How three Milwaukee water-tech businesses are innovating global sustainability solutions.
How three Milwaukee water-tech businesses are innovating global sustainability solutions. Back to the full article.
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Excellent! Great implementation of a great idea!
Regarding the mobile units – Do they have/use
apparatus that siphons from sewers in overrun-prone areas?
Or do they treat only water that has already overflowed?
A good question re: how sewer water is routed to the mobile units. So far, these have been tested drawing water up from the sewer (during dry weather, actually diluting this to simulate wet weather flows), treating, then discharging back into the sewer due to permitting requirements that currently do not allow for their end-of-pipe to be its own discharge into receiving waters. So, the water they have treated with their mobile units has not overflowed and was not part of an actual overflow event, but their premise/proposition is to deploy at overflow outfall locations that may be prone to overflows. The State Street location in 2023 was located near an overflow outfall location but followed the procedure above where the tested effluent was discharged back into the MMSD system, where it made its way to Jones Island for treatment. That field experience was likely to help inform what kind of systemization/integration makes sense per your question — if say, down the road, a municipal wastewater system wanted to use this technology and deploy multiple decentralized units. We have a companion comic book that diagrams some of this to clarify what’s been done thus far versus what their aspirations are that may help illustrate this a bit more (https://refloh2o.com/water-stories). Rapid Radicals only has the two mobile units right now, both now at MMSD South Shore where testing and optimization for the tech and process integration continues. My understanding is that a lot of learning was/is happening re: the solids filtration step that is involved with drawing on actual sewer flows. As far as the particulars of siphoning, I do not know that answer; I believe there was a pump used to draw water through an intake hose. Thanks for your interest.