Artificial Intelligence and Data Intelligence Advantages for an Enhanced Source Control Monitoring System in Direct Potable Reuse

Sustainable water management, ensuring water availability and quality is a challenge for water utilities worldwide. Specifically, wastewater management is important to protect water resources, and is regulated by various programs. The National Pretreatment Program (NPP) is a set of federal regulations that define pretreatment and provides the framework and stepping-stone for water reuse, to solve the strain on the diminishing drinking water supply. Wastewater quality upstream from the Wastewater Treatment Plant (WWTP) is essential to provide high-quality wastewater for Direct Potable Reuse (DPR) purposes. It allows a comprehensive risk assessment, by an enhanced source control that drives a protective wastewater quality monitoring and offers a holistic and risk-averse strategy towards a full-circle water reuse approach. Such a program is an important barrier to protecting the wastewater treatment system and the quality of the potable water1., especially as wastewater often does not arrive at the WWTP as planned. The wastewater collection system upstream and its underground sewer networks are difficult to access. Understanding its continuous real-time wastewater quality is a challenging and time-consuming task for the utility team. Therefore, an enhanced and remote source control technology can provide a better risk management strategy, increase security, and give insights to the real-time status of the wastewater and improve the health security for the DPR process. The insurance of understanding wastewater events and its impact within the collection system and its users allows the utility to strive for a higher quality of effluent that is safe for its environment and community, while reducing chemical/pollutant discharges to ensure that WWTPs and Advanced Water Treatment Plants (AWTP) can consistently meet all drinking water and other required stand2. The presentation will discuss the benefits of implementing an enhanced source control program on top of the national pretreatment program to get the best possible DPR water quality and how such data can support WWTP operators and regulators can optimize conditions for maximum water re-use in three ways: - Better calibrating removal and refinement processes to what is known to be passing through the network prior to arrival, through an advance notice of an anomaly. - Working with industry and regulators to reduce un-permitted and unauthorized discharges into the sewer network that reduce the potential for water re-use. - Monitor Wastewater Quality Status to protect community health and its environment. - Improve influent quality of the WWTP Two case studies will be presented covering two projects Kando is running in the US (United States). The first will show how working with a utility in the South-West allowed localization and reduction of industrial contamination at source to increase water reuse percentage for drinking water and agriculture purposes, following achievements on an Israel based project., The Second will present how working with a utility and regulators in the Mid-West allowed to localize hotspots of ARG discharge into wastewater. The panel will discuss from various perspectives in a hands-on way the benefits wastewater upstream quality monitoring for improved water re-use programs. The discussion will also include aspects about the importance of data and algorithms toward the goal of improving visibility, driving accountability, and eventually leading to improved water quality. Specifically, our proprietary data and its analysis enables accurate deployment of our monitoring and intelligence platform. Once deployed, advanced machine learning algorithms enable to identify events impacting water quality, pinpoint their source and indicate their impact on the treatment process and the utility infrastructure. Water resource managers in any community require to adopt new strategies that will help reduce costs and improve services for the long term. Using this efficient and near-real time insight generation will allows regulators and WWTP facilities to better control their jurisdictions and act upon data-driven insights to mitigate DPR processes and ensure maximum water reuse, as part of the 'one water' approach.