The Annual Conference for the Pacific Northwest Clean Water Alliance was held September 8-11th. Portland, Oregon. It was bustling with over a thousand attendees, 161 technical presentations and 50 exhibitors. Three High school teams that competing for the Stockholm Water Prize presented on their projects. PureBlue (www.pureblue.org) participated in committee sessions including: Government Affairs, Sustainability, Communications and Outreach and Emerging Technologies. Exhibitors were briefed on the Wellspring Conference to be held October 24-25 in Tacoma, Washington. Link to website: www.wellspringconf.org PNCWA sessions tended to be very operational covering a variety of topics including:
- Sustainable biosolids management
- Fostering collaboration and innovation
- Equitable access to clean water and sanitation
- New approaches in sludge processing
- Social equity and workforce development
- Resource recovery in fuels and energy
- Real time monitoring of collections systems and failure detection
- District level stormwater infrastructure
- Novel food waste processing
- The role of women in the water industry
- Remote management of wastewater treatment facilities
- Special presentations by King County, Bellingham, Tukwila, Edmonds
- Watershed water quality monitoring
- Phosphorus recovery
- Workforce diversity strategies
- Navigating nutrient requirements
- Tours of wastewater facilities
- Seismic resilience
- Virtualization for wastewater control systems
