Find out more below about our third WRE Conference and Exhibition Speakers and their talks for the third session on Public Health in Water Reuse:
Katie Bell
Director of Water Strategy, Brown and Caldwell
Dr Kati Bell is the Director of Water Strategy for Brown and Caldwell with nearly 30 years’ experience. She is responsible for setting the vision BCs research and innovation program, leading global partnerships, and managing BCs technical innovation leadership team. Her collective work in the water industry exceeds 5 billion gallons per day of capacity, globally. In addition to project work, she is a leader in research having published hundreds of papers focused on OneWater. She supports regulatory efforts, having led the EPA Guidelines for Water Reuse as well as supporting various states in the US.
Keynote: Evolution of Potable Reuse Regulations in California
Water is a limiting factor to economic and population growth in California, and as a result, water reuse been documented as early as the 1800s, when farmers were using municipal wastewater for irrigation. As the population of California has increased dramatically over the last century, groundwater has been over-drafted resulting in saltwater intrusion from the Pacific Ocean. In 1962, the first recycling plant was opened, using reverse osmosis to treat sewage and stormwater that was infiltrated into the groundwater, which was in turn pumped for use as drinking water. Since then, there have been numerous projects demonstrating success of indirect potable reuse, even in absence of specific regulations. Recognizing the need to advance a more robust approach to permitting projects, California promulgated regulations for indirect potable reuse through groundwater replenishment and surface water augmentation in 2014 and 2018, respectively. To meet increased potable water demands, California, the second state in the US after Colorado, promulgated direct potable reuse regulations. This presentation will provide an overview of the evolution of potable reuse in California, with case study examples including the San Diego Pure Water Program and contrast the California approach to numerous other US states advancing potable reuse regulations.
Jean François Loret
Head of Department, CIRSEE, Suez, France
PhD in Analytical Chemistry, Strasbourg University, France (1987), Master in Biological and Biochemical Engineering, Paris University, France (1983). Jean-François Loret worked for 14 years in the food industry, as laboratory manager (R/D, quality), and joined the SUEZ Research Centre (CIRSEE) in 2000. He is experienced in food safety, hygiene, HACCP, Water Safety Plans, quantitative chemical and microbial risk assessment. He heads the Health & Environment Department of the CIRSEE since 2014.
Presentation: Health risk assessment and perception of risk by end-users of reused water: A Case study from Toulouse
Toulouse-Ginestous-Garonne wastewater treatment plant, with a total capacity of 950,000 population equivalent, is equipped with a 60 m3/h membrane and disinfection treatment unit. This tertiary treatment enables to use the treated wastewater for the irrigation of the green areas of the plant and of a golf course located nearby. An opportunity study conducted in 2021-2022 highlighted a possible extension of wastewater reuse to about twenty potential projects within a radius of 3 km around the plant. Among these projects, those with the greatest technical and economic feasibility were selected. They include the irrigation of young plants by the municipality, the hydro-cleaning of the sewerage network, the supply of the toilets and the irrigation of sport fields of a large stadium, and the washing of metro trains. These new applications require prior studies to assess the health risks related with these uses and identify the ways to control them. For this purpose, qualitative and quantitative risk assessment approaches were applied. The originality of this project was to combine this assessment of health risks with a sociological approach to consider the perception of risks by future users. Considering the expectations of users of recycled wastewater in the risk control measures allows both to prevent the barriers to this use and to ensure the proper application of preventive measures during use.
Ulf Miehe
Head of Process Innovation, Kompetenzzentrum Wasser Berlin (KWB), Germany
Dr Ulf Miehe works at the Berlin Center for Competence in Water (Germany), a non-profit research center on urban water management. During his PhD at the TU Berlin (2006-2010) he evaluated the removal of pharmaceuticals in large scale wastewater treatment plants. Since 2009, he works at KWB with focus on advanced wastewater treatment such as pharmaceutical removal, phosphorus removal, disinfection, ozonation, water reuse and risk assessment. As chairman of the working group on “Ozonation in municipal WWTP” of the German Association for Water, Wastewater and Waste he is responsible for technical guidance documents for pharmaceutical removal.
Presentation: Class A validation monitoring: Lessons learned from long-term pilot scale monitoring
Current changes in EU legislation present simultaneous challenges and opportunities for wastewater treatment plants. The implementation of micropollutant removal technologies could provide synergies with future water reuse schemes. The German project FlexTreat studied how different technologies for micropollutant removal (e.g. activated carbon, ozonation) and disinfection can be combined for water reuse in agriculture. This presentation will cover the pilot scale experiences of operating and monitoring treatment processes (e.g. combination of ozonation, sand filtration, and UV disinfection) to achieve the highest water quality (Class A) as defined by Regulation 2020/741. Pilot plant operation for > 1.5 years was accompanied by an extensive monitoring programme, including various physico-chemical parameters, micropollutants, microbiological indicator organisms (e.g. E. coli, somatic coliphages, and Clostridium perfringens) as well as antibiotic resistant bacteria (ARB) and genes (ARG). During the project a method for appropriate statistical evaluation of Class A validation monitoring data was developed. Data from the pilot study was used to identify the impact of different statistical approaches for Class A validation monitoring, and to assess chemical and microbiological risks associated with the use of reclaimed water in agriculture.
Windi Muziasari
CEO and Founder, Resistomap, Finland
Dr Windi Muziasari has gained years of experience and the know-how to monitor antimicrobial resistance (AMR) from environmental samples such as wastewater, rivers, lakes, soils and manure during her PhD and Postdoc at the University of Helsinki, Finland. She wanted other researchers at universities, governmental agencies, water utilities, and industry to gain easy access to this technology and that was why she moved from academia to entrepreneurship by founding Resistomap in 2018. Headquartered in Helsinki, Resistomap’s mission is to mitigate the spread of AMR by providing robust tools for monitoring.
Presentation: Innovative approaches to monitoring and managing antimicrobial resistance in water reuse: the role of Resistomap.
Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is a global health threat projected to cause 10 million deaths annually by 2050. The One Health approach, linking human, animal, and environmental health, is critical for addressing AMR. Monitoring AMR is recommended in the Annex II of the updated EU Water Reuse regulations as part of the risk management plan to ensure protection of the environment, human, and animal health, especially when scientific evidence shows that reclaimed water is the risk source. Monitoring AMR in water reuse can identify hotspots and point sources, leading to targeted risk management actions. Resistomap, a pioneer in environmental AMR monitoring since 2019, has analysed over 18,000 samples across 46 countries. Alongside laboratory services, Resistomap is launching the Resistomap Platform, a biosecurity intelligence tool offering insights on AMR levels over time and locations. A key feature of this platform is the comparative risk assessment of AMR in water, which generates risk scores based on quantified AMR gene levels, bacterial pathogens, mobile genetic elements, and other environmental pollution markers in water samples. This feature supports risk assessment of water reuse concerning AMR exposure, aiding in the effective management of health and environmental risks.
