In an old novel I read years ago, Adam Bede, the title character conveys an attitude toward work that has always stayed with me.
Adam is a carpenter who takes pride in his craft. He has disdain for workers who simply show up and go through the motions. Early in the story, he complains that some workers, if the quitting-time bell rang while they had their hammer raised and a nail half driven, would just put the hammer down and leave.
Name any profession: The best people in it feel the way Adam Bede does. It’s not about going home at the stroke of 5 p.m. or whatever your quitting time is. It’s about doing the job, doing it well, and being proud of it.
Wastewater treatment operators have pride in abundance. They’re justly proud when their plants win honors like the Platinum Peak Performance Award from the National Association of Clean Water Agencies, recognizing five years of continuous permit compliance.
Minimum standards?
But what about doing better than the permit says? Even far better? That’s one thing that separates the good from the great in treatment operations.
These days, NPDES permit requirements set the performance bar pretty high, and they seem to inch it up a little every time a permit comes around for renewal. But still, when you think about it, what permits spell out are, by definition, minimum standards. And who really wants to do the minimum?
Now, of course, meeting a permit consistently and continuously is no small achievement, especially when a plant process is subject to changes in flow and waste strength caused by weather, upstream industrial process changes, and other factors no operator can control.
And of course, beating the permit would be easy if everyone could just drop in a tertiary plant and put out pristine effluent around the clock. The reality is that money is always an object, and taking out that extra BOD and TSS may come at a price.
Always getting better
But then there are plants where the managers and operators really do look at their permit limits as minimum standards and do everything in their power (and within their budget) to drive effluent parameters lower.
The same applies to biosolids. There are plants that struggle to comply with regulations, and there are those that produce superior products (and biosolids is in fact a product) while keeping the community on their side.
Improving performance can be difficult, but tools are available to make it easier and to make change lasting. In private industry, initiatives like Six Sigma and Lean help facility teams take a scientific approach to solving problems and fixing processes.
Six Sigma follows a five-step approach — Design, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control — to find the root cause of process variation, devise remedies, and make those remedies stick. Decisions are driven by data, not by experience, intuition, gut feel or trial and error.
Lean is a set of methodical approaches to reducing waste in all its forms, such as time, material, motion, defects and overprocessing. It is a way of getting to the desired result in the most efficient and effective manner possible. I wonder how many treatment plants have investigated methods like these.
Case in point
There’s another kind of discipline that’s widespread in private industry and is gaining a foothold on the biosolids side of wastewater treatment. It’s called an environmental management system (EMS) — a way of documenting and standardizing processes so that people can implement them effectively and consistently.
The National Biosolids Partnership offers an EMS program to wastewater agencies. You can read about it in this month’s “In My Words” feature — an interview with the Partnership’s Sam Hadeed.
Six Sigma, Lean and EMS have helped work wonders for many businesses. Has your facility explored how they might help you refine your process and beat your permit by a mile? If not, maybe that’s something to look into in the near future. If so, we’d certainly like to hear your story and share your successes with readers of this magazine.
Feel free to drop me a note about your process improvement initiatives. Just send a message to editor@tpomag.com.
