In this episode of Engineering Legends, we hear from two members of the Cleveland Water Alliance, an economic development agency that brings together key public and private sector partners to create a clean water innovation ecosystem that boosts the local economy and encourages greater care of Lake Erie.
Transcript
Kelly Rogers: Welcome to today’s episode of Engineering Legends. I’m Kelly Rogers here with Tiffany Long, and I’m very excited that this is our first episode of 2022. Happy new year to everyone out there! Tiff, we often say that one of the best parts of what we do is just really having this opportunity to share the great things happening in our industry. And even with the chaos that was 2021 and is now 2022, there are really fantastic advancements happening in the water space and today’s podcast really highlights some of that forward thinking that makes things better.
Bryan Stubbs: We’re trying to get people to understand just how important and big the water economy is. It’s a major driver, and this is one of the fastest growing sectors in the United States.
Kelly Rogers: On today’s episode, we speak with members of the Cleveland Water Alliance. They are a nonprofit organization based in Ohio that seeks to better utilize the economic and job creating potential of Lake Erie while also urging greater care of the lake as a valuable asset. And I believe the things that they’re doing in Ohio can really be a catalyst for other areas of the country.
Tiffany Long: Completely agree. Today we have with us Bryan Stubbs, Executive Director and President, and Dr. Jeff Pu, water innovation post fellow to chat with us about the CWA and how they are creating a clean water innovation ecosystem. Bryan, can you give us an overview of the Cleveland Water Alliance?
Bryan Stubbs: Sure. I’m happy to take that one on. So at our core, the Cleveland Water Alliances is an economic development agency, also known as a cluster, through the lens of water, water innovation, water technology. So what that means is really we bring together our key partners. So for us in Cleveland, that starts always with our utility partners, the great Cleveland Water and the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, along with other utilities regionally. I mean, we’re working with Cincinnati system, we’re working with Detroit, Great Lakes Water Authority, all those kind of good people. So it starts with these utilities who’ve said and tasked us with a couple things. The first is, “Hey, help us innovate. We’re risk adverse. And we’re not always thinking about that next coolest gadget. So help us with that to help us explain to people the value of water, what it means to our region, to our infrastructure, to our industry, to our recreation, help us tell that story.”
And then there is workforce. I don’t think it’ll be a shock to anybody who probably routinely listens to this podcast, that we’ve got a whole score of people about to retire in our utility space alone. And it’s the same with our engineering partners too. They’re recruiting massively for that next generation of talent. So we start with that, then we also bring in research institutions. So we’re working with a couple dozen academic universities ranging from Ohio State, Case Western, Kent State, Cleveland State, University of Michigan, Buffalo, across the border the University of Windsor, et cetera. And what we’re working with them on, what they’ve tasked us with is increasing the level of research and also around tech transfer, and getting new innovations out of the university. And then that third pillar of our work is around working with industry partners.
So that ranges from our great engineering friends out there that are doing a lot of this infrastructure work and work with us on quite a few projects through two companies like Eaton, like Moen pump manufacturer I’m sure those know like Gorman-Rupp. So we work with them. And again, it’s around trying out new innovations. So at our core that’s the who we are and then the question becomes, and I’m sure we’ll get into this in a bit is, what does that mean? And what do we do in terms of accelerating innovation?
Kelly Rogers: One of the things I saw on your website was, you were talking about like a blue economy. Can you describe what that is?
Bryan Stubbs: Yeah. I don’t want people to get caught up on terms. We call it the water economy, but some days we call it the blue economy and there’s a reason why it goes back and forth. At the federal level, NOAA calls out the blue economy. And for them that means more salt water oriented economic inputs. But for us we’ve said, okay, we’re part of the blue economy in Cleveland. We actually have a vibrant port. We have shipping lines that basically handle a good portion of the steel being created in this country for vehicles, for auto manufacturing that’s being mined out of Minnesota, comes down on an inner lake steamship boat into Cleveland-Cliffs refinery. So we have that, but really what we talk about is the water economy and that encompasses all of this.
So it’s going to be our infrastructure partners. It’s going to be our ports and things like that. But it’s these great companies like Morland, like Brown and Caldwell. And look, here’s why this matters and why phrasing matters in this. We’re trying to get people to understand just how important and big the water economy is. It’s a major driver and water stress isn’t going away. It’s only increasing as are the challenges out there. So from an economic sector, this is one of the fastest growing sectors in the United States for us in Ohio and greater Cleveland in particular. Look, we’re adding over 300 net new jobs into water economy annually every year since 2014. Everybody talks about, oh, advanced manufacturing, United manufacturing, we’re the home of Cleveland clinic. So BioHealth, but we’re outpacing all those industries.
So people don’t realize that and why this matters and why when I look at our sewer district and their combined sewer overflow work, yes, a $3 billion infrastructure project that was started decade ago, that really feeds into our economy. And these storm separations are far from being done. I mean, we’ll be doing this for another decade or two, and then we’re getting into, now the fact that we need to upgrade our systems and correctly. So I mean, the work is there. I could ask to speak to schools on a regular basis, whether it’s a STEM program at Cleveland public school or a community college or a four year college. And I say, “look, if you want a job forever go into water, you’re never going to be hunting for a job. There will be a job out there for you throughout your career.”
Tiffany Long: And for the students that you talk to, how do they react, are they interested?
Bryan Stubbs: Yeah. So we actually take a look at these metrics around, are we changing values and perceptions, and some of our programming we’ve seen, whether it’s at the K through 12 level or advanced beyond that. A pretty significant increase in like, wow, I didn’t realize there was so much opportunity in water. I hadn’t thought about that as a career option, but now I actually am thinking about that. And I’ll give you the example of, right now we’re desperate for software engineers. Everything’s becoming digital water, huge thing and we’re having trouble finding enough people in that digital space, but they’re out there. So I’ll go even regionally down to Columbus, Ohio as an example, and say, “Don’t go work for that next mobility app, come and help us with digital water.”
So it’s a lot of fun and people are starting to realize, oh wow, I can get well paid and not have to stress. And I’ll mention one other thing. These jobs that we’re creating, their average range of pay starts at $64K and tops at $109K. That’s really good pay, especially in a place like Cleveland, where the costs of living really isn’t that high. I mean, I’ve spent time at Chicago, spent time in San Francisco and you come here and you can buy in my case, a beautiful 110 year old home for a couple hundred thousand. So if you know, if you’re making $80K, $90K a year, life is going to be good.
Kelly Rogers: One of my favorite questions to ask water and wastewater engineers is how did you get into engineering or into water engineering? And most of the time, no one planned to go into water engineering or wastewater engineering. They happened upon it. They liked a hydrology class in college, or for one reason or another they ended up in it, but they didn’t plan on it. And so it’s nice to know that you’re out there educating the young folks to let them know, “Hey, this is a really cool career. It’s a great industry.”
Tiffany Long: Dr. Jeff, we’d love to hear your backstory about how you got passionate about water engineering.
Jeff Pu: I first started my journey into water engineering, mainly there was a… I originally come from China there. My hometown is in Wuxi, which has a huge lake. It’s called Tai lake. And it had really bad pollution event happen right before I came to the States in 2008. And it just devastated the drinking water infrastructure there. And that really motivated me to go into the water engineering field. And there are mainly three different aspects of water engineering that make me passionate about it versus water engineering encompassing different environments. So not just an urban environment, but also rural and also lakes, things like that. So my journey from my hometown, all the way to doing my PhD, and now doing my Post Doc, it gave me the opportunity to basically work in all those environments, which I previously didn’t plan to at all.
So that was a very interesting aspect. The other point that makes me passionate about water engineering is the technologies, the comprehensive technologies that are used to conduct these engineering projects are very, very complex. And it just fascinates me a lot. Just to give you some examples, like the in-situ sensors that I have used so far to measure a variety of water quantities, water qualities, but also these monitoring platforms such as buoys, land stations, so on and so forth, but also there are other parts of this. So the computer models that are analyzing the data coming from these sensors also are part of the technology regime, if you will. And also the telecommunication that brings all these data back and forth to the end users are also involved in this entire water engineering complex, if you will. So these variety of technology just opened my eyes to the water engineering, but also makes me more passionate about water engineering in general.
And one last point I want to mention why water engineering is passionate, to me is the inherent point about water itself. It’s very interdisciplinary. So in working with water engineering projects, I was not just working with water engineers themselves. I also work with a variety of hydrologists, ecologists, meteorologists. So even sometimes sociologists to figure out how to best approach to solve these water problems. So that’s something also I’m very passionate about is to collaborate and to solve problems, not just from a single point perspective, but from of a holistic approach.
Tiffany Long: Yeah. That’s a great point. It really is interdisciplinary like that.
Kelly Rogers: Very cool. So one thing you guys do to really raise awareness in your area is that you have a cool competition it’s called the Erie Hack. Can you tell us more about that?
Bryan Stubbs: Yeah. We love Erie Hack. Look, the base idea is and it’s not a new concept, but it’s outsourcing innovation and it’s to say, we have some problems we want to solve. We’re going to open it up to the world and say, “If you can help us solve this problem, we’ll pay you, we’ll give you cash.” So that was the origins of Erie Hack, but Erie Hack is a little different than a lot of these open innovation challenges in that it’s broad and big. What we did is, we have a partnership with NASA and NASA has a center in Cleveland called the Glenn Research Center. I think most of us can figure out where the name Glenn comes from and why that matters to us in Ohio, but they have this really great innovation team. And so they partnered with us, and this was in 2016 the first time we did this.
We went to all of these lake Erie basin cities, all the way around on the Canadian side and on the US side. We brought people together who had never been in the same room. And this gets into the workforce thing too. And the very first one was in Toledo, Ohio. And we started in Toledo with intention, because it was two years after the Toledo water system had been shut down for two and a half days. People there trust me, they care about water, because they’ve seen what lack of infrastructure and what challenges around nutrient pollution can do to their system. But what I realized is, we were in this room, it was in a tech incubator. I had people from the sewer system, from the water departments, from water resources, et cetera.
Then I had all these innovation technology people. And look, Toledo it’s a city, but it’s not huge. It’s not 8 million people. And what happened is that I realized that people in this room had never met. And I was just shocked by that. I’m like, Toledo’s not that big. And the fact you had never met. So we did similar things in each city, we brought people together and we said, what’s keeping you up at night. What are your biggest challenges? And we’re going to create an open innovation competition based on that, so that’s what we did. We did similar events in Windsor, in Buffalo and Erie, Pennsylvania and Detroit. And out of that came this competition that is just really broad and open. And it does a couple things. One, we actually do get some pretty interesting ideas out of this.
Two, it actually gets people intrigued about careers and workforce and three, from a community perspective, it’s the value of water. People need to understand why they pay a water bill. They need to understand that. We have not done a great job of explaining. It’s like it’s not just about turning on that faucet and paying for the amount of water you’re using. It has to be delivered through infrastructure and that takes money. And so this is how water engages with your life. So, and look it’s mind boggling just in terms of people not understanding even how water gets into their homes. I have to explain to them the concepts of pressure and all that. It’s shocking, but it’s healthy and good. So Erie hack was our attempt at making this collective kind of action around, let’s all come together around new technologies, the value of water.
And look, we just finished up the third one last month and it’s just been incredible watching the evolution of technologies and innovations and this last round, the team that won and there was two really exciting teams using this technology was RNA based technology. Everybody knows RNA because of the vaccines for COVID, you know RNA, RNA and RNA brand new innovation. This is somebody, the person who won actually turned down a job a decade ago at Moderna. And what he developed was using RNA to track invasive species. And it’s like, what a concept that we can now track with certainty in a particular area. Wow, we actually do have the Asian carp here. So we need to get a little more busy on what we’re doing. And then we’ve taken that a step further. And what he developed was using RNA to develop the level of toxicity and the type of toxicity within micro-system and harmful algal blooms.
This is a big unknown. We don’t know a lot of times if an algal bloom is a nuisance algal bloom, is it toxic? How toxic is it? We have to grab samples. We take them back to the lab. A couple weeks later, we have the answer. Well, a couple weeks later, it’s too late. This actually allows us determine quickly succinctly, near real time. So it’s a fun event. It’s garnered worldwide attention, NPR, all things considers covered it. It’s always great when somebody in another region of the country says, “Hey, I heard you on NPR as I was driving in Denver.” So it’s fun.
Kelly Rogers: And it sounds like you get all types of people that enter these contests, like young folks, old folks, a wide range of careers, just a wide variety of people.
Bryan Stubbs: Yeah. That’s actually a great point. That’s one of the really fun things about it. So probably my top five favorite innovators within the competition, one at the time was 17 and the other at the time was 88 and then we have everything in between. So the person who was 17 is amazing. She was in high school in Buffalo and she realized that the beaches in Buffalo every season were just getting inundated with invasive muscle shells to the degree where the Buffalo work system has to like actually take a caterpillar and a backhoe system and a scooper system on the beaches just to clean these up on a regular basis.
So she asked this question of what if, what if we could reuse those shells and what she ended up engineering was grinding them up and turning them into a polymer that is really well used around 3D printing filament. And here we were with a 17 year old negotiating an MOU with Eaton, a multi-national technology company headquartered in Ireland, but really headquartered in greater Cleveland. That was like, wow, so the point of these open innovation challenges is you don’t know where that next really cool idea is going to come from. So let’s just put it out there and see what happens.
Tiffany Long: That is fantastic. I definitely was not thinking about things like that when I was 17.
Kelly Rogers: Me either.
Tiffany Long: So what was the winning submission this year?
Bryan Stubbs: The winning submission this year was the RNA technology that I mentioned, being able to really fine tune in on toxic levels of micro-system through this RNA technology. And the team that won is going to take their winnings. That was $30,000 that I literally just wrote a check day before yesterday and it’s like, wow, that’s a lot of money. They’re going to take that 30K though and use it not internally, but externally to install their system all along lake Erie this coming up spring and summer to further the research they need. So they’re putting the innovation and the dollars to use for the community, which I just love that messaging.
Tiffany Long: Amazing.
Bryan Stubbs: You know, we can do more. We’re going to do more. And that’s if we win this, that’s what we’re going to do.
Kelly Rogers: Now I understand that you’re working on, what’s called a smart lake for lake Erie. Can you talk a little bit about what that is, what that means?
Jeff Pu: So my work is just a small bit of the smart Erie lake program at the core. What is smart? Smart is essentially three main components. One is the sensor and the data. So having an extensive network that monitors the water in lakes and the second component is the information. So all these data coming in from these sensors, we need to store them. We need to analyze them to understand them. And then the third part, which is the most important is to drive decisions and actions based on the data that we collect. So these decisions are backed up by data if you will. And this whole system of the three components makes the smart lake smart.
Tiffany Long: Fantastic.
Bryan Stubbs: So let me give you a business use case, just so your listeners fully understand why this matters. And Jeff hit on this. It’s about improving management actions and cost savings ultimately. So as part of our work, we brought in a French company into the test bed who wants to enter the US market. And what they wanted to do was develop a hypoxia early warning system, huge issue for Cleveland water, and a lot of other utilities, oxygen starved water causes all sorts of headaches. It does also create taste, odor, and color issues of the water, and it requires a different chemistry treatment. So the idea is, can we give Cleveland water a two to three day heads up that a hypoxia up swelling event is coming to their water intakes. And through that they know how to properly be prepared for chemistry changes in their treatment systems and also supply chain, which is a huge issue right now.
What kind of activated carbon do you need for this and do we have the right type and all of that? So this stuff really matters. Some people get caught up in, “Oh smart technology. I don’t know about all of this,” but no, this is improving outcomes. It is improving costs. And that’s just one little fraction of what the smart lake effort is doing. So we’re really excited by it. It’s also one of those great things to get people a little more engaged around water. We control some of the buoys out on Lake Erie. As an example, you can text them from your smartphone. It’ll text you back and it’ll text you all the parameters available. When we had the Plain Dealer, the Cleveland newspaper cover that and it crashed our whole system. It was so popular. Everybody regionally was like texting these buoys and it’s like, “Oh my God, I had no idea. Stop, wait. I need to upgrade our system.”
Tiffany Long: That was going to be my next question is where are the sensors? Are they all on buoys, are they close to the shore, are they throughout the entire lake or?
Bryan Stubbs: Well, so it starts with, we have both open water placed sensors on buoys, and then we have watershed based sensors. So it’s not just on the lake, it’s slowly going up the entire watershed, but you can start with the buoys. So just in Cleveland alone, we’ve got four buoys, three around Cleveland’s water intake, and then one about seven miles out, a little further out, that’s more of a predictive sort of sensor. And these are kind of Frankensteined as we’ve learned, put together, and this is through our partners at LimnoTech out of Ann Arbor, a really good engineering partner of ours. We split Jeff with as part of a NOAA funded post-doc work. So we’ve got these buoys out there, which may have some YSI instruments on them.
It may have some in-situ instruments on them. It may have things that are generic off the shelf from a weather standpoint, all the cost on these sensors are going down. So in Ann Arbor, Jeff and a gentleman from LimnoTech start assembling these, they are the ones who put them out onto the lake, has all the telemetry. So we’re getting that information off of them in real time. In the same breath, some of our partners like NOAA will have, was trying different moving submersibles that will swim around the Great Lakes and have different sensors strapped on them. Almost every water intake for the Great Lakes has some of these sensors on them. So just from the open water, you’re suddenly having a huge collection of data coming in. We also look at satellite images.
Then as you go up the watershed, we have all sorts of different things like nutrient analyzers, Green Eyes is a great example of one of those. Again, another startup that won one of our competitions that has basically what we call wet labs whether it’s in a can. So meaning we can put these nutrients analyzers on the great lakes and a buoy, but we’re more intrigued right now about putting them in small contained areas within watersheds and different areas where we’re trying to reduce nutrients. So this is actually wet lab chemistry without a human. And it’s kind of cool.
Tiffany Long: So how does having lake Erie be a smart lake, how does that affect the average recreational user beyond drinking water implications for folks that like to go swimming and boating and fishing. I know there’s so much recreation around the lake.
Bryan Stubbs: Recreation was actually one of the early adopters of some of our technology and innovation. If you’re going out, let’s say you have a boat in Port Clinton, popular area here for Lake Erie boaters. And a lot of people have multi-generational family places there, and that’s how they spend their summers. But harmful algae blooms and algae blooms in general have really kind of changed that. So let’s say hypothetically, you want to go out for the day. Do you want to go through a soupy green algae area or do you want to go in clean, good water? You want to go in good clean water. So the various forms of technology will inform them on, “Hey, this is good recreational area.” Also, a major industry here is charter wildlife fishing. I mean, people are coming from worldwide to fish wildlife here.
I mean, it’s not unheard of that I’ll see a private plane from literally the Mideast flying into our smaller lakefront airport, Burke. For wealthy people that will spend real money, crazy money wildlife fishing, because it’s one of those things that if you’re an outdoors person you should do in your life. So you know…
Kelly Rogers: I did not know that.
Bryan Stubbs: Yeah, it’s really fun and…
Kelly Rogers: That’s crazy.
Bryan Stubbs: The charter fishermen have been one of our most active citizen science groups. They will actually do grab samples for us and bring them back and we’ve trained them. And this is through a partnership through Bowling Green State University, University of Toledo, Ohio State City grant and others, and these charter fishermen. And they were initially one of the leaders around the Toledo crisis in doing grab samples, because the infrastructure hadn’t been set up yet. So there’s a lot of fun things you can do in terms of recreation. The beach is another huge issue. And look, I mean, we still have issues of E.coli. We will for a while more so we’re using technologies to more accurately predict and let people know, stay away from this beach today for the next six hours versus “Hey, all clear go swimming and have fun.” So there’s a lot of interactions with the public that we’re anxious to build upon.
Tiffany Long: Very interesting. So you mentioned that the organization has gotten attention nationally through NPR and such. How will the Cleveland Water Alliance reach beyond Cleveland and the Great Lakes area?
Bryan Stubbs: Yeah. So, what we’re working on right now is we received a highly competitive award through the US Department of Commerce and the EDA or economic development administration to stand up the first tool of what will eventually be four water technology accelerator test beds. In doing our research, again our core is how do we accelerate innovation and technologies in the water space? We realized there were just a lot of challenges, traditionally embedded in the innovation ecosystem within water. You know, utilities are massively risk adverse and correctly so they have mission critical infrastructure that can’t be played with. So what we said is how can we create these testbeds in a way that doesn’t interfere with that mission critical infrastructure, but still gets those utilities engaged around new innovation, new technology. And we can go into details on how we’re doing that, but we are doing that.
So the first two test beds, the muni-utility testbed where we have a pipe farm. It is looking at lead service lines without breaking ground technologies. Real excited about that one and then an open water watershed testbed. And that one is the furthest along. Number three will start up this year, which is an industrial test bed and the fourth, which we’ll get into next year or year after next is residential commercial. But the point is, there’s such a thirst for this type of interplay of validating a new technology. Not only does it work and does it work in the environment, which a lot of people just test their water tech in a lab is you both probably know when you take it into an actual environment it’s brutal and it often doesn’t work the first time. So the system allows you to come in, trial your technology, take it back, rinse and repeat until you get it to where you want it.
But it also gets that real time feedback from the customer. Meaning Cleveland water has their sleeves firmly rolled up, Maggie and Scott over there where they’re working with us on these new innovations, new technologies, they’re part of it. They’re helping us scope some of this, but we don’t touch any of their mission critical stuff. If we have to build a little pipe farm on the side, they did that for us, they invested in that. They were so excited by it. So as we’re doing that internationally, look this year was the first year of this. It was like, rolling it out. We didn’t advertise it. We’re just like soft, let’s bring in some friendlies to trial this. So we were going to target finding five innovations to do it without advertising. We had 13 within like June of this year and of that over half of them were international.
These are new technologies that want to come into the US market. They need to validate it. They need to trial it. They need customer feedback on it. So the word is out there now for 2022, we’ll be doing a much more concise outreach. The neon light out front will actually stay open on these test beds, we’ll be presenting, hopefully if we can travel at various events in Europe and then Singapore Water Week at the end of April, then at WEFTEC this fall generally we work with the US Department of Trade or foreign direct investment. So opportunities for new companies that want to come into the US to do their manufacturing here and to have those discussions. And it brings up a great kind of opportunity and point on this, getting the word out beyond the great lakes.
The wildest thing that came to us this year was from South Korea. So we have an inked deal for a three year, $6 million water purification technology. It’s been vetted, validated and approved from a regulatory standpoint in South Korea. They wanted to come to the US and go through the same process. So they found us and came to us to do this. And the real exciting thing about this for us, not only is we’re going to validate a cool new non chlorine based water technology is they also want a US manufacturer. And so Ohio’s great for that. So we’re going to be matching them with a manufacturing company. So then as we talk about the water economy, we talk about jobs. This is the cycle.
Kelly Rogers: It’s amazing. You guys are making such a great impact in not only Cleveland and Ohio, but all over. If there are other groups that want to start an organization like yours, any advice or direction you want to give, because you guys are doing such amazing things, it’d be nice to see more organizations across the country doing this.
Bryan Stubbs: Yeah. Fully agree. So knock on wood. We actually just submitted for a new proposal with the US EPA around building what we call a freshwater economy community of practice. And this would give us a two year ramp to literally bring anybody who has an interest in this into Cleveland, learn from what we’ve built here, we’ll have all sorts of sessions. We’ll be able to take it on the road, including at WEFTEC as an example. So I really think that’s going to be the most strategic way of doing this.
This kind of came out of our initial EPA work because the other five grantees in this competitive process a year plus ago, was everything else was saltwater related. It’s all coastal, it’s the Bering Sea Fishing Association of Alaska and Anchorage. It’s the blue economy work in Seattle and their port. And then a couple in Maine. So we’re the only fresh water, but we got into a conversation there. It’s like, how do we learn from each other as a starting point? So we’ve started getting together and then out of the gate, like let’s start building these communities of practice. But the shorter answer look is just reach out to us. We’re not a closed book. We’re very open. We’re a 501C3. We have a responsibility to grow this economy and we need good people helping the whole country do so.
Kelly Rogers: Fantastic. Hopefully we can get the word out there.
Tiffany Long: Absolutely.
Bryan Stubbs: I appreciate that.
Kelly Rogers: Thank you to Bryan and Jeff for taking the time to speak with us today. If you want to reach out to the CWA, you can contact them through their website at clevelandwateralliance.org. We know that many of our listeners have their own engineering legend stories. In fact, the Cleveland Water Alliance reached out to us to tell their story. We’d love to hear from you. Please send us your feedback, stories and ideas for future episodes. You can reach us at info@brwncald.com.
Tiffany Long: This podcast was brought to you by Brown and Caldwell. It’s our purpose and our passion to safeguard water, maintain infrastructure and restore habitats to keep our communities thriving. Until next time!