To Matt Jenkins, optimizing a wastewater treatment plant is a lot like tuning a guitar.
“You can never just tune one or two strings and expect the others to stay the same,” he says. “As the tension changes on the neck, the tone of each individual string will change. A plant is much the same. You change one thing and it affects five or six other things. You basically work in a circle until finally it all stabilizes.”
That’s what Jenkins did for the City of Ridgefield (Washington) Wastewater Treatment Plant. In his two years there as lead operator, Jenkins and his
