Research To The Rescue: Solutions For Today's Top Water Challenges

The Water Research Foundation (WaterRF) should be well known to those interested in the latest solutions to the water/wastewater industry’s most pressing challenges — they’ve been solving such problems since 1966 — but in case you don’t know…

Rob Renner, WaterRF’s executive director, chatted with Water Online Radio about the foundation and some of its initiatives.

“The Research Foundation is essentially a research cooperative with the nation's large utilities. We have a thousand utilities that contribute funding to do research, so that rather than each one doing their own individual research on a topic, they pool their resources, they set the research agenda, and we carry out that agenda for them,” said Renner.

So what are the big issues, and what is the focus for the future? Renner notes a point of emphasis on the WaterRF agenda:

“One of our new focus areas is integrated water management planning. It’s going to be: Where do we get our source water, and where does that source water come from? We're in a position, in a lot of parts of the world, a lot of parts of the United States, where water is in very short supply.

“We're looking at things like how do we take wastewater and treat that to drinking water [standards]? Some of the water supplies are getting more impacted, and so we have to figure out what technologies we’re going to use to treat that water.”

To hear about more WaterRF agenda items, including those related to infrastructure and various treatment technologies, tune in to the Radio Player below.