Wastewater Monitoring & Analysis

Digital wastewater maps future for sewage management

A wastewater intelligence solution is helping improve community health in a partnership first between Scottish Water and Kando. Water Industry Journal spoke to Dr Andrew Engeli, CSO at Kando, about the shared vision for a smart networked wastewater system.

Wastewater treatment is a priority for the UK government. Raw sewage from storm overflows and harmful wastewater emissions are an escalating problem, with water utilities often under-equipped to respond to the resulting public health challenges. Effective wastewater analysis can have a game-changing impact on community health, using technology to monitor the spread of viral diseases or measure the impact of specific community health initiatives. Kando is implementing its cutting-edge wastewater management technology across hundreds of assets for Scottish Water, using a real-time alert system capable of unlocking a range of actionable insights. As Steven Boon, Wastewater Treatment Area Manager for Scottish Water, says, “We were impressed by the offering, experience, and professionalism from Kando which should enable us to bring this wastewater treatment works back into compliance.” Kando is an Israeli-based company with a proven track record in the field of wastewater intelligence, having spearheaded Israel’s efforts to track COVID-19 and its variants in collaboration with Israel’s Ministry of Health. So just how novel is its approach? Andrew explains, “We’re at the forefront of AI and IoT innovation in the field of wastewater analysis providing software that, through automation, can generate instant insights into what’s really going on inside urban sewage systems, helping municipal authorities pinpoint how and where they need to intervene to manage water networks most effectively, to improve public health and protect the environment. He adds, “With wastewater quality a growing health and environmental concern, we help government authorities accurately detect and pinpoint the sources of reduced wastewater quality thanks to a first-of-its-kind hyperlocalised comparative wastewater quality analysis, helping them track down entities and organisations violating hygiene regulations. “We are working with partners, investors, and clients to improve public and environmental health all over the world. We also support water utilities, which bear the ultimate responsibility for the quality of the wastewater that their networks emit, in bringing their technology up to date and fitting it for purpose through AI-powered big data analytics and predictions, reducing risk and mitigating legal and compliance concerns.”

Kando’s solution will provide Scottish Water - for the first time - with the ability to know when and where contamination is accumulating in their assets, helping them ensure that all assets are working properly. Andrew says, “This will have a multifaceted effect increasing levels of regulation compliance, policy observance, and cost reduction.

“In the UK today, there is no other technology that provides such a holistic solution to water utilities, implementing state-of-the-art AI technology in wastewater and subsequently providing unique value and visibility into what is happening in a water network. Once a water utility has access to this invaluable information and insights, they can manage their assets and networks more efficiently and save costs.”

With wastewater quality a growing health and environmental concern, we help government authorities accurately detect and pinpoint the sources of reduced wastewater quality thanks to a first-of-its-kind hyper-localised comparative wastewater quality analysis, helping them track down entities and organisations violating hygiene regulations.

From left, Steve Boon, Wastewater Treatment Area Manager Scottish Water, Anat Belkind, Director of Customer Success Kando, Racheli Fast, Customer Success Manager Kando, Andrew Boyd, Wastewater Operations Team Leader Scottish Water, and Zohar Schenin, co-founder and CRO, Kando

In December 2021, Kando and Israel’s Ministry of Health (MoH) combined in a unique project using wastewater analysis to track COVID-19 throughout Israel’s sewage system, the first time a single technology provider has provided such instant insights uniformly across an entire country. The partnership used data drawn from within the collection network to support accurate COVID-19 outbreak mapping across service areas.

Andrew explains, “Kando’s solution uses real-time, in-network condition monitoring and cloud-based data analysis to ensure findings represent viral loads accurately. Live data inputs from in-sewer IoT units are used to determine when effluent contamination might compromise results, preventing automated sampling when conditions are not ideal. Working with lab and deployment partners, Kando provided the MoH with geographically defined outbreak data, pinpointing infection hotspots via a live online dashboard.

“The partnership enabled officials to aggregate data from every population centre with more than 20,000 residents (85% of Israel’s population), gaining a full picture of COVID-19 rates without requiring individual tests. This method indicated outbreaks and their locations up to 6 days ahead of conventional testing, providing an early warning system to anticipate outbreak waves and detect variants.”

In short, using wastewater intelligence helped authorities monitor spread of the disease without relying on the population to come forward and get tested. Scottish Water’s system will ‘hit the ground running’, collecting raw data from strategic locations on the network. Together with historical data, it will create a unique base line of predicted behaviour and identify abnormalities, correlating them to types of industrial effluent and “pinpointing the source of the exact location of each behaviour that impacts the asset”. Andrew adds, “Our system can provide insights into the source of the events in the network, the severity of the event, its timespan, and eventually, after characterising it, the type. Most of all, it will allow the water utility to identify the source and take the relevant actions to stop it from occurring or re-occurring.” Turnaround time on testing depends on the nature of the event being analysed and its findings. Some insights can be shown instantly through a real-time online dashboard, while lab-analysed results are typically turned around within several days, and within 36 hours at a minimum. Andrew points out that further down the line, Scottish Water can leverage Kando’s technology and its expertise to tackle a range of questions whose answers might be found in water systems: detecting future pandemics, overcoming high levels of drug use, reflecting the quality of the population’s diets, monitoring wastewater being reused for agricultural needs, and more. He says, “Using the Kando system will allow Scottish Water to manage their assets differently, as by harnessing the data, they will know 24/7 what, when, and where every abnormality is accruing, and prevent it from happening. This will allow the asset to perform in compliance with regulation and also optimise its efficiency and reduce the overall costs of operation.” Looking forward, it’s hoped that Kando’s network intelligence can mitigate problems like pollution, water waste and climate change and boost real-time decision-making. Andrew concludes, “These capabilities are only scratching the surface. As investment into the industry increases, more capabilities will be discovered to further support healthy communities and environments.”

Dr. Engeli was previously Deputy Director for Innovation at the Joint Biosecurity Centre (JBC) and Deputy Director for EMHP at the UK Health Security Agency.

Wastewater treatment plants can ‘catch a cold’

Just like humans, wastewater treatment plants can get sick through viral attacks. Research from Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, reveals the implications for the local environment if a plant gets ‘sick’.

In the sewage industry, the ‘work’ of wastewater plants is often executed by microscopic bacteria. Biological processes carried out by these bacteria turn the wastewater into cleaned water that is safe to discharge into the environment. Essentially the bacteria break down the pollutants and purify the water, keeping the plant running efficiently. “A large treatment plant has billions of bacteria that work in a treatment process called ‘activated sludge’,” says Oskar Modin, Professor at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Chalmers. “The bacterial communities are constantly exposed to viruses that infect them, so the question we asked ourselves was whether the process can periodically be more exposed and what happens then.” Researchers measured the concentration of virus particles released from four different wastewater treatment plants in Sweden and compared this with how much organic carbon was released at the same time. This relationship between virus and effluent quality is a first step in understanding the impact of a viral infection on a treatment plant.

‘Sick’ wastewater plants might affect aquatic ecosystems

The study showed a clear relationship between virus concentration and the amount of dissolved organic carbon present in the effluent water. This is because viruses could affect the concentration in two ways, firstly because they themselves contain carbon and secondly because they rupture host bacteria cells, causing carbon to be released.

“When we measured virus particles in the water, we found a connection between viruses and organic carbon – when there was more of one there was also more of the other,” says Oskar Modin. More dissolved organic carbon in the effluent water means that more oxygen is consumed by microorganisms in the surrounding bodies of water where the effluent is discharged. This could have potential negative impacts on nearby aquatic ecosystems. Therefore, tough regulations are in place for wastewater treatment plants to reach low concentrations of biodegradable organic carbon in their effluent. A small increase of organic carbon in the plant can also lead to increased resource consumption, including money, energy and materials in processes for disinfection and pharmaceuticals removal, which are implemented at wastewater treatment plants in some parts of the world. Organic carbon in the water affects the efficiency of these processes.

When we measured virus particles in the water, we found a connection between viruses and organic carbon – when there was more of one there was also more of the other.

Oskar Modin, Professor at the Department of Architecture and Civil Engineering at Chalmers The activated sludge process at a wastewater treatment plant and virus particles visualised using nanoparticle tracking analysis - Chalmers University of Technology

No infection risk for humans

Viruses are dependent on a host to replicate. Since biological wastewater treatment processes have a high concentration of active bacteria that can serve as hosts, there will be a lot of viruses capable of infecting those bacteria. This leads to a net increase in virus particles as the wastewater moves through a plant. Oskar adds, “Viruses are often specialised in a certain species, which means that humans and bacteria cannot be infected by the same virus. So, the viruses ‘generated’ in a wastewater treatment plant do not infect humans, but only affect microbial communities. One possible way to influence the number of viruses in treatment plants could be to adjust the way the treatment plant is operated. We saw differences between the treatment plants in the study, which we believe may be related to the design or control of the biological treatment processes.”

References

The scientific article “A relationship between phages and organic carbon in wastewater treatment plant effluents” published in Water Research X was written by Oskar Modin, Nafis Fuad, Marie Abadikhah, David l’Ons, Elin Ossiansson, David J. I. Gustavsson, Ellen Edefell, Carolina Suarez, Frank Persson, Britt-Marie Wilén

The researchers are active at Chalmers University of Technology, University of Connecticut, Gryaab AB, VA SYD, and Lund University The study behind the paper was financed by Svenskt Vatten through VA Teknik Södra, and involved wastewater treatment plants in the Swedish municipalities of Lund, Malmö, Kalmar and Gothenburg. Funding was also provided by the Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development (FORMAS).