The Future of Wastewater in the U.S.’s Fastest Growing Metros

The future of wastewater treatment in the United States will look a lot different than it does today.

From our vantage point, which is a unique place in the water/wastewater industry, we get a little glimpse into the future.

Utilities, engineering consultants, and equipment suppliers – sometimes on the same project! – all use Transcend software to rapidly & automatically design and assess multiple configurations of a treatment plant and its associated equipment; aiming to find the best outcomes (CAPEX, OPEX, Carbon Footprint, etc.) for a given site in the conceptual design phase, long before the plant is ever built.

One of the data sets most interesting to us is where both greenfield and brownfield (expansion/upgrade) treatment works projects are happening around the world. Being a company with HQ’s in both the U.S. and Europe, we’re always looking for new and innovative ways to get our tools into the hands of utilities, consultants, and suppliers… and this year we’re kicking off a new series of articles we hope you’ll enjoy.

The first question we need to answer – where are treatment works going to be built? – can be found from publicly available data.

With a bit of digging we’ve been able to come up with some good indicators… the leading one being  population increase per region .

It’s pretty straightforward… more people living in a region create more municipal wastewater. But there will also be a need for more clean drinking water, and likely more industry, which brings about more wastewater as well. Even if the population increases because of migration from other parts of the country, those people can’t really bring their wastewater plants from those regions , so in the end, the population increase will mean more wastewater plants.

One of our talented Transcenders, Gabor Kovacs, a self-proclaimed data nerd, found the US census page, downloaded a bunch of datapoints, migrated them into one dataset, and spent an evening or two calculating the top 100 counties in the USA by population growth in the last decade.

With some additional assumptions, like expecting a population increase by the same % for the next decade and the gallons of wastewater a US citizen typically generates per day, he assumed the sizes of the plants, or plant extensions needed for all those counties.

So what you should expect from Transcend in upcoming months, and we hope you’ll follow along  here , are loads of interesting articles, posts, infographics, and even some suggested wastewater plant documentation & designs about these counties.

 

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Taxonomy

• Wastewater Treatment
• Wastewater Treatment Plant Design
• Water & Wastewater Treatment
• Wastewater Treatment Market
• Water and wastewater treatment
• Biological Wastewater Treatment Market
• Wastewater Treatment, Sewer System Design