From water scarcity to water reuse, our Water Sustainability Blog has its finger on the pulse of water news, trends, and issues

The year 2020 has seen no shortage of troubling events. We’ve reported on many of them — from wildfires in the US and drought in Chile to COVID-19 around world — but one common thread lies behind all of our articles: optimism.

We’re living in an unsettling, but also a potentially transformational time. People are starting to think about wastewater treatment differently. Decision-makers are evolving from a wastewater treatment model to a resource recovery model, and from a less-efficient linear economy toward a circular economy.

And while our water resources may face hard limits, those limits can now be pushed to the horizon by revolutions already well underway in desalination and water reuse, two areas in which Fluence is a leader.

One role of our Water Sustainability Blog is to spread the word on decentralization, the idea of bringing modular treatment containers right to where they are needed, instead of installing extensive piping to connect to a central treatment plant.

While decentralized treatment has long been understood as a promising new direction for the water sector, its adoption was long impeded by technical and economic hurdles. At Fluence we’re changing all of that by supplying the essential technology, support, financing structures, and expertise for the decentralization revolution.

Thank you for tuning into the Fluence blog this year. We hope you enjoy our roundup of the 2020 blog posts viewed and shared most by our readers!

What Is Biological Wastewater Treatment?

This earned more page views than any other of our blog post published in 2020 and took third place for most-viewed page overall. Part of its success may be that biological treatment is a mainstay of the wastewater treatment sector, and the post offers a useful, concise review of legacy aerobic and anaerobic treatment processes. But the post is especially important for Fluence because it showcases our revolutionary approach to biological treatment, the membrane aerated biofilm reactor (MABR). MABR features improved effluent quality, energy savings, or increased capacity — all on a smaller footprint.

Facing the COVID-19 Pandemic Without Running Water

This difficult year has brought attention to the lack of safe running water and basic sanitation in many parts of the world. Hand-washing, a basic defense against disease transmission, is impossible for too many people. Even parts of the United States are underserved. At Fluence, we’d like to change that. Our mission is to empower communities and business to make the most of their water resources, and our water, wastewater, and reuse solutions can be quickly deployed anywhere in the world.

Decentralized Wastewater Treatment Adopted by Oilfield ‘Man Camp’

The most popular case study covered on the blog this year demonstrated Fluence’s expertise in highly efficient, quickly deployed wastewater treatment solutions for virtually any application. Temporary workforce housing has received its share of negative media coverage as wastewater from sudden population growth overwhelms local infrastructure. Operators need solutions they can install right away to keep their workers healthy and their camps on the right side of local authorities and communities. For one encampment in the desert outside Carlsbad, New Mexico, Fluence quickly turned a local regulatory crackdown into glowing praise from local political leaders, and increased the supply of safe, recycled water for nonpotable applications.

SUBRE Infographic: Upgrade Wastewater Treatment With Revolutionary MABR Technology

This year our SUBRE infographic stood out as the most-viewed and most-shared of the year, surpassing our infographics on Waste-to-Energy and NIROBOX™. SUBRE uses MABR technology to upgrade legacy wastewater treatment plants. SUBRE improves effluent quality, energy savings, and capacity, without plant expansion and with minimal interruption of operations. To upgrade, MABR towers are submerged in existing basins. That’s a game-changer, and this popular infographic helps visualize just how simple and beneficial a SUBRE retrofit can be.

Brackish Water as a Resource

With increasing global water shortages, it’s no surprise that attention has turned to nontraditional sources like brackish water, which is less saline than seawater and, therefore, less expensive to desalinate. Researchers have been discovering new brackish aquifers, as well as primarily freshwater aquifers that contain more brackish water in their depths than previously believed. Desalination of these abundant water sources will play a huge role in the management of our water future. Fluence’s NIROBOX™ line, which includes options for brackish water desalination, is ideal for taking advantage of these untapped reserves.

Fluence’s Water Sustainability Blog will continue to bring you more news and thought leadership in 2021. Subscribe below to stay up-to-date on the latest developments in water and wastewater, and learn how Fluence is paving the way to a decentralized water future.