March article ignores new technologies introduced in past 10 years….
I was disappointed with an article I saw published in the March 2010 issue of the Journal AWWA (American Waterworks Association) titled “Treatment alternatives for compliance with the Stage 2 D/DBPR: An economic update”.
My major concerns with this article as follows:
1/ The technologies reviewed in this article were identified back in the 1990's as best available to meet new EPA drinking water standards for disinfection by-products (Stage 2 D/DBP Rule) that were originally scheduled to be implemented in 2005. Compliance dates for these standards have since been delayed until 2012-2014, depending on the water system size. Hello! It is now 2010 and a lot of new water treatment technologies have been developed and proven in the intervening period – so why no mention of these?? The JAWWA is supposed to be the go-to-publication for the latest and greatest in water treatment science and engineering, but the publication of this article suggests its editorial committee may be a decade or so behind the times....
2/ I take exception to the statement that "Among the precursor technologies examined, the data suggest that activated carbon continues to be the most cost effective method” (for compliance) and the assumptions used in arriving at this conclusion. In determining the activated carbon operating costs it was assumed that the carbon would be replaced on an annual basis. How many treatment plants using GAC are this lucky? Most plants using GAC that I know of have to change their carbon out every 2 to 3 months. It was OK to make this assumption in the 1990s when no large scale GAC systems had been installed yet for DBP compliance, but it is irresponsible to continue to use this assumption when there have since been many operating plants that demonstrate significantly higher carbon consumption rates.
I can only hope that water systems looking at ways to meet the future Stage 2 DBP standards do not use this article for technology selection and budgeting purposes or they could find themselves in a deep hole with their operating expenses, and not benefit from the findings from many water utilities that have gone through this pain already. I also hope the AWWA will follow up sooner rather than later with a more useful article that summarizes more realistic operating costs of existing installations - something like what was published in JAWWA in May 1996 on Nanofltration systems in Florida. I sent the editor a letter expressing my concerns and suggestions, so let’s see what the response is.
By the way, when I tried to check out the background to the company of the article’s author, while I couldn't find much, I did find out that the company is involved in the sales of activated carbon. Surprize, surprize......
So how did the JAWWA editorial committee let this article get through? Obviously the committee consists of very experienced members of industry. Perhaps that is part of the problem. If their expertise was developed many years ago on the advanced technologies of that time, is it hard for these people to keep an open mind and accept that these technologies may no longer be at the cutting edge? The water industry has always been very conservative and slow to adopt new technologies, but with the increasing challenges presented by climate change and population growth we have to break out of the old mindset and look for new solutions. JAWWA should be at the forefront of the new thinking required to meet today's challenges!
I should give credit to the author of this JAWWA article who caught up with me at the Trade Exhibition of the Arizona Water Association Conference two weeks ago. He collected information on the technology that my company provides and was apologetic that he did not have enough information or the time to include this in his article. My beef is not with the author but with JAWWA peer reviewers who should have identified that the article did not give a balanced review of all technologies available for meeting the EPA DBP standards.
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