Aaron Zahn is president and CEO of NuTerra, which is leading the transformation of the wastewater and organic waste industry to mitigate the global water crisis. He recently spoke with Modern Pumping Today to explain how NuTerra has quickly become a preeminent developer and operator of public and private organics waste recycling facilities. For more information, visit www.nuterra.green.
MPT: What are some of the advantages NuTerra brings to projects for managing and implementing biosolid and other material handling solutions?
Aaron Zahn: The number one advantage is 100 percent success on a lifecycle basis. When you’re looking at the track record of solids handling—be it biosolids or food waste or most processes with a material handling element to them—the industry as a whole is proliferated with failures. Often time this is due to working with a waste stream that is regulated like water but managed like solid waste. Unfortunately, there’s never been an industry leader or a professional organization that emphasizes how to operate within the confines of the regulations but also engineer systems that take into account the material handling element.
About six years ago, we started by aggregating wastewater facilities into a database. We’re now able to model exactly their unit cost and how they operate, which then allows us to forecast model of any of our prospective clients. When we forecast for a client, we can show them where they’re going to spend their money as well as what to do and what not to do when addressing the solid handling elements of organic waste. For example, we could advise a client not to design an auger system in excess of 20 feet to avoid replasticizing and making their material handling more difficult. That knowledge base allows NuTerra to deliver exactly what we say we will—or better
MPT: Government regulations, resource pollution, and increasing energy costs are the three top factors facing many municipalities as well as handling and treatment facilities. What options can NuTerra provide for cost-effective and environmentally sound waste management?
Aaron Zahn: With the resources NuTerra brings to our clients, the options are practically limitless. We can come into a facility, bring in our technology, and take on that risk from the private entity or alleviate that risk from the public. Typically, we structure our transactions in the form of public-private partnerships where what we bring to the public sector is our capability and understanding how technologies can be interconnected to create a successful project and then maintaining that project over its lifecycle.
The key to success is creating predictable costs. It’s unpredictable costs that cause infrastructure difficulty. When the public sector is unprepared for these costs, that’s when they have to go back to their rate base for more revenue.
MPT: Municipalities are frequently caught with underperforming and out-of-date infrastructure. What are some of NuTerra’s options for these operators?
Aaron Zahn: There’s a great deal of innovation in our industry—whether it be in energy conservation, energy production, resource reutilization—yet at a state level regulations are getting more and more stringent. What NuTerra can provide is a series of design solutions that adapt over a ten- to twenty-year framework. For example, many of our designed facilities in Florida are now providing 100 percent reuse on their water and 100 percent reuse on their solids. We’re a big believer that using less energy is better than producing more, and energy efficiency is at the core of our design solutions. ◆

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MODERN PUMPING TODAY, October 2015
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