 to Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Medjuan, and our underwriter is the Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. So I'm really pleased to have my good friend, Dennis Furukawa, of real green power on the show today. And we're gonna be talking story about spaceship Earth. We have a problem, but we also have solutions. No good having a problem if you don't have a solution. So in previous shows, we defined the problem, basically the energy problems we have in the world. And so now we've got a series of episodes, we're gonna be talking solutions. And today we're gonna be talking about wastewater treatment solutions where we can save a lot of energy treating our wastewater and making the best use of our resources so we're not wasting power. So let's throw up the first slide and welcome to the show, Dennis. And I'm gonna ask Dennis to talk to us a little bit first of all about what about this efficiency and it being the best solution. Dennis, over to you. Well, thanks, Mitch, for inviting me to speak on this subject. I'm really passionate about water efficiency, energy efficiency, and it all goes to the heart of sustainability. And I was put on this path about 25 years ago. I've been designing for sustainability as an architect for many, many years. And I came to Hawaii with the idea of starting a water recycling and renewable energy technology company. And so through the good people at UH, I got some technology that was available from the Technology Transfer Department at UH. And through some work with HNEI, we worked with the Department of Energy to refine the technology and apply it for wastewater treatment in sewages. It was originally designed for dealing with dairy wastewater and it's an anaerobic digestion technology that we've been improving and focusing on energy efficiency. So rather than focusing just purely on wastewater quality, there are a number of other factors that go along in wastewater treatment. And predominantly one of the biggest things is sludge. Sludge production through aerobic technology creates a problem that is odor generating, solid waste handling, solid waste disposal and a real big not in my backyard problem. So we were focused on making a wastewater treatment technology that could be cited in close proximity to people's homes and neighborhoods. And so we invented a containerized wastewater treatment module that embodies our, the anaerobic digestion technology developed with the cooperation of HNEI. And we've packaged it. So we've been operating these systems now for several years and in close proximity to people's habitations. And it's going pretty well. So let's talk a little bit about the sludge reduction and energy savings that you were able to identify in the first installation, which was at the Hawaii Suits Treatment Plant. There's some really amazing results there on those two subjects. So do you wanna cover those first before we get to the modular toilets systems? Toilet system. Sure. Like I said, one of the chief problems with the siting to which treatment plants and operating them is handling all of the sludge that is generated through the aerobic treatment process. So we discovered that and yeah, we discovered that by putting anaerobic digestion ahead of aerobic treatment, you eliminate the production of sludge by 80%. You reduce that sludge production by 80%. And it's a tremendous advantage. And it really doesn't come at any energy cost at all. In fact, it saves 50% on the energy just on the energy savings in aerobic treatment. So that doesn't even account for what to do with the sludge, which is a giant problem that we're having in Oahu. I think they're talking about closing the landfill. Yeah, it has to be trucked off to the landfill and nobody likes them trucking it through their neighborhood and our landfill is getting filled up. So if we can reduce the sludge by 80%, wow, that's pretty huge in anybody's calculation because you have to have these big diesel trucks, they're burning diesel to truck it out there. So it's a pretty energy intensive effort just to get rid of it. Yeah, and there's another factor which is actually it's known as sludge dewatering. So you have to squeeze the water out of all of this sludgy wet stuff. And traditionally it's been done by letting out a slurry of smelly black sludge out onto a confined piece of land where it dries out under the sun and that attracts flies and it's a real dusty, horrible problem. We've been able to operate our modular wastewater treatment systems and not have to handle any sludge. So somebody has to handle a certain amount of sludge at the back end but through our systems, we are able to minimize that whole process such that it can be vacuumed up in a small truck and hauled away. Well, let's go on to the next slide of the modular sanitation systems that you developed. So tell us a story behind that. And why is it there? And what are the energy savings and more just as important, what are the cost savings? For example, to the city and county of Honolulu. All right, well, so this is a camp for the transitional housing or temporary housing. It's for people who are homeless who are houseless and they're under the care of the city and county at a facility over on the sand island. And they were formerly served by port-a-potties. They didn't have shower facilities, permanent shower facilities, nor permanent toilets. And that was an expensive, expensive proposition. They were spending about $30,000 a month to provide sanitation for about a hundred homeless person. The solution was to put a modular treat wastewater treatment system on site and to recycle the water that was coming out of those new bathroom systems and eliminate the wastewater. I mean, the port-a-potties. So that's what we did. It was the project cost about $600,000, but if you're spending $30,000 a month, then the payback period on this is just around two and a half years. So the system has been operating for about three years and it has flush toilets and showers inside. The water from the showers is being used to irrigate some gardens in this slide here. You can see the bathroom layout and the gardens that absorb the treated waters. And so this was a project that was funded by the city and county with grants from the state as well. So I'd just like to put in a comment. Like I was out there when it first opened and there was a lady that I was talking to, one of the residents there, she was talking to another lady and she was saying, wow, she said, this is just like being at a really nice hotel because they didn't have showers. They didn't have a place where they could wash their hands. And if you look at that slide, you can see that it's a beautiful system for them. And so it's, I mean, everybody's been to a porta potty and knows how awful they are and smelly. And this was just like a total step up for these residents. And they really, really appreciated it. And I'm sure appreciate it today. And so we're working to put similar systems in for harbors at the state small harbors. So there's one on Maui and there's one on Kauai that were under the engineering permitting process right now. And where are these built, Dennis? So they're a combination of various, we have some sources on the mainland and we bring the parts here and we assemble them on Sand Island. Okay. Yeah. And I think you have a local guy on Sand Island who actually assembles the containers, yes? Yes, there's a company called Container Storage Company, Hawaii and they're really great team members. We work together to do containerized solutions like for instance, these bathrooms. So not all of the systems that require containerized bathrooms that require onsite treatment. There are a lot of things that we're working on for the prisons, for example, so isolation facilities, but we're slowly getting some opportunities together where we're looking at more remote applications for our module. So what's been the feedback from the city and county? How do they feel about this project? No complaints so far, which is a good thing, you know? It's really, I think it's taken a while for people to be comfortable with the fact that this is like a septic system. It's not like a municipal sewer system. So you have to treat these things like you do, you know, your own household septic system. It benefits from that sort of level of care. The, yeah, the proclivity for people to use to put non biodegradable things in the toilets. So, you know, all you listeners out there, right? Those flushable wipes, they are devastating for the sewers. It's costing, you know, communities, the state, untold millions of dollars a year to take those things out of the sewers. It's, yeah. So if you're looking at saving money, just a simple thing like that, let's change the way you do things. You don't just take this so-called flushable wipe, which if you can't even rip it apart, there may be a plastic mesh or something in them and they're impossible to do it. You just throw them in the toilet. I mean, come on, you know, millions of dollars, that's your taxpayers dollars, going to be able to have to, you know, unclog the sewer system. So that's a tremendous waste of energy and money. And we're all talking about solutions here. So the solution is, as Dennis said, if you can't eat it, don't throw it down the toilet. Yeah, I think that we've identified, right, a major way that we can apply this kind of solution to, right, to solving big energy costs and to solve, you know, wastewater problems or reduce the wastewater problems for the state and the city and county. So let's throw up the next slide and we can talk about that. It's really a brilliant idea. Go for it. As many people know, the sewer systems in Honolulu, that serves Honolulu are like woefully plagued with all sorts of problems. And one of the biggest problems is that they're trying to gather the wastewater from far corners of the South Shore and feed them to the wastewater treatment plant over on Sand Island. And the energy that's required to pump that water from, you know, Aina Hina and from Diamondhead and Waikiki all the way across. I mean, these pipes are, you know, below sea level for most of the way, right? I mean, they're a big cause of pollution and it takes a tremendous amount of energy. And once it gets the wastewater treatment plant, that water just goes right straight into the ocean and contributing to pollution. You know, if we can put wastewater treatment plants that produce recycled water and reuse that recycled water for irrigation purposes within the neighborhoods essentially that wastewater was generated in, then that's gonna reduce all of the problems at the existing wastewater treatment plants and it's going to increase our ability to recycle and reuse water. And I'm gonna say that we're putting this into practice personally, ourselves in a project. What this is, this is a neighborhood. This is a community-scaled wastewater treatment infrastructure that produces recycled water out of all of the wastewater in the community. And what we've done here is actually we've scaled up the whole idea of the wastewater treatment systems that we put in at the homeless camp. We split the gray water from the black water. So the black water is from toilets and from kitchens. So only that water gets treated in the traditional sewage treatment plant. The other forms of wastewater are gray, are referred to as gray water and those waters can be recycled on each home site. So there's a code that allows for gray water systems on private property and we take advantage of that to recycle all of the shower water, all of the laundry water, all of the water that is generated in the home that is not septic sewage water or full of food. So for the water that is being treated as sewage, we're treating that to the highest rating. It's called R1 recycled water which allows that water to be used in all forms of irrigation. So what this allows us to do is to completely eliminate the wastefulness of water. And it actually barely comes at any energy costs at all because the volume of gray water is such a large fraction of the total amount of wastewater that a house generates that if you're reducing the amount of water that's going to the sewage system by 60%. That's a 60% savings, right? 60% savings in volume, 60% savings in energy costs, 60% savings in all metrics. So it's a higher front end investment in terms of the hardware that we're using but we're getting a lot of bang for the buck in terms of energy savings and being environmental stewards and achieving sustainability. Well, also we have a potable water problem developing here in Hawaii now. Our aquifers are, I don't want to say drying up but they're being used up. Some of them are being polluted for example by the Red Hill disaster and we have no idea what the effect of that's gonna be and so we need to be looking for other sources of fresh water. I mean, otherwise we're not gonna be taking showers in the future. So anything we can do to save that is also part of the energy solution because it takes energy to treat that water. As Dennis said, it takes energy to pump it through the, both through the city water main and also once it's used in the sewer main back to the sewage treatment plant. So we have a solution or Dennis does real green power has a solution to do that. And so I wanna go back to the previous slide though. If we could, Michael and I wanna point out the little red squares on the previous slide. That one, yeah, that slide because one of the features it shows is that you collect the water where those little squares are before it gets into the main sewage pipeline. So it's like a distributed sewage treatment system. So you treat it as close to the source as possible. And as Dennis said, then you can recycle the water locally on gardens and on medians, on golf courses. And you saw how lush those plants were at the sand island facility where they were using those to grow various plants. And so you really reduce the flow of water. You're making the best use of your resources and you're not wasting anything. Dennis, I've been doing a lot of talking. It's your idea. Well, you know, tell us a little bit more, what have I missed? Well, that distributed wastewater treatment system actually also takes the nutrients that are essentially, you know, they form pollutants in the wastewater. And the wastewater treatment plant makes it in a form that makes it directly available to the plants. Now, if we were actually gonna have to take that water and make it so that we could discharge it into the ocean, we would actually have to spend more energy to do that. And if it ends up in the ocean, it's only like adding to pollution in the ocean. Whereas if we can add that, those nutrients to, for instance, the golf courses or farms or, you know, yards, then people will have to spend less money on fertilizer. So one of the big issues that we're having or, you know, one of these future issues is fertilizers, nitrogen, you know, nitrogen, phosphorus, all of those things are commodities and it's in your wastewater. Folks, it's free. I mean, if we, you know, if we just can recycle our water and put it in, so. And we're pumping it out to the ocean, so that helps kill the coral. So it's got multiple benefits. We got about four minutes left and before we get to the sign off part, why don't we talk a little bit about cesspools and the cesspools situation? Like for example, on the big island, they have 80,000 cesspools and they've got a lot of communities that have a, have a cesspools, but like you said earlier, they have to, if they use a centralized wastewater treatment plant, they'd have to pump that for miles and miles and miles, blast through rock to lay the pipe down. Tell us how this can be applied to some of these smaller communities out there in a kind of a, once again, calling on the distributed wastewater treatment plant we talked about like you're talking about up on the North Shore. Yeah, thanks. So it really is, you can apply the same technology at a different scale. So for instance, one of those 20 foot, like just like the module that we use at the homeless camp, that could actually serve eight or 10 homes. If there was a way that a block, a block of homes, let's just say they back the backyard neighbors, you have neighbors on the back side of your fence, so if you had a street with neighbors, with their backyards touching you, if everybody had a sewage ejector pump that went along the back fence line to a neighborhood wastewater treatment plant, and that neighborhood wastewater treatment plant sent the treated, recycled water back to the homes in the form of a garden hose bib thing, the purple pipe divide for garden irrigation, you could have a pretty simple solution right there that people could eliminate their cesspools with. Yeah, we have a big problem because the EPA is, what do we call that when the state is under notice that if they don't do it, they're gonna start getting fined, like big bucks? I will say this, that one of the big issues moving forward for a lot of people is going to be that getting a septic system as a replacement for the cesspool, it may require what's called an evaporation transpiration, you know, raised bed facility like a garden that's specially designed and allocated for that purpose. And so that's an elevated system that a septic system in your home's not made to do with it. So that's pretty expensive. It sounds expensive as heck. So here, once again, we have a solution that always saves energy, but saves you money. I mean, how great is that? So we've got about a minute left and it's time to wrap it up. So let's have my slide seven on because I have my little pitch that I always like to give. So basically what I like to tell everybody is our world is fragile, our future energy needs are great and it's time for those of political power. All you politicians, out there, pay attention to this. You've got the political power. You're sent there to do a job. And here we have a solution. And why don't you run with, pick up the ball, get hold of Dennis, and he can tell you how we can implement this in our communities and save money, water, coral, our water quality, surfing spots, it'd be a better place to surf. And then you people with financial strength, all you billionaires that live here in a world that just, I don't know what you're doing with your billions of dollars, but you could be putting it to good use here in Hawaii. So now's the time to make a difference. So get out there and make a difference for not only our community, but for the world. Because this is a model that can be applied throughout the, certainly throughout the Pacific Islands who are all having problems with wastewater. And this kind of technology would be really good. Made in Hawaii, made at the University of Hawaii itself. So the University of Hawaii is solving today's problem. And Dennis has got a license to that technology. He's applied it, he's demonstrated, it works. He's got the data to show it works. Now's the time to get on with it. And now let's throw up the last slide, which is how you can contact Dennis and start the ball rolling. So let's not just stand around and say, oh gee, that's great. Let's do something about it. You got to do it. So Dennis, final word from you and I'll shut up. Thanks, Mitch. Yeah, it's nice to have somebody, you know, leading the charge. Hallelujah. Okay, well, that's our show for today. And we'll be back in two weeks with another show on Hawaii, the state of clean energy with your host, me, Mitch Yuan. Aloha, everyone. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please like us and click the subscribe button on YouTube and the follow button on Vimeo. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn and donate to us at thinktechhawaii.com. Mahalo.