Transcriber: Lucrezia Assoldelli Reviewer: Amanda Zhu
Hello. I’m Fredrik Ording.
When I tell people that I work with water and wastewater,
they say, “Aw, that’s fine. Good for the environment.”
And I say, “Maah, not necessarily.”
Because we do provide people with healthy drinking water,
and we do, hopefully, prevent our lakes and rivers
from being polluted by sewage,
but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s being done in a climate friendly way.
Maybe our sector
hasn’t always been the pioneers I think we ought to be
in reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
And the reason for that may be that there are so many single factors,
each contributing significantly to the total carbon footprint.
We cannot pinpoint one single source
and say, “Hey, this is what we need to work on.”
Let’s say you need to supply a housing area
with water and wastewater services.
Obviously, you'll need pipes.
They can be made from plastic, from cast iron or from concrete.
And they could be produced in your own neighborhood,
or they could have been transported around half the world.
Then you need trenches to put the pipes in.
That requires machinery and fuel.
Then there is electricity for the pumping.
And if we were to build a treatment plant also,
the facilities where water or wastewater is being purified,
then there would be a carbon footprint from the construction of the plant,
and then that would be the operation, which requires electricity and chemicals.
And you’d be surprised to see
how much the choice of process technology and the choice of chemicals
matter for the total carbon footprint.
Now, let me mention that there are some positive actions you can take
to improve your carbon footprint.
Some of them I’d even call low-hanging fruit.
For example, many plants today produce biogas from wastewater sludge.
That biogas can be used for heating, electricity or for running cars.
Or if water enters a water treatment plant with a very high pressure,
instead of wasting that energy,
we like, in our company,
to install a small turbine and a generator.
That gives you virtually free electricity with no carbon footprint.
But my question is,
In all this, how do you get the full picture?
When you start a project,
you normally have a budget and a technical plan.
But from there to knowing the total carbon footprint of your project,
well, that used to be very complicated.
With so many and so different factors contributing,
well, you would find some of the figures are needed,
but not all, and not enough to get a reliable answer.
But in recent years, this has changed a lot.
There is much more information available.
And a couple of years ago, our company launched a calculator,
a tool that guides you through the process.
When you enter the details from your project or your operations,
the calculator contains all the figures and background data that you need
in order to calculate the total footprint.
Right now, this tool is being used in a project for the city of Drummond.
The city wants,
along with its neighboring municipalities,
to build a new wastewater treatment plant
or perhaps to extend and upgrade existing ones.
This necessitates investigation over a number of alternatives.
This map may give you an idea of the complexity of the project.
There are seven alternative locations for a treatment plant, or plants,
and for each of the alternatives,
there are two or three alternative routings for the piping.
When we enter all these figures and parameters into the calculator,
the result really can represent it as two simple diagrams.
They show us the total carbon footprint from the construction of the system
and for 30 years of operation
for each of the alternatives.
I’ll not dig into the details here.
I’ll just refer to you a couple of the interesting findings.
It hardly comes as a surprise
that there are considerable differences between the alternatives.
But then it turns out that the emissions from 30 years of operation
are really on the same level as the emissions from the construction.
And they correspond well
in that the alternatives with high emissions from construction
also, for the most part,
have high emissions during operation.
And that is not always the case.
So far, we’ve been looking at the piping and the pumping.
When we come to treatment plants, it’s often the other way around.
High emissions during construction
correspond with low emissions during operation,
and vice versa.
Anyway,
my point is that with so many different factors
all contributing to the total carbon footprint,
our calculator transforms what used to be a daunting task
into a simple set of figures,
or graphics, if you like.
And I dare say these figures are just as reliable
as the economic calculations in the projects.
And now that we have reliable figures available.
There is no reason not to make use of them.
Greenhouse gas emissions are just as important as economy.
Or no,
it’s more important than economy, as a criterion for making decisions.
And let me add one thing in the end.
There is a good thing about the complexity of this
in the water sector.
Because when there are so many different factors
contributing to the carbon footprint,
that means there are so many things we can work on improving, right?
I think that’s a great job.
Let’s go for it.
Thank you.