2017 IWA International Conference on Water Reuse and Reclamation Recap

I am not trying to turn this into a conference review blog but I just happen to have been at quite a few conferences this summer. The most recent was the 11th IWA International Conference on Water Reclamation and Reuse held at Long Beach, CA July 23-27. The attendance seemed pretty good considering a lot of local forums for Water Reuse this year, with the pre-show registration list showing 540 attendees, 420 of these from the United States. I was impressed with the number and quality of attendees from the US which shows that despite recent rains on the West Coast, water reuse still has a lot of interest. Although I did hear from one engineer from Northern CA that some of the reuse projects in that region have gone from urgent to a slower schedule.

The technical presentations were very good and I really liked the 20 minute limit which kept the sessions moving and interesting. Each session had a 15-20 minute question period at the end if there was no time left after a specific presentation. My only criticism of the format was some moderators let speakers overrun by 5 minutes because there was the 15-20 minute questions session at the end to make up that time, but if you wanted to jump across to another parallel session, you missed a good part of that presentation.

Horses for Courses for Technology Selection

Without counting papers, it seemed like the majority of current research is on advanced oxidation and biofiltration treatment while the case studies for full-scale reuse projects were mostly around low and high pressure membrane processes. I don’t know if this means that we will see more AOP and biofiltration projects implemented on the full scale in the future at the expense of membrane projects or if there is just more research money for AOP/biofiltration where membranes are seen as a more mature technology with less areas left to research. I suspect a bit of both.

While I mostly went to the membrane related presentations, skimming the abstracts (I was very impressed with the Conference App that allowed you to easily review abstracts) there is certainly a horses for courses approach, with focus on AOP/biofiltration focused mostly on inland areas where disposal of membrane concentrates is difficult while membrane solutions are predominantly on the coasts with access to outfalls for waste disposal.

If you went to the conference to see the exhibits, you would have been disappointed. There were only 20 or so exhibitors and no booths really popped with anything new. Even so, the breaks in the exhibit area were very well attended and a great opportunity to mingle and network with attendees. Most people who go to this sort of conference aren’t really there for the exhibits anyway.

Overall I am very glad I attended to get the chance to see a lot of interesting presentations and do some great networking. Next conference is the 2017 Annual WateReuseSymposium in Phoenix AZ, September 10-13. I will be interested to see if the IWA Conference lowers the attendance this year or if there is enough momentum in Water Reuse to allow people to go to both shows.