Sustainability In Your Ear Transcript: Making Wastewater the Foundation of a Regional Circular Economy

Take another walk along Elk Creek after this transcript; plus thoughts on “home.”

Listen to the interview while you read along.

Mitch Ratcliffe  0:00

Hello, good morning, good afternoon or good evening, wherever you are on this beautiful planet of ours. Welcome to Sustainability In Your Ear. This is the podcast conversation about accelerating the transition to a sustainable, carbon neutral society, and I'm your host, Mitch Ratcliffe. Thanks for joining the conversation.

Today we're going to take another dive into the circular economy, this time into how water can be reused. As we've heard in many recent interviews, the circular economy reframes waste as misallocated resources that should be reused in a new way. But nowhere is that reframing more literal than at a wastewater treatment plant. Every gallon flowing through a municipal sewer contains recoverable energy, nutrients and water assets that the linear flush and forget model has treated as problems to be disposed of rather than value to be captured.

And our guest today is Kevin Shafer, who spent more than two decades proving that wastewater utilities can operate as resource recovery hubs. As executive director of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District since 2002, he's transformed an agency that was once mocked in local media as a symbol of government waste into a national model for sustainable infrastructure.

Last year, Veolia designated Kevin's organization as America's first eco factory, recognizing its integration of biogas energy production, nutrient recovery through the century old Milorganite fertilizer program and its aggressive green infrastructure deployment.

Kevin recently wrote an article for Earth911 about applying Cradle to Cradle thinking to wastewater management. That's the philosophy that waste from one process can become feedstock for another, pioneered by architect William McDonough.

Milwaukee is conducting a market study to identify regional industries, including Milwaukee's substantial brewing sector, that generate organic waste streams that can be co-digested at treatment plants to produce additional energy while reducing disposal costs for everyone involved. It's a model inspired partly by Aqua Minerals, a Dutch collective of water utilities that has turned treatment by products into inputs for industries ranging from glass manufacturing to cosmetics.

So we're going to talk with Kevin about what it takes to shift utility leadership from compliance focused management to systems thinking, how industrial partnerships can make wastewater infrastructure more resilient to climate driven storm intensity, and why he believes utilities should see themselves as anchor institutions with generational responsibilities.

You can learn more about the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District at mmsd.com. So can the pipes beneath our cities become the backbone of a regional circular economy? Let's find out right after this brief commercial break.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:02

Kevin, welcome to the show. How you doing today?

Kevin Shafer 3:04

I'm good. Thanks for having me.

Mitch Ratcliffe  3:06

Well, thank you for joining me. The story about what you're doing in Milwaukee is really interesting. But for listeners who don't think much about what happens after they flush, can you give us the big picture? What does the sewerage district do?

Kevin Shafer 3:20

Yeah, and it's more than just what you flush. It's what you use in your dishwasher, your laundry, all that water that's used in the house, it goes through a series of pipes that eventually bring that water down to what we have, what we call water reclamation facilities. So there are two wastewater treatment plants that treat that wastewater, and we then discharge that clean, cleaner water back into Lake Michigan, which, here on the Great Lakes, is our drinking water supply as well.

Mitch Ratcliffe 3:48

That's important. You wouldn't want to be drinking what does go down any of those pipes. How's that evolved during your tenure? You've been here 20 years now.

Kevin Shafer 3:57

Yeah, I've been here a long time. We're constantly upgrading the systems, constantly bringing on more energy efficient systems, if we can, always expanding based on any type of population growth or economic growth that we see in the area. So it's a constantly changing job.

And we've, you know, we have a lot of different daily changes to the system. We have a deep tunnel system here as well, because part of our service area is what's called a combined sewer, which takes both stormwater and wastewater. So after the Clean Water Act passed in the early 70s, we built a deep tunnel system to help us reduce our overflows, our combined sewer overflows to the waterways, and where we had 50 to 60 of those occur a year before the tunnel, now we're down to just over two, and we've added two segments of that tunnel since I've been here.

So since I've been here, we've expanded the tunnel system. We've maintained or expanded the wastewater treatment plants, and we're also a flood management authority. So we've installed green infrastructure. We've taken concrete line channels out of our waterways. We're really looking at the entire water cycle when it comes to how to manage water.

Mitch Ratcliffe 5:11

Now you're really describing a multi-faceted infrastructure, and you've also been designated America's first eco factory. Can you explain what does that mean in practice?

Kevin Shafer 5:21

So eco factory is a designation that we received from Veolia Water, which is an international wastewater and water corporation, and what it means is we look at all the input influence or inputs that we have in our system, whether that's wastewater or any type of flow that might come to us. We look at that and we say, what resources can we pull out of that water? How can we utilize that resource better, as opposed to just cleaning it and putting it back in the lake? Because there's a lot of innate elements of that process that really have multiple benefits for the economy and for the region.

Mitch Ratcliffe 6:04

Were there specific metrics that you had to meet in order to earn the designation?

Kevin Shafer 6:09

It wasn't so much a metric, because this is, I think, like, as you said, we're the first in the US. It's a relatively new designation. It was more the methods that we're using, the approaches that we were taking to address these issues.

If you want me to talk about a little bit of the history, back in 1926—so 100 years ago this year—we started utilizing a process where we dewater and dry the biosolids from our wastewater treatment plant, and we produce this wonderful product called Milorganite—Milwaukee organic nitrogen. And so we're celebrating 100 years this year of that product.

And this was really the first eco factory approach that we did 100 years ago. So we've been doing it for a while, and it takes a product where most utilities in the country, once they treat the wastewater, they take that biosolid or that sludge, they'll just spread it on a farm field or field, or they'll incinerate it. We actually dewater it, dry it, put it in a bag, and then we sell it throughout the country as a lawn fertilizer, and it produces returns about 11 to $12 million a year in revenue to us.

Mitch Ratcliffe 7:23

So the circular economy took hold in Milwaukee 80 years before it became even a phrase. How has that inspiration changed the trajectory of Milwaukee's wastewater program compared to many others in the country?

Kevin Shafer 7:38

Well, it's changed the trajectory of the district or their approach to a circular economy, but it was the foundation of it. I mean, it was here from the very beginning. And you know, it's just amazing to think what, 100 years ago, why we ended up doing that, because there weren't the regulatory or economic drivers that we have today. So they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. And it's really that sense of doing the right thing that's been instilled within MMSD, Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, with all my staff and where today, it's just common. We just always look at those type of approaches.

So I think it's foundational to the district. And so that's different than other utilities around the country; they may not have that foundational element. I can't tell you, we have folks from China, all over the world coming to see our flood facilities and to see the production of the Milorganite, but it's really something that is not used much in the country. I think there's only two or three other cities around that do this. And I think we'll see more and more folks do it, because the regulations are going to get tighter for disposing of biosolids. And there is a Cradle to Cradle approach to really use this material for good.

Mitch Ratcliffe 9:00

You just used the phrase Cradle to Cradle. It was coined by architect William McDonough and chemist Michael Braungart in the early 2000s. Have you talked with them? Or perhaps, was this an inspiration for their work?

Kevin Shafer 9:13

You know, it wasn't an inspiration. They'd already done it. But William McDonough actually came to my office, probably in the mid 2000s, maybe like 2006. I actually got to meet with him. He signed a book for me, and he was intrigued with the Milorganite story, but he was also intrigued with some of the other work that we're doing to try to capture energy or capture reusable pollutants, things that we could do more with.

So it was a very inspirational meeting for me, because it really brought forward stuff that we'd been doing for, at that time, probably 90 years. But it really connected the dots for me, where we could do more, we should look at other ways to tap resources out of something that most people think is a waste product.

Mitch Ratcliffe 10:00

Now in your article for Earth911, and thank you, by the way, for sharing that with us, you mentioned that co-digestion of industrial organic waste can produce energy and reduce climate impacts overall. Can you talk about how you're working with breweries or food processors to reduce their initial emissions and costs by partnering with the sewage district?

Kevin Shafer 10:20

I can, and this is not a new technology. It's not something that, you know, we've just—some innovation has come up with. We've been operating digesters at our South Shore water reclamation facilities since the mid to late 1960s, and these are just like the digesters you hear about on agricultural fields, where you take human waste, or in those cases, animal waste, you digest it, produce methane gas, and then you use that gas to produce electricity.

We have eight digesters at our South Shore plant, where, once we've treated the wastewater, we take those biosolids, we put them into these digesters, digest this material, and as that's decaying, it produces methane gas. We then capture that methane gas, we clean it, and then we put it into turbines and engine generators that then create electricity to power the plant.

And on a normal year for the South Shore plant, we're somewhere right now in the 80 to 85% of our energy is produced from the biosolids that we digest.

And interesting Cradle to Cradle on that one is so we take that methane gas and we produce energy from it, but then we take the remaining biosolids that have been digested, we pump those to our Jones Island water reclamation facility, where we mix them into the Milorganite product, which then becomes a fertilizer for the lawn. So again, it's almost unlimited the amount of ingenuity that can be used to create some of these great products.

Mitch Ratcliffe 11:50

Now there's also residual heat in the water that's collected from the system. Are you looking into how to use that? For instance, I know Vancouver is heating part of the city using the heat from their sewage. You just said unlimited. What are some of the other vistas that you're exploring?

Kevin Shafer 12:07

Yeah, so heat extraction from wastewater—we've always watched Vancouver. We want to be like Vancouver when it comes to something like this. We're not there yet, but we have looked at it. And you have to, you really—so you flush your waste, it's got your body temperature basically to that water, and then as it flows through the pipes, it cools off, but eventually comes to a wastewater treatment plant. So you want to have the ideal distribution system to capture that waste, and you want to tap into that waste at certain points before you lose all that heat, because that's the resource you want.

So that's some of the studies that we've looked at. We haven't implemented anything on that yet, but that's something throughout the country wastewater utilities could be looking at today.

There's also within our waste, different pharmaceuticals. So when you take a med of any kind, probably 50 to 60% of that probably washes through your body and then comes out through your waste. Are there ways to reutilize those? We've been working with the School of Freshwater Sciences at UW—University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee—to look at that.

And then we also have this great organization here in the Milwaukee area called the Water Council, and they've allowed us to expand our innovative thoughts on different companies in the region that might be able to do similar things with either wastewater, heat or the meds that are in it. We're already capturing the nitrogen and some of that with our Milorganite product.

But the goal would be to bring, you know, tap all the resources out of that wastewater stream that you can, put it back to good use at a lower cost, and then, you know, it helps industry.

I think, Mitch, you asked about how we're partnering with the industry on this as well. On the digested sludge that we use, we do take truckloads of waste from some of the companies in the region, whether it's the breweries or some other organizations that create a huge organic waste. So we're taking that organic waste and instead of them having to, in some cases, they're feeding it to cattle or they're just disposing of it at a cost to them, we're taking that, producing energy from it, and Milorganite from it, and then that reduces their costs as well. So there's a synergy with industry.

Mitch Ratcliffe 14:36

Most infrastructure is built for a single purpose, or at least that's how we did build it. It really sounds like what we should be thinking about, both in the public and private sector, is blending all of these infrastructures, getting rid of the duplicity in order to make it more efficient, but also to leverage it to create more value from every ounce of material energy that passes through the system. How do you explain that to a company who isn't familiar with these ideas? Is it a business case? Is it a moral or ethical case? A combination? How do you make the sale?

Kevin Shafer 15:12

I think it's combination. And it's not always the sewage district that makes that sale or that discussion. Sometimes it's the Water Council, or sometimes it's an industry rep that learns about some of these possibilities. It's really a partnership that we utilize to try to address these or to bring in these ideas.

We've got this wonderful economic development group called Milwaukee 7, which looks for industries to relocate to the Milwaukee area. They're utilizing some of these capabilities that we have to entice companies to come into the Milwaukee area.

It's just amazing how you do this and bring it out into the industry. And the selling point is really that return on investment. It's the business case that you talked about. How do you make it something that helps industry, helps companies do their job better with less, but then it also helps us.

Mitch Ratcliffe 16:09

That points to an interesting moment in our evolution in thinking about sustainability. It isn't really about what's right, although it is—that's a given—but it really ultimately comes down to how it changes the performance of the economy. Is that taking hold? Do you see that, despite all the pushback about environmental activities, is this starting to really sink in for all of the businesses that you're talking to?

Kevin Shafer 16:37

I think so. I mean, because you know, we have more needs and less finances for everything we do, whether it's private industry or public industry. So we're all looking at ways to squeeze more out of that investment that we're making, and in some cases, companies just know it's the right thing to do. It's the right thing for the environment, and that's what drives them. But if you have that business case to support that, it makes the argument even more.

I do think this will be growing as we move forward. The digester gas approach, where we're capturing that gas and digesting and producing electricity—as I said, it's not a new technology. I know out in the Oakland, San Francisco area, they're using this as well, and probably more of an extent than we are, but they've brought, they built facilities to take waste from their industrial users into their system.

So I do see, you know, seeds of this occurring around the country, and those are going to grow because we're all looking for ways to enhance our revenue and to reduce our costs.

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:40

So let's explore that garden of opportunity right after this quick commercial break, folks. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe 17:51

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. Let's get back to my discussion with Milwaukee's Executive Director of the city's Metropolitan Sewerage District, Kevin Shafer.

Kevin, in your Earth911 article, you mentioned Aqua Minerals in the Netherlands. It's a model for resource recovery at scale, as you described it, and they've turned water treatment byproducts into everything from glass and carpet to face cream ingredients. I have to really take that one in. What parts of—or what did you learn from their model that you're looking to adopt in Milwaukee?

Kevin Shafer 18:25

How intriguing is that, right, to be able to make carpeting and other things from wastewater? This was another technology and entity that came to us through the Water Council, and it sparked my interest because they're doing on a grand scale what we're starting to do and continuing doing.

So they are really pushing the envelope forward on trying to recover minerals, right? Trying to recover energy from the systems that they operate. Theirs is more of a, at least right now, I think theirs is more of a drinking water approach, where we're the wastewater side, but the principles are the same. You're still pulling as many beneficial resources out of that stream of water that you can to benefit the community.

So they're a great example of that. They've been—we've had discussions with them about some of their approaches. A lot of it gets back to what are the needs of the region. Gets back to how do you market this, as you talked about before, Mitch, and how do you integrate this into what your day to day functions are, as a utility or utilities. So they're a great example. We can learn a lot from different companies in the Europe market and others around the world.

Mitch Ratcliffe 19:45

Volume is key in making this economically viable. You have to have enough intake in order to produce a reliable stream of feedstock for there to be off-takers to acquire, because they need to rely on a supply. Aqua Minerals succeeds, in part, because it aggregates resources from 11 drinking water utilities and nine wastewater authorities. Do you see sort of an aggregation strategy, or in the private equity sense, roll-up opportunity for utilities to begin to share that infrastructure and use it to create collective value that can be distributed, not only to the companies, but to the society itself?

Kevin Shafer 20:25

I do. I think with anything you look at, there's a tipping point of whether it makes sense or not, and so the more volume that you can get, the more raw resources, if you want to call it that, that you can get into the stream, that tipping point becomes easier to meet, so that you can then make your return on investment and your business case for it.

We are currently doing a study right now to find out what other industries in the Greater Milwaukee area or southeastern Wisconsin area might be a partner for us on these initiatives. As we bring in this better knowledge of what the waste stream might be, we'll then see, oh, maybe we need more wastewater, or can we partner with other utilities or different entities?

I do think you'll see a regionalization of some of these efforts. Every wastewater plant in the world produces sludge, which we now call biosolids, because it sounds better, and what do they do with it?

So if we can have that partnership, and we've had some discussions with some of the smaller utilities in the region—I mean, the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, we treat the wastewater from 1.1 million people, we're treating 130 to 240 million gallons a day of water, so we have a large capacity there—but can we tweak that?

And in this program where we have companies hauling waste into our facility so we can make more energy from it, this was a case where we said, okay, we have lots of wastewater, but we could use more of what we call high strength waste, or organic waste, and that's when we bring in these industries to supplement what we have already and utilize the infrastructure that we've already built to produce more energy.

Mitch Ratcliffe 22:14

Now your article offers a pretty pointed critique of wastewater leaders who only look at the one utility that they're responsible for, rather than understanding it as fitting into a broader ecosystem. What do you think the institutional or professional culture barriers we need to break down in order to bring this conversation to full fruition?

Kevin Shafer 22:35

Well, I didn't mean it to be a critique, but maybe it came off that way. You know you have to have a reason for what you're doing, and in Milwaukee, because we have this foundation of Milorganite for 100 years, our reasoning has always been to do the right thing for the environment. I think every utility has that same ethic built into them. They want to provide clean water to the world, but sometimes because of financial constraints or political constraints, they may only look at what the regulations require them to do.

So what's the regulatory framework that they're operating under, whether in the US or somewhere else, and it's just this limiting factor, whether it's finances or regulatory. It's hard for someone, especially in a smaller utility where they're just, you know, they're one person, probably, or two people, trying to manage these things. It's hard to look beyond the box that they're in, to look at more partnerships, or to look at ways to expand the discussion on sustainability.

So I really think it needs to be driven—number one, you need to have folks that really care about sustainability and trying to improve the environment, which I think most of them do. But you also have to be able to go out to the public and say, this is why we're doing that. Is it a regulatory reason? Does it save us money? You know, different reasons to do these things.

So you have to try to connect those dots for the utility managers or for the cities that operate these to show that broader benefit. And that sometimes takes a front investment, which is hard to do.

Mitch Ratcliffe 24:17

There's a lot of people in a lot of different boxes thinking about this from their particular perspective. And another term you used in your article is thinking about utilities as an anchor institution, because they are organizations that will last for generations. What can everyone learn from the utilities' long-term perspective on capital investment and its rate decisions and everything else in thinking about how we architect the finances of the circular economy?

Kevin Shafer 24:45

Yeah, so in my industry, you don't build something overnight. You know, it takes years sometimes to build some of the systems that we're building. And we are an anchor institution. I won't be here 50 years from now, but MMSD will be, or some form of Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District will be.

So you need to take that long vision when you're looking at some of these investments, and you need to look at what might be different 20 or 30 years down the road to help drive some of these discussions. And I think as we're seeing fewer resources, we're seeing constraints on investment, you start bringing all these things together, and you use that longer vision to really build the infrastructure of the future, which these anchor institutions are. We're really meant to do that.

We need to always be more efficient with what we do, and do it well. So I think that it's an important concept that we all need to understand, that you're always going to have a drinking water utility. You're always going to have a wastewater utility of some form, where they can be together. And you need to do this work in a partnership with private industry or public industries as well, and bring them all to the table.

Mitch Ratcliffe 25:57

Milwaukee's Water Council has assembled an ecosystem of startups and universities as well as organizations like the sewerage district and established companies. All of this designed to accelerate Cradle to Cradle innovation. What are the right policies for us to think about investing in as a nation right now in order to create that kind of catalyst so that all of the organizations across the country, utilities, private, public, come together to create this circular economy?

Kevin Shafer 26:30

You're asking, what was the nucleus of that? Or why? What should we be doing?

Well, we first need to understand that one group, one entity, can't solve all the problems by themselves. You need to bring in multiple partners. You need to be in these multiple views. They may not always align with your views, but there's nuggets within these different ways of doing things.

So the Water Council, I don't know, in 2008 I think it was formed. I was on the board then, I still am, and that entity saw that there was a nucleus of water industries in the Milwaukee area that could partner together to try to improve Milwaukee by bringing more industry here, but also improve their bottom line by partnering with other companies that might do something totally different, but partner with those companies to market water and market the sustainability of water.

So I think that is very important. Before the Water Council was here, I'm a public entity person, it was hard to get the private industry to really partner with us on some issues, and the Water Council bridged that gap. So they brought in a nucleus of CEOs from companies in the area that understood this, and then they helped us move the model broader throughout the region.

So I think other entities or other areas around the country trying to do this, you need that connector, whether it's a chamber of commerce or someone to see that there's a way to bring public and private investments together and benefit everyone. It's not an easy discussion to occur. There were some early learning curves that I went through, but yeah, the Water Council has been an amazing partner.

Mitch Ratcliffe 28:23

You have to look beyond zero-sum thinking, it sounds like. Not just, you know, did I win this deal, but did this deal create a foundation for ongoing collaboration and continuing innovation? That's a different psychology than we currently are being encouraged to embrace. How, as you think about bringing Cradle to Cradle forward, do you think we should be—how should we prioritize the reuse of materials as we think about becoming a more onshore economy?

Kevin Shafer 28:56

Well, it's a we, not an I. So we have to have others that partner on this. As I said, some of these technologies are not new, and I think there's a wealth of knowledge out there on how we can implement some old technologies to bring better benefits to the future.

So I think just pulling together that thought that, how do we—and in my case, how we the wastewater utility industry, if you want to call us an industry association—how do we as a group let others know of our capabilities, let us know of our capacities, and how do we bring them into that discussion? This could be at a national level, through some of the associations. This could be at a local level, through an area chamber of commerce, or just one-on-one discussions, but you have to drive the discussion.

Mitch Ratcliffe 29:50

Relationships grow organically. Milwaukee's got an ambitious 2035 vision, nine years from now: 100% renewable energy, a 90% reduction in carbon footprints compared to 2005. How does your strategy based on co-digestion of organic waste fit into achieving those targets?

Kevin Shafer 30:11

Yeah, so actually, I wrote the vision in 2009, the 2035 vision that you're talking about. My commission adopted it in 2010, and it, again, was building off something that we'd already—we've been doing the Milorganite for, at that time, like 90 years. You know, we've been doing this sustainability approach, and I could see the climate changing. We've had huge storms here. We've had issues with the changing climate, and we can't solve all of that, but we have our piece of it.

And so I wrote the vision to really focus on our energy use and turning to a renewable energy source. And co-digestion is one of those renewable energy sources, because we're always going to have wastewater, we're always going to have sludge where we can treat that.

So that vision is really founded on Milorganite. It's founded on the digesters that we have at South Shore. It's founded on green infrastructure as well. And bringing that all together, we've already got the digesters. They were built in the 1960s. We've already got the dryer facilities. They were built in the late 20s, early 20s, 1920s. So we've got all this stuff there to do what we want to do.

And putting that broad vision out—when I retire, it'll be the best thing I ever did—but when we put that vision out, it brings partners to the table, because all of a sudden they say, oh, here's someone that's thinking a little bit differently about something, and maybe we can help them, or they can help us.

So just the outreach and the marketing of that vision has helped us change the image of the district, but also change the partnerships that we have and bring in more partners. So I don't know if this is answering your question, but the vision really is the driving force.

Mitch Ratcliffe 31:57

So if 20 years from now, you return to the office to see how things have changed, and the Cradle to Cradle vision has succeeded, how do you see the relationship between cities and their wastewater systems having changed? What will be different and what resources are we going to be recovering that we potentially don't even imagine recovering today?

Kevin Shafer 32:17

Well, you're seeing some of that already now. I think even in a water-rich community like the Great Lakes area, Milwaukee area, you'll see total reuse of water. You'll see all the nutrients being removed for fertilizer. You'll see us tapping the heat in the wastewater for energy sources.

I didn't even talk about the landfill gas project that we have, but we're taking methane gas that used to be flared off of a landfill, we're piping that down to our Jones Island water reclamation facility, and we're burning that instead of natural gas, which is allowing us to use a waste from the landfill as an input for our power system.

So you'll see more technologies where we're partnering across the industrial spectrum. And you know, we'll be recovering water because we'll be drinking—we'll be drinking wastewater. We'll be recovering the nutrients for fertilizer. We'll be recovering the heat for energy. It's just, there's so many things that we can recover.

Mitch Ratcliffe 33:21

In that context, the notion of extended producer responsibility isn't necessarily a burden, it is a reduction in the cost of acquiring new feedstock. You mentioned the proliferation of pharmaceuticals in our water. Could you imagine a Pfizer or a Lilly taking the molecular results of your work and using them in drugs? I mean, for instance, I know that salmon in Puget Sound are more heavily medicated than the average Seattle-ite. Could we be doing that?

Kevin Shafer 33:52

Yeah, I think that is one of the cutting edge elements we're going to see. We're starting to see more and more pharmaceuticals coming into our system. And again, University of Wisconsin, School of Freshwater Sciences, has been a valuable research partner on this, but taking that information and partnering with—20 years from now, partnering with a drug company to say, hey, here's a feedstock for you to produce the chemicals that you're already producing, the medicines that you're already producing.

I do think that's going to be driven more and more because of what you just said. We're finding these pharmaceuticals in the natural environment. We're seeing them in shellfish, we're seeing them in fish, we're seeing them everywhere.

So I think that will drive that discussion. We'll have to get over the yuck factor that some people might have. But I think as population grows, as climate change becomes even more prevalent than it is already, and we see the strains on the resources that we have, people will start—and they already are in the Southwest and Southeast—they're already using water differently and over and over again.

And you know, even in the Great Lakes, I'll tell people, you know, we're probably drinking dinosaur piss at some point, because it's the same water. We're just using it over and over again.

Mitch Ratcliffe 35:09

Forty years ago, I remember reading that on the Colorado River, it passed through an average of 11 cattle and four people by the time the water reached—well, it no longer does reach the ocean.

Kevin, this has been a fascinating conversation. How can people learn more about what you do?

Kevin Shafer 35:26

You know, they can always go to our website, mmsd.com. We've got a lot of articles about this work that we're doing. You can find out about our landfill gas project. You can see our digesters. We have metrics on there that tell you how much renewable energy we're currently producing, of the total, the percentages, and I think that's a great way to learn.

You can go to other utilities as well. There is an explosion about to occur of this new innovation that's going to occur throughout the wastewater industry. And take that information and then go to your local utility and say, hey, you know, this looks kind of easy, or maybe it's costly, or can we help study this? You know, I think just sparking that discussion.

Mitch Ratcliffe 36:07

Let me ask you just one more question. Does the sanitation or wastewater district take that kind of citizen input seriously? A lot of people believe they just ignore it. Can you tell us what actually happens when a citizen speaks up?

Kevin Shafer 36:20

Sure, I can give you the story here in Milwaukee. When I started as the head of the district in 2002, we were accused of sitting in an ivory tower, that we just sat here, and we didn't listen to anyone, and we just did what we wanted to. And I didn't particularly care for that comparison.

So we, and as an industry as a whole, in the last 20 years, you'll see a huge shift from where we sat in our ivory towers and just did what we needed to to meet the Clean Water Act requirements to now we're bringing the community into the discussion further.

And depending on, you know, all the requirements of a utility like we have—flood management, so that has a certain requirement, wastewater treatment—bringing all that together, you only make a project better, or you only make a utility better if you get good public input up front. It cuts down on some of the arguing later. It brings in the discussion and it changes the project to make it more sustainable. It's more sustainable if you have the public supporting it and arguing for it.

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:27

Thanks for sharing that, and I very much appreciate the time you took with us today. Thank you, Kevin.

Kevin Shafer 37:31

Thank you, Mitch. It was a great time. Thank you.

[COMMERCIAL BREAK]

Mitch Ratcliffe 37:40

Welcome back to Sustainability In Your Ear. You've been listening to my conversation with Kevin Shafer, Executive Director of the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District, and you can learn more about their work at mmsd.com.

Milwaukee's experience is a compelling case that wastewater utilities should operate as resource recovery hubs rather than disposal operations. I mean, the city was the first eco factory a century before the Veolia designation, because back in the 1920s they looked at their sewage and thought, hey, we can't let all this crap go to waste. And voila, Milorganite was produced—the fertilizer the district has made from biosolids for almost, well, more than a century.

As Kevin explained, they did it because they thought it was the right thing to do. And it's really that sense of doing the right thing that's been instilled within MMSD. There you go, a mission.

And today, the district's digesters generate up to 85% of the South Shore plant's electricity from biosolids, with enough leftover to continue to make Milorganite, which is a Cradle to Cradle product that returns 11 to $12 million annually to the city's budget.

Kevin and his team think beyond what they are required to do, to explore what they could do better. And that is a great example of forward thinking for any organization. Going beyond compliance, to embrace cross-sector partnerships and create value from waste streams, is the right way to think about every private entity's operations.

The take, make, waste and flush and forget era is so over, and that's why looking outside the box, outside your box, into others, into other systems, is the unlock for an economically resilient, circular system.

Milwaukee's regional outreach, such as to its breweries, is necessary to make digester-based energy and byproduct volumes large enough and reliable enough to attract buyers, and all of that can be done while reducing disposal costs for everyone in the city. The key idea here is that the waste management system will merge into the supply side of the economy. It currently serves as nothing more than a dumping ground, and that's an amazing economic opportunity.

Kevin's comments about Aqua Minerals in the Netherlands, which aggregates resources from 20 water utilities to produce materials for a variety of industries, illustrates what regional collaboration can achieve.

And central to Kevin's mission is the concept of utilities as anchor institutions with generational responsibilities. And I'd go further and say that any organization, public or private, needs to think in terms of generations, not quarterly return. I know that public company leaders will say, hey, we're slaves to the market's expectations, but they also say they want to build an enduring organization and brand. So I would retort, look at the brand value and resilience the long view can provide.

As someone in their 60s, I can appreciate Kevin's comment that he won't be there in 50 years, but MMSD will be. So ask yourself, what are you building that will last and serve your great-great-grandchildren? Some of the oldest companies and countries on this planet did think that way, and they're still running.

Finally, let's take this advice from Kevin. He said, you need to take the long vision when you're looking at some of these investments, and you need to look at what might be different 20 or 30 years down the road. Milwaukee's 2035 vision targeting 100% renewable energy and a 90% carbon reduction in the operations of MMSD emerged from that kind of thinking, and Kevin credits it with attracting new partners. All of a sudden, he said, they say, oh, here's someone that's thinking a little bit differently about something, and maybe we can help them, or they can help us. It's starting that dialog with a vision that gets the conversation going.

The key barrier blocking the explosion of the circular economy onto the scene isn't technology, but institutional culture, a focus on regulatory constraints and a lack of capacity to look beyond simple compliance with those regulations. So breaking that pattern, as Kevin argues, requires connectors like the Water Council to bridge public and private sectors.

And I hope this conversation connected you with some new ideas, and I hope you'll stay tuned for more innovator interviews. And also, would you take a look at our archive of more than 500 episodes of Sustainability In Your Ear, and maybe share one with your friends. Writing a review on your favorite podcast platform will help your neighbors find us. Folks, you're the amplifiers who can spread more ideas to create less waste. So please tell your friends, family and co-workers that they can find us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Audible and whatever purveyor of podcast goodness they prefer. We're out there everywhere.

Thanks, folks, for your support. I'm Mitch Ratcliffe. This is Earth911, and we will be back with another innovator interview soon. In the meantime, take care of yourself, take care of one another, and let's all take care of this beautiful planet of ours. Have a great day.

I still refer to where we came from as “back home,” two years after arriving in Southern Oregon. It’s a strange thing to orient myself in the past and, despite having spent roughly 50 years in and around Lakewood, Washington, I should be resettled in our new place. So, why do I still talk about Lakewood as “home”?

Perhaps it is because we tend to compare places rather than take them as whole, in and of themselves, which is how so many people fall into the trap if seeing one place, say the “urban life,” as comparatively better or worse than another. So, we hear that life in the country is better than in the city, or vice versa, rather than exploring the full spectrum of experience living in either, warts and all. Instead, we tend to lionize where we live—or identify with living, as I still seem to do, with Lakewood. I walked almost every day back there at Fort Steilacoom Park, a 340-acre park that included beautiful views of Mount Rainier (always “the Mountain” to me, since I first saw it in 1963), an abandoned mental hospital, and miles of trails that I traversed every which way over the past 30 years.

Here, in Trail, Oregon, the named ZIP Code rather than a defined town, I hike more than 3,500 acres of U.S. Army Corps of Engineers land that was supposed to be submerged by a flood-management dam that was never completed. It’s bigger, quieter, and also a beautiful illustratation of how temporary any home is. There are dozens of abandoned homesteads long the valley floor. Some erected using stones in the 1800s, many featuring cement foundations that decorate the hand-cleared fields still easily identifiable along Elk Creek.

Below, for example, is a foundation that sits above a series of water falls. I can imagine the homesteaders, as well as the native tribes that preceded them, enjoying sitting on the banks of the stream, listening to the water, the soothing white noise, which is a distinctly modern, sanitary-sounding description of the babbling and churning sound of a living river. But, there you go, I am still settling in, and I will be moving on like all the rest of the residents of this and every place. Modern inhabitation will always be temporary, until we learn to preserve and care for places perpetually. So, I continue to walk the path, curious to see what’s next. Elk Creek is an unfathomably deep place, worthy of the attention of a lifetime.

I feel the pull of many places. To paraphrase Norman Maclean, I am haunted by trails.

If you’d like to take a walk along the Elk Creek trail, which is an old county road that connected these abandoned farms to the Crater Lake highway, click here if the video isn’t visible below.