation from the natural resources that surround them.

Vinci’s Sara Finley says in addition to the company’s team of engineers, it employs a water treatment specialist, a city planner, and a chemist. “We step outside of traditional engineering by involving many points of view,” she says.

Established in 1992, the firm made a dramatic change in 2008 when it decided to do “green” projects only. “We were frustrated with the way things worked in a bigger company,” says Finley. Now, she says, it’s a diverse, small team that takes an innovative approach to its projects. “Every project that we do, we manage to convince them that sustainable development is the way to go.”

One of the team’s hallmark projects is the Circus Arts Complex of Cirque du Soleil. Built on old quarry turned into a dump, it was recovered and turned into the complex. Vinci played the role of civil engineer, turning the complex into a near-zero discharge site. The team directed all roof rainwater into an infiltration basin that is almost undetectable and could handle a 100-year stormwater event.

“It’s rare that people are willing to take their roofs out of the existing network,” says Finley. “But roof water is cleaner than stormwater, and gravity is on our side. The solution is aesthetically in tune with the site’s design—we worked closely with landscape architects.”

Before they begin a project, says Finley, the team likes to spend time learning about what the site has to offer in terms of its surroundings and natural benefits and resources. “We want to harmonize the project with what the site has to offer. Projects can’t be done without reverence for what was there before.”

“In Quebec, more and more municipalities are recognizing the need to manage water in a sustainable way,” says Finley. Vinci Consultants are part of the change, and the company’s success is evidence of a new shift in the right direction. — Mira Shenker, with files from Kerry Freek

“Vinci’s obvious passion for improving urban water management is evident in their work, and provides a model for cities around the world.”