 It's Wednesday afternoon and we know what time that is. It's time for Hawaii, the state of clean energy. I'm your host, Mitch Ewen. Our sponsor is Hawaii Energy Policy Forum, and that's a program of the University of Hawaii's College of Social Sciences. And I've got to put in a plug for my own organization, financial support from the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute. I'm pleased to welcome our guest today, Joakim Schneider. He's a project coordinator for wastewater alternatives and innovations. Joakim, welcome to our show. Thank you very much, Mitch. Glad to be on. Thank you very much for having me. Well, first thing we'd like to know, give us a top level view of what is wastewater alternatives and innovations. Tell us about it. Yeah, gladly. So VAI stands for Wastewater Alternatives and Innovations, like you said. It is a young nonprofit organization based here in Honolulu, which is dedicated primarily to solving the cesspool issue in Hawaii, but also works with waste and wastewater in general. So biomass and also injection wells are topics. But our number one is helping with the cesspools. So what's your business model? Before we get into the things you actually do, what's your business model? It's reading through some of your materials. Talked about it, saw a nonprofit. So I thought, wow, how can this be? Yeah. So you can imagine that when in 2017, the cesspool ban was passed, meaning that in 2050, all cesspools have to be eliminated. But there was no funding associated with that. There was some problem there. And so Stuart Coleman, my boss, who is a member of the cesspool conversion working group with the state, saw that there was just a big need for help. And so not only homeowners would need the help to help pay for these systems, but also legislature needed help in order to find out how to facilitate this process. And so this nonprofit was born. And our business model is that we're based on grants and donations. So we have organizations across the state, be it philanthropic or otherwise, that really recognize this cause as worth their money. And so they fund us. And we have individuals donating to us on an individual basis. So that's how we subsize. Oh, I think I saw somewhere, and we'll see as we go through. But I want to get it at the top end. It's kind of like, and tell me if I'm wrong or not. It would look like wastewater and water as a service or wastewater treatment and water as a service. So rather than, like you said, they're a homeowner having to front up all this money, you find ways to put it in and then they pay for it on a fee with some kind of a metric, probably gallons of waste processed. Or how does that work? Yeah, thank you for picking that up. So again, since we're the nonprofit, we sort of play the middleman role. We connect the local people that are in need of wastewater technology to those technology companies who can offer these services. And one of these companies, which I'll get to later called Cambrian Innovation, is able to offer an innovative financing model where they are able to put down the wastewater treatment plant onto the ground and connect the houses of the certain community to their treatment plant without any upfront capital costs. And then instead of having the community own the system, the company owns the system and the community only pays a monthly fee. And that's just one of the many innovative technologies that we are helping to bring to Hawaii in order to have, like Stuart, my boss likes to call it, many arrows in our quiver because every situation needs a different technology, different financing to make it work. Well, it's really a brilliant strategy because, first of all, you have a legislated market. I mean, oh, this is the law. So right away, you define the market. And next, you come up with this innovative financing method that doesn't make everybody broke. They can actually pay as they go. So that's a really great model. And I congratulate you guys on coming up with this. And we'll see a lot more of that in Hawaii because the state's basically broke. You can't rely on government now to fund all these major projects. And we're seeing that in transportation where we have transportation services contracted just coming out. So instead of having to buy 30 buses, a private industry or a private company will come in and pay for it. And the county just pays on a fee for a user fee basis. So nice one. So let's start looking at zero in on some more of the details and looking at this market. And so let's look at the next slide. Yeah. Thank you very much. So I talked about the mission and the vision so we can skip over that. But our five pillars, which you can see here on the bottom, are what Vai likes to focus on. And that's what we use as our guiding principles. Innovative technology, meaning we bring in innovative technology partners from the mainland or from Asia, from Europe to Hawaii to supplement the existing technologies that we have. You can imagine, septic systems have been around for a while, but they're not always the best solution. And so we bring in more. Then we have financial resources where we try to not only provide financial resources that are available through federal and state funds to homeowners themselves, but also help homeowners and communities come up with innovative financing solutions. Then policy and advocacy is about trying to make sure that the legislature goes in the right direction and many successful bills have already been passed. I mentioned Act 125 earlier. Then outreach and education is big because if you can imagine a homeowner that doesn't know that they have a cesspool in their backyard, it's likely not going to do anything about it. And so homeowners have to know that they have one and also know the hazards that a cesspool can pose. And last but not least, pilot projects are important because if a homeowner is told, OK, you have to put this $20,000, $30,000 technology into your backyard, they want to see one in action before they buy it. And so pilot projects are important where we partner with these technologies and bring them to Hawaii, put one into the ground in a public space, maybe a beach park or a public farm, where then the homeowners can come look at it and decide for themselves if that's something they want. So why don't you tell us just drill in a little bit on the outreach and education? I mean, how do you find the actual homeowners? This guy doesn't even know I have a cesspool in my plot. How do you know he's got a cesspool on his property? And then tell us how you educate them. Yeah, gladly. So there have been a number of studies mostly in the late 2000s and in the early 2010s where the University of Hawaii and the Department of Health and other parties have come together to look at existing sewer networks and existing on-site disposal systems that are registered such as septic systems and then through methods of elimination found houses that have to have something else. And 99.9% of the time that something else is a cesspool. And so that's how you came up with these databases. We have approximately 88,000, if not more, cesspools still across the state of Hawaii. Yeah, a lot. And so the way that we do our outreach advice is we hold town halls. We actually have one in Kahalu tomorrow evening where you can still register for it. And we do mailers. We have a website by cleanwater.org where we have a lot of information. And we partner with local outreach organizations that like to have our expertise on the topic of cesspools to supplement their information. So I'm really curious, like what happens when a homeowner finds out he didn't know he had a cesspool, finds out he has a cesspool, then you come in and you're educating them. And do they get shocked, like sticker shock? I mean, how do they react? Oftentimes, yes. Oftentimes they say either, oh yeah, we've had a lot of problems in the past. We've had to get this pumped. We've had to, you know, it's been caving in and we've been wondering what that hole in our backyard is. Or you have the people that say, well, but it's working, the water is just going down. Why do we have to change anything about this? And so then, most of the time when we tell them, you know, we have two times the rate of staff infections in Hawaii as in the mainland. We have four times the rate of MRSA infections in Hawaii as on the mainland. Mostly because of these cesspools we have. Horrifying algae blooms that destroy our coral reef ecosystems, they sort of come around and they say, oh, I don't wanna swim in my own waste when I go into the ocean. So I do have to do something about this. How can you help us? And then we say, well, we can help you in a number of ways. We're related to our pillars. We can help you find the right technology. We can help you set you up with the right people. Most of the time that's a local engineering firm that can help them get the permitting done and install the system with the contractor in the state of Hawaii and financing. So we can help them direct them towards funding and help them apply in a number of different situations they apply for different funding. So that's where we come in. So let's have the next slide up and let's talk about injection wells in Hawaii. So a typical injection well is not the same thing as a cesspool and we'll get to that difference. But first I wanna talk about what a typical injection well looks like. It is usually approximately four inches in diameter. You can see a typical cross section here on the image on the left. And they are used to dispose of wastewater that has been mostly treated to a secondary treatment level. So relatively high level of treatment. They're used for condominiums as well as wastewater treatment plants. And you can see it's basically a PVC pipe that's vertically in the ground that is solid casing for the first couple of feet and perforated casing when you reach a layer of soil or lava rock where you can dispose of water relatively quickly. And so that's what they look like they can be between 20 and 100 feet deep in the ground. And the reason I have the slide on the right here is because it shows that injection wells are only really permitted in the red area. So only near the coast. Here's the island of Maui as an example. So wherever there's any risk to drinking water aquifers, they're not allowed. And even in the red areas starting in the year 2018 the Department of Health is not allowed to issue a permit for new injection wells unless there's no other alternatives. For example, if there's no space for other alternatives or if there's a slope that's too big for other alternatives. And so that's where injection wells come in but ideally we're trying to move away from these because we do want to protect our oceans. So let's have the next slide up. I think this illustrates a little bit more of the business model that we talked about. Yeah, so this is the company that we touched on earlier, Cambrian Innovation. We're very happy to partner with them. They're from the mainland originally and they have been very successful working there with breweries as partners that produce wastewater but also they're moving strongly towards the residential wastewater. And so the way it works for them is what they call the Water Energy Purchase Agreement, the WEPA. And it works by having a community producing wastewater as they often do. And that wastewater is sent through a collection system of pipes to the Cambrian Innovation Wastewater Treatment Plant that they have installed there at no cost to the community. And the community only pays a monthly fee to Cambrian Innovation per gallon of treatment. So you don't pay for repair, you don't pay for operation and maintenance. It's all no headache. You only pay for what's treated and it's pennies on the gallon. So it's really a reasonable fee. And then the cool thing about them or one of the coolest thing about them is that you can produce, due to their cutting edge wastewater treatment technology, reusable water that can be used, for example, as irrigation for agricultural lands, which can also then house or host the site of the treatment plant itself. So it's really a circular approach. And since all the water is ideally used for irrigation, you don't have any need for injection wells and you don't inject water near the groundwater resources or the ocean. So is this a solution to injection wells then? So where you have an existing injection well, you put in a Cambrian system and then do all the things you just told us about. Absolutely, it can be one injection well or ideally many. You know, some communities here in Hawaii have 20, 30 injection wells. If you have many condominiums, for example, next to each other, and those could be all replaced by just one Cambrian system. Okay, let's go to the next slide and you can tell us a little bit more about the Cambrian system. Yeah, gladly. So many of these points I already touched on on the left, you can see what a typical Cambrian system looks like. You have your modular system, which is approximately the size of a shipping container, obviously, depending on how many gallons per day you're treating, but it's scalable. So if your community grows due to new buildings or due to new flows, it can be scaled up without too much hassle. And so that's a great point for future expansions if you're a community thinking about which ways sort of treatment to go with. And like I said, it's risk-free ownership. Cambrian owns the system. And so after, you know, so and so many years after the contract is over, the community has the option to purchase the system, but they do not have to. So it's really great, especially if there's not a lot of capital to spend in the beginning because no capital expenses needed in the beginning. So I have one of the labels you have on side of the shipping containers, EcoVolt. EcoVolt or EcoVolt, what's that to do with? Yeah, so EcoVolt is a technology that is proprietary to Cambrian Innovation and it is a cutting edge MBR that stands for membrane bioreactor, which is a type of secondary wastewater treatment that is small in footprint and low in energy cost. And so a couple of those have been installed, a couple of MBRs I should say have been installed in Hawaii. For example, at Wahiwa Municipal Treatment Plant, they use an MBR and they are sort of the future of municipal wastewater treatment because they're just combining the best properties that you could have. So are you producing energy or why do they call it EcoVolt? It implies it's like now it's producing electricity. Yeah, that's a great question. So Cambrian sort of has a route A, type of logic system behind it. If you have high strength wastewater, as you would have, for example, if you're treating brewery wastewater or if you're treating industrial type wastewater, then there's so much energy in that wastewater that it's worth it to produce biogas out of it. And so that would then produce biogas, you can create energy from that. And that's a great way to offset the cost of the treatment as well. Or you go down more of the municipal side, if you have residential strength wastewater, which is not really strong enough to produce tons of biogas, but you can treat it so well that you produce irrigation type water and that can then offset the cost because you save on water use that you would otherwise have to pay for. So it's either one or the other, but it's always at least one of those options available. Very good. Let's throw up the next slide. Yeah, so injection wells are, like I said, they're four inch PVC pipes, they're pretty deep, but cesspools are really just a hole in the ground and they don't receive any type of treatment at all. So the wastewater from the house is going in there from the toilet, kitchen, bathroom, everything goes right in there. And so that's super dangerous to the environment because all those pathogens just travel to the groundwater and from the groundwater to the ocean, to drinking water resources. And like I said, there are 88,000 cesspools across the state of Hawaii that are estimated to release 53 million gallons of sewage per day into our groundwater resources. It's a mind-boggling number, I know. And so to compare that to something, if you remember in Waikiki, I wasn't in Hawaii for that, but in Waikiki in the sewage spill in 2006, approximately 48 million gallons were released. So that is less than is released every day through cesspools in Hawaii. And that sewage spill in 2006 was a huge, huge scandal that made international headlines. And so this cesspool issue is really dangerous, especially if you picture that photo here on the left from the Hanalei flood, which just shows that the natural catastrophes are unfortunately going to get more and more. And so our infrastructure has to be resilient against that. So I recall that happening and some poor guy fell in the canal from the L.Y. and got flesh-eating disease. I'm not sure if he actually died in the end, but they had to chop parts of his body off. It was pretty horrible, but yeah, really bad. And that's the kind of, that's like the staff infection you're talking about about it. But I didn't realize it was so prevalent in Hawaii. That's not well known. No, and I'm sure the tourism authority would like it to remain that way, but hopefully we can fix this problem by eliminating our cesspools and injection wells as soon as possible. Well, I just wanna ask it, how hard is the government pushing this? I mean, is this just being swept under the table and everybody hopes it'll just go away naturally or is there actually people really taking this on? Do we have champions in the government that are pushing to get this thing done to solve the problem? That's a great question. So I would say it's a growing awareness and with that awareness, just like your reactions right now of saying that's crazy, those are the same reactions that the government also has when they find out. It's a lot of, yeah, with awareness comes action and a couple of these actions that we have seen in the past were tax credits for homeowners who replaced their cesspools. Unfortunately, those tax credits have expired by now, but we're hoping to get those renewed in the near future. Then further actions are the creation of the cesspool priority areas, which were done by the Department of Health, which sort of show areas where cesspools have been proven to be detrimental to the drinking water resources. And so those areas will have to ideally upgrade earlier than 2050. And as the time goes by, this legislative session, obviously everything is about COVID, but people are still pushing this and new bills and new legislature will be passed that will facilitate this sooner than later. I wonder what the health bill is like, okay, people get staff infections, they get sick, they go to the doctor. That must cost the state a lot of money. Oh yeah. Just, you know, create people that get sick from the groundwater. So let's go to the next slide. I mean, it kind of illustrates what you told us about how a cesspool constructed bunches go through it and educate us all. Yeah, gladly. So we have a picture here. I wanna give credit to Michael Mazzacapo who created this. It is a cross-section of a typical cesspool. You can picture it. It's usually approximately six to eight feet in diameter. And it can be between 10 to 15 feet deep. That's sort of the average, but we've seen some that are really shallow. We've seen some that are really deep. And like I said, there's no treatment before this. Everything goes straight in there with completely no treatment. And as you can see in the bottom, there's sort of the groundwater showing sometimes the groundwater is even inside of the cesspool, meaning that the waste goes straight into our rivers, our streams, and therefore our ocean resources. And so this direct connection is what poses these hazards to public health and the environment. And I suppose people pour paint and oil and all sorts of other nasty stuff inside. They just pour it down the drain, right? Insecticides, Javex, so it kills any of the enzymes that are eating up the sludge. Yeah, it's terrible. And so the longer you have these cesspools, the more they clog up and the more these terrible things seep into our environments. It's really sad to think about. Let's go to the next slide and you can show us where all these cesspools are. Yeah, gladly. So this is from an article in Hawaii Business Magazine that my boss Stuart wrote. It is showing in brown, every brown dot represents the location of one cesspool. And you can see the big island has approximately half of all the cesspools in the state of Hawaii, but all other islands, Maui, Oahu, and Kauai, Moloka are not pictured here, but also them have a significant amount. And it's not only it is going through all types of ecosystems, all types of altitudes, but also all kinds of socioeconomic layers. So they're really everywhere. And here in yellow, you can see the upgrade areas, the priority upgrade areas as defined by the Department of Health. And the two highest as of now priority areas are Kahalu, Oahu, and Upcountry Maui that you can see there. But all those yellow areas are shown to be very important that we upgrade those cesspools as soon as possible. And these upgrade areas are also in review right now and will be updated very soon. So keep on the lookout for that. So I hope the University of Hawaii is helping with that, are they? Definitely, yeah, heavily involved and doing lots of very interesting research, including dye tracer studies, where for example, you have a cesspool somewhere and you put dye into the cesspool itself and that dye later, 10 minutes later, sometimes shows up right at the beach. So you know that the connection is just immediate and how little filtration is going on. Oh, I wanna put a plug in for you, H. I mean, everybody loves to criticize the University, especially when times are tougher, when they're looking for more money for the football team, blah, blah, blah. You know, you guys are living in your ivory tower, you know, what the heck are you doing for us? Well, this is what they're doing for us. You know, they're trying to solve an immediate problem. And if it wasn't for them, you know, not just them, but you know, they're helping solve this really terrible problem. So hats off to the University of Hawaii. That's right. Next slide, please. I got my plug in. Yeah, so now we're getting sort of into some of the possible conversion technologies. We have here something we're really proud of. It's Cinderella. That's a company from Norway that we're partnered with who produce the most advanced type of incineration toilet. And we've been able to put two of these in the ground in Hawaii so far, one on Moko Oloi and one at Kulima Farms. And so these are waterless. They don't need to be hooked up to a water line. They don't need to be hooked up to a sewer line because they are able to incinerate all excrement to odorless and pathogen-free ash. And they can be powered either by propane or by electricity, so it's very flexible. You can put them in remote areas. You can put them in houses. They're really a fantastic solution for toilet waste itself. What happens to the ash? You can take the ash, put it in the trash or you can put it in the soil as a soil amendment. I was just going to say, at H&I, we had a big program on flash carbonization of biomass and it showed that you could double or really increase the production of your crops by putting carbon into the soil. That's right. It's like peripreta, which they found in the Amazon like thousands of years ago. The Mayans and people down there, the Aztecs used to burn parts of their forests and they had tremendous growth. And so now people actually mine it, you know, this dirt is black and it's very, very fertile. So let's go to the next slide. Yeah, so here are other technologies that are able to deal with the whole broad range of wastewater, not only toilet waste. We have systems that are either able to replace or supplement a conventional septic system. And just to give a little refresher, septic system is usually a septic tank, which receives all wastewater from the house and settles out the bigger particles and then a leach field, which receives the water that comes out of the septic tank and then trickles away all that wastewater over a larger area into the surrounding soils and the soil sort of acts like a filter. And these septic systems, you know, have been used for decades. However, they just don't provide that level of treatment that you need and especially in coastal areas and high groundwater areas here in Hawaii. And so these three technologies that I wanna highlight here are able to remove those nitrogens that we don't want in our groundwater. So we have bio filters, for example, by the company Elgin that we're partnering with, they are essentially putting wood chips underneath a leach field. And those wood chips are able to provide a habitat for certain bacteria that can treat the wastewater much better than just a conventional leach field could. Then we have aerobic treatment units that use electricity to provide tiny little air bubbles, which aerobic bacteria need to survive. And those bacteria, again, can treat the wastewater better. One company that we're partnering with is Fuji Clean. And then constructed wetlands are also, just like bio filters, nature-based, meaning no electricity solutions that are able to use just the regular mechanisms that nature uses to break down pathogens and nitrogens with plants and also produce high-quality effluent. So those systems we're trying to use in Hawaii more and more. And we're helping these companies come into the market, get the required permits, and be used here more and more. I have one final question. I can throw up the last slide just so people can see how they can contact WAI. But how busy are you? Like, okay, we have this tremendous market, 88,000 cesspools need to be replaced. I mean, like you have like 3,000 guys out there fixing this stuff or what's the level of activity here? That's a fantastic question. So right now, the state of Hawaii is replacing approximately 150 cesspools per year in the state of Hawaii. 150? 150, and we have 88,000 left. So at the current pace, we're never going to meet that mandate of no more cesspools by 2050. So we have to ramp that up by 20 times to approximately 3,000 a year to meet that mandate. And so the bottlenecks are everywhere. You need more engineers, you need more contractors, and you need more homeowners that are willing to upgrade. And so we're working on all of those fronts where we're working on workforce development programs with the community colleges, and we're working on outreach to the homeowners as well as financial resources. So we're trying to work on all those fronts. You can imagine we're really busy and we love to work with other people if you're interested, reach out to us. And yeah, again, that's by the nonprofit. It sounds like this is a huge jobs creation project here, program. Absolutely. So the legislators that are watching the show, please note that here's thousands of jobs and it's all funded by private industry. So it's not coming out of the government's coffers pretty well. So there you go. Let's make some work for all these people that are unemployed. So anyway, Joaquin, thank you very much for coming on the show. This is how we can contact people. There's a little splash screen with your website on it. So please, you know, those people in the audience, please contact WAI, Wastewater Alternatives Innovations. And Joaquin, thanks very much for being on my show. Great slides, great presentation. You obviously know your subject. So well done. Thank you very much for having me on. Appreciate it, Mitch. Okay, so this is Mitch Eulen from Hawaii, the state of clean energy and hopefully clean cesspools saying signing off.