Name: Circular Economy & The Role of Water with Daniel Nolasco
Uploaded: 2025-03-20T17:30:04.269Z
Duration: 1 h 30 min
Description: Circular Economy & The Role of Water with Daniel Nolasco

Transcript for "Circular Economy & The Role of Water with Daniel Nolasco": Hello, everyone, and welcome to this amazing webinar we have today. I'm super excited to be here. Hi, Jen. How are you? It's great to have you with us. Thank you. How are you today? I'm good. And we have with us Danny Velasco. Hi, Danny. Thank you so much for joining us today. Hi, Vicky. Thanks a lot for the invitation. I think we are all super excited about this topic. Jen and I have already had several discussions on super economy, and we are super excited to have you here as an expert to bring these amazing examples that we have for our webinar on sugar economy and the role of water. I know we'll have so many interesting conversations today. We'll have a lot of questions from the audience, so feel free to engage in the chat. You can ask your questions there or in the q and a feature. So since we have a lot of content for today, I'm going to start with some housekeeping items, and then we can introduce ourselves so we can just dive into this amazing topic that we have today. Just keep in mind that this webinar is being recorded, so the recording will be shared after in our website. You can also find additional resources there on digital webinars, blogs, and case studies. Only cameras and microphones for our speakers will be available. So Jen, Danny, and myself will be the only ones with microphones and cameras. Feel free to use the chat and engage over there. We love engagement. We love your comments for the webinar. So we'll then share your stories, share your firsthand information, what you are leaving regarding your economy water. We love to hear it. The slides will not be shared after the the webinar is a separate file. We can save them all in the same recording. We will be, sharing a couple of posts throughout the webinar and, at the end, a feedback survey. We thrive on feedback, so feel free to tell us what you think. If you have any additional comments, questions, or anything, we'd love to hear from you. And, also, as I mentioned, we have a q and a feature. So if at any point you want to do a specific question to that general result, you can use it there, and we'll make sure we address them from the webinar or at the end. So that being said, and we with all the information that we have to share today, we can just jump into presentations. Danny, would you like to start? Sure. Yes. Okay. I'm I'm Daniel Nolasco & Asoc. S.A., and I thank you very much, Waterplan and, Nico, Victoria, and and Jennifer for the invitation. It's a it's a pleasure. You can see our our bio there on the on the screen. I'm gonna share my screen. This is gonna be about a forty minute presentation, so feel free to send your questions and to interrupt if you if you want to. I'll be I'll be happy to, I'll be happy to answer them as as we as we go along so as to make it more more dynamic. I'm gonna stop the sharing of your screen, Victoria, and, I'm gonna share mine. Just give me give me a second here. Yeah. Of course. I will. Let me start the the presentation. Jennifer, do you want to do a quick introduction of yourself since we have you as the expert here today also? Sure. Happy to. Hi, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I'm Jennifer Heymann. I'm based in The US. I lead our senior water adviser team. I've been involved in water resources for many years starting in, consulting. I've also worked in the manufacturing sector and in utilities, and circular economy has been, a topic that's come up in many contexts, but I love how we're connecting it with water today. So looking forward to hearing from Daniel and and hearing your questions from the from the group. Hey, Vivo. Jennifer. So let me let's start to check, send us three faulty concepts that may lead to these three ideas that I wanna share with you, in the presentation. The the the first one is, years ago, I and I and I've been hearing this, on and off that the application of circular economy in water systems is expensive, and thereby, it's for rich and developed countries. And and, therefore, low and middle income countries, LAMEX, should, concentrate efforts in first providing water and sanitation services to the people. And then once achieved, contemplate circular economy. This concept is wrong. Circular economy war assistance is economically advantageous to low and middle income countries. And I'm gonna show you a few case studies demonstrating that, and I'm gonna point at some resources that you may wanna dive in after after the presentation to find more. The other point that is, very commonly heard is that, circular economy and the water sector is only about, wastewater reuse, biosolids programs, energy cogeneration with biogas. I would say I would argue that making our plants, our water treatment plants, wastewater treatment plants more efficient through treatment intensification reduces resources we take from the environment, saves a lot of money, and, is worthwhile looking at together with reuse, cogeneration, biosolids, and other circular economy approaches. So that's gonna be my second idea today. And, and the third one is that many people think many countries, unfortunately, regulators think that all things foreign standards say that The US EPA Five Zero Three c for biosolids or, the European regulation for waste water use would make them more advanced and, would, would be a success. So would make them similar to those countries where they're copying the regulations and the standards from. And that is a big mistake. It generally impacts sustainability, and it should not be done. Assistance should be thought, and, regulations and water quality standards and other standards should be developed ad hoc for for the country or for the region where they're gonna be implemented. And, yes, you can consider what's been done elsewhere, but, it is important to look into local conditions. So if I by the end of the talk, I managed to convey this to you, this would have been a very successful, for all of us. So what I'm gonna do for the first point, which is, the applicability of circular economy principles in, low and middle income countries, I'm gonna give you a few examples starting with La Farfana, which is a water resource recovery facility, and the old times would call them wastewater treatment plant because that's what it does, in Santiago, the capital of Chile. This is a conventional activated sludge plant, large. It serves over 3,000,000 people, close to nine cubic meters per second of nominal capacity, which required an investment of over $300,000,000. I'm not gonna go through all the processes that are involved, but you can see there in the in the photograph. It's a it's a very important, plant, and it has eight anaerobic digesters. So the sludge that is removed from the primary and the secondary clarifiers, which is typical of these type of treatment systems, is sent for anaerobic digestion in these stacks. And so the sludge comes from in this case, we're seeing the secondary clarifiers goes to digesters. These are not the digesters. These are, biogas holding, reservoirs. But it generates a lot of biogas, close to 25,000,000 cubic meters per year of biogas. And the biogas used to be burned. Quite a bit was burned. The difference between what is was being burned, what was generated was used to, generate heat to heat the digester. So anaerobic digestion works better when, the sludge is between thirty five and thirty seven c. Generally, the temperature outside is much lower than that, so you need to heat it up. And the rest was burnt. And that brought up an opportunity, the available biogas, to use it somewhere else. And so, if this is, this is a picture of the city of Santiago. You see the Andes there at the back. The wastewater of over 3,000,000 people goes to this, conventional wastewater treatment plant. The treated water goes to the Mapocho River, and the sludge goes to the sludge treatment system. Now this biogas was enough to, support, 35,000 households, close to a 20,000 people. So it's not less. So Metro Gas, the gas company in Santiago, bought the gas and provided it to, to the city for, a large number of people, if you can see that, and paid for it. But in addition to Bing, there was a carbon credit because if you instead of, venting or a bit better would be burning, the biogas, if you use it, you actually displace burning other fossil fuels that and in that in that approach, you generate an important carbon credit that goes to Agua Sandinas, which is the utility that operates, La Farfana. And on top of that, Metro Gas pays for, for the system. This is a win win situation in which, there has to be several, contractual, agreements. Now on top of that, the the sludge treated to a level that could be used for agriculture, what we generally refer to as, as biosolids, was, has enormous value for its, the nutrient, content it has. And, it actually displaces part of the use of, traditional, fertilizers, also generating another circular economy approach. Now, financial and contractual agreements are when it comes to investment, was Andinas invested in the biogas treatment. You know, they need to treat the sulfides and modify pressure, humidity, and temperature so as to be able to transport it to Metrogas. Metrogas invested in, gas pipeline of, 15 kilometers to take the biogas to the point of use and also did some final treatment, to remove, siloxides, which is not a good idea to keep if you're gonna be using the gas for heating. Now, contractual conditions established a fixed price for the biogas indexed to the price of oil. There was in situ measurement, of the energy value of biogas at the plant. There's a minimum, volume expressed in a million BTUs guaranteed per trimester. And another important thing here, this is a sustainable contract. So it's a six year renewable agreement that has already several clauses to that allows the renegotiations of it after the six year term. And that is very important. So these are, as we could say, key to success. So this is the first of a series of case studies I'm gonna show you. Chile is a middle income country. And this is, this approach turns this typical wastewater treatment plant into what is called, biofactory. That's a term Aguasandinas likes to use. Now let's move to another, aspect of this, which are the economical, benefits. Obviously, for Aguasandinas, there's an additional revenue for the sale of the biogas and for the carbon credits. Metro Gas reduced the dependency on imports. This is not, this is not minor since Chile is not an energy generating country like could be many others in in the region. And the farmers saved close to 50% of, fertilizer use, which is also an advantage to them. From an environmental standpoint, you see the greenhouse gas emission reductions, also energy sustainability, and, there's a creation of know how. So this is this can be replicated. As a matter of fact, it's being replicated elsewhere in the country. Now this case study and others I'm gonna show are part of a work we did with the World Bank Group. We published this, book called From Waste to Resource. If you if you do a search, if you Google waste to resource and put World Bank, you're gonna come up with this, with these papers in different languages, Spanish, Portuguese, English. It's been one of the most successful resources produced by World Bank recently with close to a hundred thousand downloads and, 200 citations in the literature. So it's, it's pretty interesting, and it has this case from La Fofana and the others I'm gonna be presenting in addition to many other ones, that show this first point. Second example is, the San Luis Potosi in Mexico, the the water reuse program in Tenorio. The challenge in, San Luis Potosi was, as in any, many other parts in Mexico, is the over extraction of water from the from the aquifer. San Luis Potosi and the surrounding area has close to, a million people living there, so there's a high demand. And the main source of drinking water supply is, groundwater from the San Luis Potosi Valley aquifer, which is significantly over exploded and has, an a difficulty in meeting increased demand for for drinking water. But at the same time, the wastewater generated by the city of Saint Louis Potosi and its surrounding area currently is close to 2.5, 2.5 meter cubes per second. So it's a it's an important amount of, of, wastewater close to a third of the Santiago De Chile example. And, today well, before the project was used for agricultural irrigation on both private and communal lands, but it was not treated. And that did create quite a bit of, of problems. So the solution proposed was the reuse of treated wastewater for non portable uses, mainly, as I'm gonna show you, agricultural use, but also for industrial use. And, this allows for diversification of water sources. By incorporating this alternative source, it will improve or it's improving actually the water efficiency in agriculture and allows for artificial recharge of the aquifer and, has an important health improvement of citizens. So the schematic would be somewhere like this. Waste water from a million people from Potosi goes to the Tenorio Water Resource Recovery Facility. About, so about, 450 liters per second of treated wastewater are sold to CFA, which is the energy utility in Mexico, to a thermal power plant that needs water to cool down. And, and, the the benefits for the power plant, well, the wastewater reused wastewater is, one third cheaper and more sustainable than the previously used groundwater. The other the other merits I've already explained. But the plant is saving, the utility, actually, the energy utility saving in the order of $18,000,000 over a six year period. Now the Tenorio, water plant is compensated by paying for this water. And the interesting fear thing here is that the revenue covers almost all operation and maintenance costs, and, that is not a minor detail. Now the leftover 600 liters per second are used for agricultural irrigation. Better quality water not only reduces the impact of diseases for those who, use the projects from, from agriculture, but also increases the quality of the produce, allowing the farmers to pick other type of, crops. That's a benefit for environment due to the net reduction of groundwater extractions. And, so there's, as I said, there's economic benefits to the power plant, to the water utility, to the farmers, and also environmental and social benefits as you can see there. The impact, in to gastrointestinal diseases has not been measured yet, but we estimate that it's gonna be quite large. Now which were the key factors for success? First one here at the top is sensible federal and state, policies. What do you mean by sensible is not asking for, extremely high quality or not copying, foreign policies or foreign quality standards. Just give the the the users a water quality that is better than they were doing before. This is particularly for the case for the farmers who are using raw wastewater and now are using are using wastewater with secondary effluent quality that is on top of that, disinfected. Very important to have, stakeholder engagement. This is, not only the the farmers and the and the denorio plant and CFE, the energy utility, but also the people living in the area must compromise in in the in this, circular economy approach. There's innovative financing schemes. I also refer you to the World Bank, book because, I don't have enough time to go through that. But clear bidding rules defining responsibilities, allocating the risk to those parties that are more accustomed to deal with that risk are part of, of the key factors for, success. Very important, the quality of the treated wastewater is being consistent, and also education and awareness of uses of treated wastewater is, is is important. Now the third and last, case that I'm gonna show you is, is that of the Inlo Sada water resource recovery facility located in Arequipa, Peru. Arequipa is an important city in Peru that was facing, a challenge. And the challenge was that there's no water in the region. So the mine the mine was trying to expand, but, needed the water for that and didn't have it. The wastewater from the city of Arequipa was mostly untreated and will go to the Chile River polluting it. And, as I said, the Cerro Verde mining operation, required additional water supply and tested. The explored desalinating seawater and, also transporting water from faraway aquifers, but that was too expensive. And, you using a Quipa's wastewater, treating it was the most sustainable and economical solution for the project. What you can see here is, the El Lozada water resource recovery facility. Here you have the preliminary treatment, primary, clarifiers, trickling filters, and, that is continued with contact chambers and secondary clarifiers. So this produces, waste to water effluent of secondary quality, which is a very good quality, which is used at the mine, and the rest goes to the river. As you can see here in this very simple schematic, the city of Arequipa, which is the the water utility Cetabar, sends the wastewater to the Elo Sada plant, which requires also pumping considerable pumping. One cubic meter per second of treated wastewater is sent to the Cerro Verde mine, which allowed, the mine to be expanded. And the El Lozada plant is financed, built, and operated by Cerro Verde. And in return, they can use that cubic meter of treated wastewater for its operation. And this has been, what we called, a PPP, public private partnership, operating in a build to own, operate, transfer, or boot twenty nine year concession. So, the remaining treated wastewater goes to the Chile River and is reused downstream for agriculture, which in turn also increases the value of the crops that could be you used by the farmers. So there's a there's a complete circular approach, and the winnings are well well distributed. Now for Celepar, well, they avoided the construction of a plant that cost close to, over, half a billion dollars. It does not have to, invest in, or spend in, operation and maintenance cost because all that is covered by the mine. Now, more than 95% of our capacity wastewater is treated. You're gonna see now the the benefits on the river. For the Cerro Verde, this was the cheapest approach for treated wastewater. They have managed to reduce the risk of water availability availability because the city is gonna be there. The treatment plant is gonna be there. So the quantity and quality of the water to be supplied to the mine is, guaranteed. And, and the the CapEx and OpEx that they had to invest is considerably less than the economic losses for related to not expanding mine operations. From a social and environmental condition, well, the Chile River has been decontaminated. And as I said, the farmers have the possibility of having higher quality water that allows them to grow higher value crops. I think this picture is worth a a thousand words. This is the Chile River, before the plant started to operate, and, this is not the Photoshop. That's the color of the river with all the contamination. Amazed. I need to step in here, and I am so amazed by this difference. Like, I can't believe it. They were living like this, and the amazing the big change that it makes with a secure economy solution that brings so much benefits. Yeah. Yeah. So it's really it's really impressive, Jennifer. And, again, to stress this, this is in a in a middle income country. So, definitely most definitely, all these examples I'm I'm I'm showing you demonstrate that we need to plan in advance for circular economy. Even if we don't do it right away, we have to start planning our system so when when the demand comes comes, we can we can provide it. But, this has store solved the water scarcity issue. It had a stake an important stakeholder engagement. And, of course, once again, the reused regulations were clear and were adapted to the conditions in, in Arequipa. And, I'm gonna show you, examples of what happens when we do not do that. So I think, I made clear that circular economy water systems is economically advantageous in low and middle income countries. Go to the World Bank report if you, called from waste to resource, if you wanna see more examples. Now I'm gonna touch the second topic, which is, treatment, intensification, as an important circular economy approach. Now the by now, you should know that wastewater is no longer such waste, and it's actually a resource. We've shown examples of water reuse, energy cogeneration, biosolids applications, in view of, fertilizer. So all this generates potential revenue streams, benefits environment, benefits the people. So I think these cases are good examples about this way more. Now circular economy goes beyond these four items here. And this is my point. Generally, I borrow this from from, WBCSD, which is one of the several definitions of, circular economy principles, the five r's. And, is reduce, reuse, recycle, restore, recover with the idea of reducing natural resources, energy, water that we extract from our environment. Now the examples I mentioned before talked about water reuse. But if we actually reuse water, we are reducing the extraction of it from the aquifer or from the environment. We're talking about recycling nutrients in biosolids programs. We're also reducing the fabrication of fertilizers. When we restore the quality of our rivers, we are reducing extraction of higher quality water from other sources. So as you can see, every every, one of these examples that I have put before you in the previous, case studies also recover energy through cogeneration, reduces, the use of energy, for instance, from fossil fuels. But the keyword here that sometimes we miss is reduce. And my point is when it comes down to wastewater treatment plants as a circular economy, reducing the size of the facility, reducing the capital expenditures to build it or to expand it, reducing the costs of operation and maintenance, and, not only leads to greenhouse gas emission reductions as I'm gonna show you, but also is an important aspect in circular economy that many times is overlooked. When we manage to reduce the size of the wastewater treatment plants, we are implemented a very important circular economy principle. I would say the most important of all, which is reduce. Now how do we do that? Now the first point to think here is that the existing infrastructure at a water resource recovery facility is a resource in itself that we need to intensify, and we have the technology to do that. We have the technologies to reduce unnecessary expansions. So to do, more with the same, take advantage of the plants. And here in this graph, very simple graph, I'm gonna show the treatment capacity of different unit processes. In this case, it's megagallons per day, but you can think of it as cubic meters per second, million liters per day. Use the units you wanna use. Imagine that we have a plant that has been designed to achieve their treatment, objectives, with a capacity of 10 MGD or 10 whatever unit you wanna you wanna have. When we start looking at different unit processes, because a plant is a series of unit processes working together in a dynamic fashion, the first one, for instance, being preliminary treatment, the real capacity may be quite different from the design capacity of the nominal one. You can ask me later on why this happens, but it's something that we observed in numerous plants. And, in this example, we have, primary treatment that could have a capacity shown in the bar higher than the nominal design, sizing of the aeration tanks, capacity of blowers and diffusers. And looking here at the secondary wastewater treatment plant with secondary clarifiers, the bars represent the treatment capacity of each of the unit processes. And I could go on and on here adding liquid train, the sludge train, and adding pumping stations, inside the plant, etcetera. Now, when the expansion to a new capacity comes, so when we need double the capacity and we don't know the real capacity of the unit processes, the traditional approach to expansion is, well, if the this plant as I have it is 10 and I need to get to 20, I'm gonna double the size double the numbers of, of the tanks we have. Say if I have four tanks, I build four more. Now if I do this, and this is a very typical approach. You know, it's like mirroring the plant. This would be the result in real capacity. I would just double what I have. It's the bars are not, matching the the scale, but but but you can you can get the the sense of what I'm talking about. When you can actually if you had known the real capacity of your unit processes, you would have only expanded those bottlenecks marked there in the black arrows. Now all of that, which is actually much larger, it goes further up in the in the graph, is a waste of money, both in investment and in operation because you're gonna have to maintain excess tanks. It's a waste of carbon footprint, water footprint, energy footprint, and you name it. Now years ago, in Canada, we developed something that is called process auditing, which is which are technologies that allow you to determine the actual treatment capacity of the unit processes, thereby making more efficient the expansion of a plant and intensifying the use of existing infrastructure. And that's the key. Now I'm not gonna go into that. There's several presentations and books we've written on on the topic. But this idea of doing a process audit and using evaluation tools to determine the capacity of the unit processes for pretreatment in intensification, sorry, not only allows to achieve better reference quality, but also reduces unnecessary expansion. So it's the first r of the five r's. And it's, an intelligent step, arguably the first intelligent step towards a circular economy approach in water treatment. Now tools, there's many. You know, you can look at historical data, the online monitoring, offline monitoring. Sometimes I think of, water resource recovery facility as patients, you know, human patients that walk. And you can do, you know, an electroencephalogram, all sorts of tracer studies and, stress testing, etcetera, to determine the health of the individual. In this case, we use them to determine the capacity of the plant to find out where the bottlenecks are and find out where that expansion that is coming up is needed and where we can extract better quality and more capacity. Some of the latest tools, even though it's not so recent, but people are starting to talk more about that, is the dynamic simulation using mathematical models, the digital twins. You must have heard of that. Like, I'm not gonna go through all of this, but I'm gonna show you one case study, which is one of Sabespy, which is the the water utility of Sao Paulo, Brazil, serves over 30,000,000 people in the state of Sao Paulo. And, we were contracted to do process audits in five of their largest utilities. They operate over 300 wastewater treatment plants, but they wanted us to look at the five, largest ones. The names are there. The capacities are there. You can see it's it's fairly large fairly large, large plants. This is a project that was financed by World Bank, and we used most of the tools described in that list. And as an example, I'm showing here the Sao Miguel Water Resource Recovery Facility, which had a nominal. And here's important to say nominal. It's not the actual capacity. It was the design capacity of 1.5 cubic meters per second needed to expand to 4.5. We did all the testing. They had everything prepared to add two modules that they thought they had a 1.5 cubic meter per second capacity to achieve the four. And the results from the testing and the process audit indicated that they don't need a full module. That with just two modules, they could do and some adjustments to cover for process bottlenecks. Now very similar to what happened in San Miguel, happened in the other four, plants. So in total, these five plants that were, being expanded from 525 MGD to 845 MGD, almost close to a 50%, capacity expansion. They were planning to use close to more than half a billion dollars Through the optimized expansion, this was reduced to 320, representing close to over $200,000,000 of savings. We also evaluated expansion to tertiary treatment that is shown here, but the numbers, these are a million dollars, were a bit too high. So the, utility decided to do this, achieve the tertiary treatment gradually. But these are the savings achievable with this concept of maximizing the use of the existing infrastructure through intensification and process audits. Process audits are just one way. Other ways to do this are there are several, but for instance, is, sludge densification through granular sludge growth. There's, membranes. There's all sorts of technologies that lead to an optimized expansion, with better effluent quality that we need to take into account when thinking of circular economy. So those are the savings. Interesting enough, during the process audit, without implementing or without doing anything to, expand the water quality would have served, something interesting. As the flow rate was going up from 02/2015 to through 02/2022, the flow rate going into these plants increased by 50% and, equivalent population added of 4,000,000 people. These are large numbers. The BOD, a a good indicator of, organic contamination to the receiving water bodies, was also increasing. And, but at this point, when the the audit started, started in the year 02/2019, you can see a crack here and an increase in the in the removal. And because we we got the operators engaged, even this is without any infrastructure addition or anything. We already by studying the plant, by talking to the operators and, doing analysis, we realized ways of, extracting more from the existing infrastructure. This is a quite interesting case study. Now not expanding means not construction. So there's emission reductions, through avoided expansion. Here we have and this is this is being adjusted later on. There are some errors here. But in ballpark, the emissions from these utilities were, in the order of, 2,000,000 tons of carbon of c o two equivalent a year when we started the audit. The projected emissions yearly emissions for 2030 were over 3,000,000 tons. And the emissions avoided through a reduction in the expansion by being more efficient almost matched the emissions of one full year. So this is this is not minor. So this is the impact I was talking about, also in greenhouse or the positive aspect in from a greenhouse gas emission. These could be lower. There's different ways to look at them. But, overall, there are there are important missions that are eliminated from civil construction only. Now going to the last point, I think I have probably five more minutes, is the issue of copying foreign stat quality, quality standards and how that impacts on circular economy. All the cases I showed you before, they were all using local standards. Nothing copied from abroad. There's a recent case we looked in, a city in South Asia. I, you know, the good cases, I mentioned the names. The the cases that are used as not to follow this example, I I prefer not to. But, this is a water scarce city. Just to give you an idea, people in the city receive one to three hours of water supply every day, and the water is not potable because it gets contaminated. This generates, in the order of ten thousand diarrhea cases per annum. So it's not it's not minor. And, the proposal was to, to discharge treated wastewater for indirect reuse in one of the urban lakes. This is one of them that you can see in the picture. You can see people, here washing their heads and, washing water, their clothing. This you can see animals walking, on the on the side of the of the lake defecating there. So these lakes don't have high quality, but are the current source from where the water treatment plants take raw water to be treated. The water treatment plants today in the city generate potable water, but when it gets into the the network, given that there's no, continuous pressure, there's a lot of inflow that contaminates, the water. Now the idea here was to copy California standards for reuse. This generated really high costs of wastewater treatment, limiting the capacity of how much water could be treated, and discharging this really high treated wastewater quality, which actually was would match, drinking water quality into this unprotected and polluted urban lake. To be further captured and treated at a water treatment plant. To be, as I said, pumped into an unprotected distribution network. The excuse for copying, California standards as discussing some of the colleagues there was that, well, you know, they wanna have really high standards. They were afraid of, antibiotic resistance and other contaminants of emerging concerns. But, you know, the the the water in the in the distribution drinking water distribution was not portable. So it made no sense to generate portable water out of a wastewater treatment plant to discharge it into a polluted lake. I don't think I need to go over this a lot. It's it doesn't make any sense. The end result was that, the the, you know, the conditions had to be adapted. The work quality standards needed to be adapted to local conditions to make it simpler, to make it cost effective. Cost effectiveness generates cost savings that could be used to expand the capacity, I e, I e, treat more wastewater for indirect reuse or or at the same time reduce water losses, nonrevenue water in the network exceeds 50%. And do this in phased grades. Overly stringent standards like is in in this case, and I have many others many other examples but no time to present, hinder circular economy approaches. So, context appropriate regulations take more time. It's not easy. Now they're not easy to develop. It requires some thinking, but improve a lot resource recovery potential and improve a lot circular economy, making better the quality of life of people in the area. A very good example of using local conditions is that of the water resource recovery facility of Mexico City. This is Atotonil Goletula, hard name to remember. 35 kilometers per second treats, a large fraction of the wastewater generated, in Mexico, close to 60%. It the biogas is used to, provide energy to the plants, so they don't need to extract that much from the environment. But on top of that, the treated wastewater is used at the Mesquiteau Valley agricultural zone, which used to be irrigated with raw wastewater, which in turn generated a lot of gastrointestinal problems in the city of of Mexico. Now wastewater of secondary quality, secondary treatment levels, so that is a very good level of treatment with disinfection, is used in the Mezquital, thereby reducing the the impact of diseases, increasing the value of the produce over overall making this project a very good example of using local conditions to, wastewater, quality standards for reuse. Mexico, overall, has many good examples. They actually take the time to think their effluent, quality standards. So, with this, I think I'm going to, I'm going to finish the presentation. I think you can you can see, some of the objectives here. 60% of the people in Mexico City are covered by Atotonilco, and the secondary wastewater treatment plant serves 90,000 hectares of agricultural land. This is a very, high economic positive outcome from this, from this facility. I think overall, I have tried to manage to convey, these three ideas. Circular economy water systems are economically advantageous in low and middle income countries. Treatment intensification to reduce unnecessary expansion is an important circular economy approach, and copying foreign quality standards is not a good idea for circular economy. So, over to you. I'm gonna stop sharing. I just Thank you, Daniel. Over the time. I think no. Don't worry. Yeah. I think it was super insightful. Jen and I could hear you talk about cigarette vending resolutions, I think, for the next hour. And just I just have one or a couple of follow-up questions we can start. We oh, we lost Daniel for a second, but I think, Daniel, I think you're in the backstage. You can't come back so we can ask you if I'm there he is. Because please don't go with it. Don't leave us now because we have some follow-up questions that we'd love to know. I what I love about your examples on what you brought are that there you have public and private partnerships. You have different industries working in this. You have a water resources, a lot wastewater treatment plus there. We are a technology company. One of the questions in the chat was related to water meters, for example. So maybe Jennifer can bring this to you. I'm gonna be quick at that perspective after. But how do you feel like how do you see new technologies? For example, AI based softwares, digital platforms that may also mention digital twins that are being used. How about these solutions help, companies that are are trying to include secret initiatives? And what do you see these technologies shaping in the future of secret economy? Yeah. Thanks, Dickie. I think, you know, Daniel said it well, that technology exists. Right? There is technology today to evaluate, circular economy solutions, come up with better alternatives. I think one of the challenges that we see, and and there was a comment in the chat about it as well, is being able to, justify the investment and the and the return on investment. I I think, you know, there's still a case where people undervalue water. And so the technology can really help in bringing all of that data to bear to understand it and make the business case that this is really valuable, not just from a a water standpoint, but also from an energy waste overall sustainable use of resources. So that technology can help with, like you pointed out, the metering, the visibility into the processes that exist today so that you can optimize those and improve your decision making. Daniel, I would love your perspective on the technology angle of this. I I fully concur. One of the things that are happening now in these plants with all the the knowledge we're gaining from, genetics, biology, instrumentation, digital twins, all all the advancements we have is that in in in the old days plant and not in the old days, just ten years ago, wastewater treatment plants were limited by process, process capacity. And the hydraulics, you know, you could always pass the plant, the the water through the plant because, you know, the plant would be limited by process. You know, the clarifiers would fail, the aeration system would not, be enough, etcetera, etcetera. Today, as we are improving processes through all these technologies, the limiting factor starts being, hydraulics. And we don't have very good hydraulic models that are as good as, I don't know, for example, BioWin is for, for modeling the the processes. And, they're still we're still lagging, and we need to we we need to start developing that and, if possible, coupling hydraulic models with process models. Now, I I that's one one comment. I I'd like to answer, if it's possible, and answer a few questions that are on on the side to my friend here, Thomas Lopez de Guafala, who's asking if there's any technical guide unpublished on the methodology for, process audits. Yes. If you check environment Canada and you put, sewage treatment plant process audits, the it should come up. If not, send me an email, and I will send you the we wrote a manual for that that Environment Canada still puts out. There was a time in which Environment Canada would not fund any expansion of any plant if we did not go through a process audit. There was another question. Sorry if I don't mention the name of the person, but but if you want the this book from World Bank, just Google World Bank World Bank from Waste to Resource. Oh, yeah. We should we should have the link so everyone has it on on the chat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And and And, also, we have another question from Thomas that we can address. For example, he was asking one of the the big issues we always bring on. Maybe you can we can't have this short answer. One of the big big things that we have about Sugar Solutions that we all think about it as a no brainer, but we need but there's another really big problem with them. There are, for example, transport infrastructures and transport costs. So Thomas was asking, how does this wastewater treatment plant operate as a supplier for the biogas or biosolids for agriculture? Is it a pickup point for clients? Who'd place for the transport of those infrastructure problems? Yeah. That's a very good question. In the case of La Farfana, Metro Gas paid for the 14 kilometer gas pipeline to take the the treated biogas into their facility for further treatment. And then, I think there was a question about whether they, Metro Gas covered all the the needs with the plant, and the answer is no. But, you know, it's, it's it's good enough. And okay. Thank you, Thomas, Georgia. Let me see. Maybe I can address another question to Miguel. You guys. Thanks a lot. We have some amazing people asking questions. So one of the main things that we we see are the issues of for example, reporting freight workers. And that you mentioned how it's important to take into account local situations. I don't know. Everything is for everyone. So maybe, Jennifer, you can also give us your perspective on how secure and more practices can support, for example, compliance, on what are related regulations that we're seeing, reporting frameworks that is a big issue that that we find with clients. What's your perspective on this part? Yeah. I mean, I think it's a lot of it comes back to data, right, and having good measurements to make those cases, both in terms of the design and strategy for how you're gonna handle this type of circular economy initiative, but then also for the reporting of that. And the better data that you have, better information, you can make better decisions. And AI in particular can be really helpful with that because, you know, as I'm sure you noticed all of these systems, there's a lot of complexity too, and there's a lot of potential data points and being able to understand what are the limiting factors, how does that interplay, and then from a big picture perspective, how does that affect your broader, climate water targets. And so that information can be really helpful both for the planning phase and for the the demonstrating progress, that this is something that was worthwhile to do, and now we have the case studies, as Daniel showed, to to prove it. I think you just made one you brought one ex excellent word that I want to bring. And, Daniel, I'm going to ask you the hardest question for everyone. Jennifer mentioned the importance of planning. So so thinking of planning, as a seniority manager is listening to us. In one minute, what would you say are their best best practices or main steps for them to start planning of including these types of solutions for them? Alright. So they only have a minute. Just exactly. They only have a minute. I'm gonna tell you, hire good engineers because good engineering is the best investment, you can have. You know, in The United States, there was a bill passed, during Nixon's government in '72, which is I can't remember the name now, but prohibited picking engineering by price, and it had to be by at least in, in federal funded programs. And, I'll if you if you send me an email, I'll I'll send you a copy. So just a one page that says for architecture and engineering services, you cannot be selected in them based on price. It should be based on experience, quality of the team, and proposal. And, and and and I think it is it is important because if you don't incorporate the idea, the gene of circular economy at the planning stage, it becomes very difficult to do it later on. I've seen cases, for instance, going back to wastewater treatment. You wanna do cogeneration. If you're at the planning stage, you decided to go for an extended aeration plant. That's it. End of the story. Your your your your sludge is not gonna have enough organics to generate biogas, and it's out of the question. So and that very initial decision is taken from, you know, a process engineering or planning engineering that is less than one per thousand of the cost. But if you are trying to save there and the same thing goes for architectures, for social planners. I'm an engineer, so I I I talk about engineer. And I see it all the time. I go and say, oh, what a pity they did this with a plan. Because now to change this into a circular economy plan is plant is gonna take much more. You know? So, yeah, do a good selection, ex ante, and, yeah, that's my advertising, obviously. But I you just look at the list of people that are listening to us, hire any of them. You know? Yeah. Jennifer, any final advice for sustainability managers in this role? Yeah. I would say follow the data, find your expertise, and and make good sustainable decisions. I love it. I love it as closing part. Thank you so much both for your time. Thank you everyone who joined us today. These webinars are part of our amazing series. We have a webinar next week on water risk and technology insights for sustainability managers with a adviser, Kate Lam. Also, another great person to hear from on. Then another one with CCP, Amazon, and the RiverStrats. So make sure you will follow us, you join. And thank you so much, Daniel and Jennifer, for your time. It was a super insightful webinar. So I hope you all have a nice day. Thank you very much for the invitation, and thanks for those.