Engineers called to lead as PFAS and climate dominate IChemE water talks

AT ITS first in-person conference since the Covid-19 pandemic, IChemE’s Water Special Interest Group convened leading experts to confront urgent challenges in water treatment – including PFAS pollution, climate resilience and infrastructure innovation.

Over two days at the University of Bath, around 150 attendees, including experts from Mott MacDonald, Severn Trent Water, and Cranfield University, gathered to explore new technologies, enhance project development and shape policy direction.

“I see a lot of passion in this room,” said Maria Manidaki, the technical director for decarbonisation, asset management at Mott MacDonald. “Chemical engineers may not recognise it, but they have a superpower which they can use to influence change.”

Manidaki delivered a keynote on the climate challenges facing the water sector, urging chemical engineers to leverage the data already at their disposal, however broad, to drive improvements in water and wastewater treatment.

She said: “I have worked across the policy and asset level of project development, and I know that as an engineer, we have the right data to have conversations with policymakers and ask for funding to exact real change.”

Moving fast

A key takeaway from Manidaki’s presentation was the urgency facing the water sector to accelerate treatment and decarbonisation efforts. The UK water industry has come under fire in recent years over inadequate operations and sewage spills linked to extreme weather events.

Progress has been made in developing new strategies to tackle treatment challenges, with the Independent Water Commission issuing wide-ranging recommendations aimed at helping regulators and water companies secure greater support and funding.

A key recommendation is to raise standards for treating emerging pollutants, particularly PFAS. In his keynote presentation, Peter Jarvis, professor of water science and technology at Cranfield University, spoke in-depth about removing PFAS from drinking water, emphasising that tackling these pollutants, which encompass more than 14,000 synthetic chemicals, needs multiple technologies.

Jarvis outlined several current methods for PFAS removal, including high-pressure membrane filtration, such as reverse osmosis and nanofiltration, and ion exchange. He explained how different processes vary in effectiveness depending on the type of PFAS, with short-chain compounds proving significantly harder to eliminate than long-chain ones.

He said: “There are a whole host of treatment technologies being developed for the degradation of PFAS and the ‘best solution’ for PFAS removal will be different for individual scenarios.”

Cleaning water

Samantha Vince, head of supply compliance, and Steve Hurley, head of water quality at Wessex Water, outlined the challenges of trialling new water treatment technologies, including upgrading infrastructure and adopting innovative techniques, while keeping customer bills in check.

Hurley said: “When implementing new technologies to operational treatment works, there is no messing about, it has got to be right, because if it isn’t it will impact our customers.”

Hurley explained that innovation in the water sector doesn’t always require new solutions – existing infrastructure and technologies can still offer effective answers for treatment challenges.

He explained: “We managed to reduce the amount of chlorine we use to kill off germs and bacteria in water by looking at our historical data and understanding how much of what chemical is needed to remove specific pollutants. The data is out there, and it is just about using it.”

Wessex Water, along with other speakers at the conference, reinforced the importance of cross-sector collaboration between chemical engineers and policymakers, emphasising that engineers already possess the data and insight needed to drive improvements in the water industry and accelerate progress toward net zero.

Vince said: “The real innovation comes from the people in this room, regulators, manufacturers and academia. We need to keep creating to collaborate. It is really important that we make gains through collaboration, and we as engineers control the pace of that.”

Visit the Water SIG, to keep up to date with the group’s work, activities and events.