Duct tape and cardboard, recycled bottles, toilet bowl floats and other items help solve tricky problems.It’s not always costly engineering solutions that fix problems in clean-water plants. Sometimes, it’s operators mixing the simplest materials with a heavy dose of ingenuity.Today at WEFTEC, the Water Environment Federation recognized winners and finalists in its third annual Operator Ingenuity Contest. The nearly 30 entries ranged from innovations in process control to public education programs. Six judges evaluated entries on three criteria:
Relevance/usefulness — Is the idea transferable to other plants?
Originality/creativity — but also safe.
Resourcefulness — Did the entrant use easily accessible materials?Several of the
