waterloop

For years, the clearest way for wastewater utilities to cut greenhouse gas emissions was to use less energy. Now they’re taking a closer look at emissions that don’t show up on a power bill, including some produced by the same bacteria that help clean the water. Jeremy Kraemer, wastewater technical director at GHD, traces methane and nitrous oxide through sewers, treatment tanks, and digesters. There’s some fascinating biology here: the process that removes ammonia to protect rivers can also re

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 water systems running. This episode follows Kelly Anderson, director of the office of watersheds at the Philadelphia Water Department, whose r

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, brings a perspective from infrastructure most people never see. He traces the decisions that begin underground or on the surface and continue through water collection, treatme

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 of Blue-White Industries, explains how watching operators work helped turn a pump update into a broader redesign. What began as improvements to a peristaltic

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 that cleans pressurized pipes. The second is a floating device called SewerBall that gathers images and water-quality data. Kevin Shipp, SUEZ’s general manager for ice pigging

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 can actually use. Earth is NASA’s most studied planet, and advances in satellite resolution, computing power, and modeling are revealing how rainfall, snowpack, groundwater, and soil m