Interview with Jim Lauria and Adam Tank

Transcript

[Sheldon Young]
Welcome to No Footprints, a podcast brought to you by Alfa Laval. I’m Sheldon Young.

[Jason Moreau]
And I’m Jason Moreau.

[Sheldon Young]
We’re here to talk about impact and to share the efforts and people behind making sustainability real. Here we are again, my friend. Is it real or is it real?

Which is the best way to say that?

[Jason Moreau]
I don’t know. I mean, I suppose it depends what country you’re in.

[Sheldon Young]
I guess true. Making sustainability real.

[Jason Moreau]
It has a more of a regal tone.

[Sheldon Young]
Right? Right? That’s where my head went.

I guess I’ll stick to the traditional pronunciation. Sure. So not to confuse the audience, though they’re smart enough not to be confused.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, exactly.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, boy. So, my friend, what’s news?

What’s news with you? We’ve got a couple. We have double trouble guests today.

Double trouble.

[Jason Moreau]
Yes.

[Sheldon Young]
We don’t do that often.

[Jason Moreau]
Yes.

[Sheldon Young]
It’s a lot of people, but we managed it well, I think, and they did as well. They’re professionals.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, exactly. No, they managed it well. I try to pick a news story that goes with the guest. This one doesn’t, but I did think it was an important and interesting sustainability story.

So nothing to do with our guests, but timely. My neighbors. Okay.

All right. I don’t feel so bad. I make you feel better now.

Yeah. It’s about the cattle industry and the fight of the screw worm parasite.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, yeah.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah. It’s just really interesting because they’re actually trying to fast track a facility. You think of it as almost like a factory.

The facility is $750 million, which sounds like a lot of money, except they’re essentially trying to protect the $113 billion US cattle industry.

[Sheldon Young]
That sounds like a lot more than million.

[Jason Moreau]
Correct. Yeah. So the ROI is there.

[Sheldon Young]
I’m an engineer, by the way.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah.

[Jason Moreau]
I’m glad you’re here to check my math. But essentially what this facility does is essentially churn out sterile versions of the screw worm, of the screw fly.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, I’ve heard of this.

[Jason Moreau]
Screw worm fly. Sorry.

[Sheldon Young]
Right. Right.

[Jason Moreau]
Yes.

[Sheldon Young]
I’ve heard of this. It’s the tactic. They do it with mosquitoes as well for malaria.

[Jason Moreau]
Mosquitoes, fruit flies. It’s a very well-known tactic for, we’ll call them biological scourges like this.

Essentially, this facility eventually needs to produce literally a hundred million flies in order to make a dent. But apparently, historically, this is what we have done, I guess, back in the 60s and 70s. This is how we defeated this particular pest to start with.

We had completely eradicated it, and so our infrastructure for fighting it went by the wayside. So now we’re having to build up that infrastructure again to essentially combat it. But it is highly effective, but I found it really, really interesting from a sustainability standpoint where, I don’t know, just using the natural world in a way to help sustain our infrastructure, going with investments in terms of what’s important, how do we prioritize certain things.

And maybe in that way, there is a bit of that that we get into with our guests. So prioritizing infrastructure, what do we value? So maybe I did, I did find the thread there.

[Sheldon Young]
You did. Look at you. You always find the thread, Jason. You pick at it.

You find that little nub of thread and you pull in the whole thing unravels like a, like a bad sweater.

[Jason Moreau]
Yep. There it is.

[Sheldon Young]
It’s funny.

Your story reminds me of, there’s a new podcast, relatively new, maybe a couple months old. It’s called Are We Doomed is the name of it. It’s at the most, that’s the most uplifting of names.

But it’s interesting, this fella, I think it’s put on by NPR, I’m not sure. But his whole thing is, he has like a whole list of things of like the way things could go really wrong in the world, right? And he then kind of walks through, like brings in experts and talks about it.

And this was one of the topics, it wasn’t screws, it was mosquitoes. I think it was genetics.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
I think it was around genetics or I can’t remember exactly what the topic was. But anyways, it just reminded me of that.

[Jason Moreau]
Very cool.

I’ll have to check it out.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah. You’d like it, I think. It’s interesting.

Not as interesting as No Footprints, but interesting.

[Jason Moreau]
Well, you know, not everybody can be.

[Sheldon Young]
Okay. So my story, I kind of, I find that article, I usually like go and look through articles and try to find something that just kind of catches my eye. And I found one.

It’s like five questions brands should ask before joining the next big sustainability conversation. It’s a long title, but.

[Jason Moreau]
Ooh. Okay. Yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
So, you know, sustainability topics come up all the time, whether it’s carbon, decarbonization or whether it’s, you know, the SDGs or whatever it is, whatever the conversation is, you know, the field constantly evolves and there’s different priorities. And, you know, companies tend to just, you know, kind of jump in and want to be part of that dialogue and part of that conversation. And they, you know, it kind of, your action begets action and you start to see more and more of that.

Well, this article proposes that you should ask kind of five simple questions before doing that. And I think there’s, I’m going to, what do you think they’re about, Jason? What do you think a question a company should ask a brand should ask before jumping into a sustainability conversation?

I won’t, I won’t spoil it. If I give you a chance to give me one.

[Jason Moreau]
One of them is commitment and how much they’re sort of, I guess, promoting that externally, right? Because from a brand standpoint, it’s, it’s very much like making any promise you would to customers or potential customers where, you know, you don’t want to over promise and under deliver. So I think if you’re, you want to commit to it, if you’re serious about it, because otherwise there could be unintended consequences.

[Sheldon Young]
Yep. I think you, you pretty much nailed the gist of the article. So you’re smarter than the average bear.

So I’ll just quickly give you the five questions, let’s react to them. And they’re relatively simple. What are we prepared to prove is one, right?

So backing it up, right? What does the moment change about stakeholder expectations? So you know, high attention, sustainability moments are kind of, you’re not interchangeable.

It’s like, you know, you have, you have that kind of moment of time, you know, what are you expected to change for stakeholders? Are the right teams aligned before you go public? Right.

So do you have like the right commitments? Cause you know, you could say, yes, we’re doing this. No we’re not.

Right. Right. There’s people right here where you say that.

What can we discuss transparently? And then finally, is this our moment to join? I think that’s a good, I like that last one.

[Jason Moreau]
That’s a really good one.

[Sheldon Young]
It is. I think that kind of sums up the others almost, right? Because when you step back and we all have choices to make when it comes to you know, our sustainability, I guess journeys.

Personally, it’s like, you know, you hear something, oh my God, I really want to be part of that conversation. Well, yes, but you risk, honestly, either one, making yourself look kind of silly or hurting your own journey if you jump in too early and do these things, just like you said, you don’t want to kind of stick your neck out there and not be able to back it up. And then you kind of, your momentum gets lost and it’s hard to rebuild that.

And then honestly, you also dilute the overall conversation. Yeah, go ahead.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah, but I like how that last question is framed because it’s not a no, it’s a no, not right now. If the answer is, yeah, we’re not quite ready in this moment, it doesn’t mean that you can’t prepare and be ready for six months, 12 months, whatever the case might be for your organization. So I like that it’s an honest assessment, but it’s not a like, let’s just shut down this conversation.

It’s let’s do it the right way and let’s do it when everybody’s ready. So I like that about it.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, absolutely. I think it, you know, we’ve talked before at the sustainability world is maturing. And I think these questions show that, right?

[Jason Moreau]
Yes.

[Sheldon Young]
Where before it’s like, everyone just wants to get into the conversation. You know, now it’s like, okay, let’s think about this. Is this the right time, you know?

And it kind of brings, you know, it’s that point of reflection. Yeah, and I think having that point of reflection is really critical. But you know what else reflects, Jason?

[Jason Moreau]
Mirrors?

[Sheldon Young]
Water.

[Jason Moreau]
Water. Oh, look at that, yeah.

[Sheldon Young]
Well, most of the time, I guess there’s some exceptions we won’t get into. But there is our guest today. Two wonderful folks who spend their world in water.

I’ve known, I met Jim and Adam before in the universe of water, which I’ve been involved in myself for quite a bit of time. I met them at WEFT Tech and you and I were just on their podcast not too long ago. Water We Talking About? is the name of it.

You know, there’s some really interesting voices and they’ve done a great job of making water and wastewater fun and engaging, which is hard to do sometimes because it can be kind of on those topics. Like, is that really interesting? And it turns out it really is.

And so I’m excited to get on with it and have a conversation with them. What do you say, Jay?

[Jason Moreau]
Same.

[Sheldon Young]
Today, we’ve got a double trouble episode for you. Two guests, we’re excited about them both.

Adam Tank is a sustainability-driven entrepreneur and co-founder of Transcend, a VC-backed startup revolutionizing engineering design for water and power infrastructure. With leadership roles in a fortune more hundreds and startups, he’s an engaging public speaker, coach, and content creator with millions of views. Adam’s ventures have impacted over 540 million people in 100-plus countries, and he’s deeply committed to community service as a foster parent, mentor, and advocate for personal growth.

And then we have Jim Luria, a longtime business executive, water expert, and storyteller with over 20 years of global experience in water treatment. As vice president of sales and marketing at Mazal Injector Company, he’s a recognized leader in water innovation across agricultural, municipal, and industrial markets. A chemical engineering graduate of Manhattan College, Jim is also a sought-after speaker and passionate advocate for circular water economies and sustainable water management.

Together, Adam and Jim are also hosts of the Water We Talking About? podcast, which Jason and I were on. We’re excited to have you both on No Footprints.

[Adam Tank]
Thanks, guys. Excited to be here.

[Jim Lauria]
Great to be here, guys. Thanks so much for inviting us.

[Sheldon Young]
Only took me two takes. Only took me two takes to do that.

[Jim Lauria]
I guess you guys felt compelled that you had to invite us because we had you on ours, so.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, I would have invited you. We’re talking water. Water is one of the most important sustainability topics that there is.

So with that, why don’t you guys tell us just a little bit about each of your journeys? Adam, why don’t we start with you?

[Adam Tank]
I, like most people who are in the water industry, did not plan on being in the water industry. Water found me. And I’d say, every time someone asks, how did you come across the water industry?

90 plus percent of people say, water found you. So I was actually in graduate school when I interviewed with GE Water’s, or General Electric’s water division, which has since been bought multiple times over the years. And when I started my role there, I realized this industry is incredible.

It is unbelievably challenging from every perspective you can imagine. Public policy, engineering technology, regulation, financing, right, all of it. And at the end of the day, we are all working on a common goal, which is to provide safe, secure, clean water to people all over the world.

So it’s multinational. It’s like no two days are the same. I just, I love everything about this industry.

And so, yeah, I feel like once you’re in, it’s really tough to ever wanna leave because not only is just the mission that we’re all working on really compelling, but the people you meet are fantastic too. I often joke every time I go to a big water conference, WEFTEC, ACE, like industrial water, you name it, it feels like a family reunion. I almost feel like I have a, you know, I joke on my wife.

I have a second family in the water industry and it literally feels that way. I’m like, it’s hugs all the time, dinners and, you know, everyone’s having a ton of fun. So that’s my journey.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, absolutely. Jim, what would you, how did you get started in water?

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, so I’m a little different. You know, I found water. Adam says a lot of people, you know, I specifically went after water.

I was a process engineer coming out of college in the sugar industry. And then I went into sales and marketing. I had the enviable job of traveling around the world, going to all the breweries to make sure they were filtering their beer properly.

[Sheldon Young]
Tough life, man.

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, it was pretty tough, pretty tough. And then I decided that around 2000, about 25 years ago, I had some ideas. I was CEO of a filtration company and I had some ideas around water treatment.

And I went to the World Health Organization and I presented some of my ideas to them and it resonated. And so I decided that that was my path. And I was quite pleased about it.

I thought that this is where I wanted to go. And that’s what I’ve been doing ever since as a process guy and selling process equipment and water treatment equipment ever since and telling water story. And as Adam says, you know, made a lot of friends in the industry.

And, you know, Adam and I started, what are we talking about? What, about five, six years ago, Adam, right? Right around COVID, right?

We got bored and we started together. And, you know, the Boomer millennial combo, the equipment digital combo. So it’s kind of been the journey ever since.

[Jason Moreau]
So in terms of water, so our listeners sort of come at sustainability from all different levels of maturity and understanding. So why would you say water is so important to the sustainability ecosystem? What is it that like really connects all of that for both of you?

[Jim Lauria]
You wanna take it, Adam? Go ahead.

[Adam Tank]
Okay, so I would say it is the fundamental molecule.

We, you know, nothing exists without water. So us as humans, like physically, we don’t exist without water. Our societies, as we know it, don’t function without water.

All of our industry doesn’t function without water. And, you know, the term you’ll hear oftentimes used in the industry is the concept of one water or that all water is the same. The water that we drink today was the same water that was drank by dinosaurs thousands of years ago that was, you know, created in whatever you believe, Big Bang, whatever your belief system is, right?

Like it’s all been around for that long. And so it is the single molecule that makes all of this work. And so to the degree that that is true, which I believe it to be true, it drives everything.

So that’s, of course, all the sustainability decisions that we make in regards to water, wastewater projects. But then, of course, if it’s involved in every project, then every decision is a sustainability decision relative to all the infrastructure that’s around us. I mean, literally every physical thing that you can see and touch and pick up in the room that’s around you right now, water was involved in that process, without a doubt.

[Jim Lauria]
So my blog is To Know Water is to Love Water. And the subtitle is The Connection Between Water and Everything We Hold Dear. And so my blog is about that.

My upcoming book, To Know Water is to Love Water is about that. Every chapter, water is health, water is food, water is energy, water is money, water is technology, water is recreation. As Adam said, everything you can look around and see and touch has a water component to it.

It’s embedded in everything. And so it’s important in that regard. And we have to respect it.

We have to manage it. We have to, you know, if you love water, as one of my friends says, if you love water, you have to treat it well.

[Jason Moreau]
I’m gonna ask a follow-up question, which I agree with everything that you said. And as somebody who’s new to sustainability, why do you think water doesn’t get its due? If it’s the fundamental molecule and it touches everything as sort of a new entry, you know, new person to sustainability, it feels like everybody talks about energy, decarbonization.

There’s some, I would say, like topics that seem to get this like priority status. And water is somewhere lower on that list. Why do you think that is?

[Jim Lauria]
Is it just, yeah. Well, the thing is, Jason, we take it for granted. You know, first of all, we turn on the tap, it comes out, right?

It’s always come out. The only time we don’t take it for granted is when you turn on the water and it’s brown or it doesn’t come out or you’re walking down the street and it’s underground, right? Everything, we deliver water underground.

We take it away underground, right? The wastewater goes away underground. We don’t see it unless, again, there’s an issue.

We turn on the tap. So we take it for granted and we don’t think about it as embedded in every single thing that brings us life, right?

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, it’s so interesting. Jason, I live in Richmond, Virginia. And two winters ago, I guess it was, there was a problem here.

And the water system, the water pumping station got like flooded and it died, literally, for like almost a week, I think it was. You don’t realize how quickly society basically goes feral when water isn’t available. And I think that is really like, you kind of hit the nail on the head.

It’s like, we take it for granted, like it’s always there. And my gosh, if it isn’t, it creates chaos. And society depends, you realize, to cook, to clean, to sanitize, to just function, you need this element.

And it’s under threat, right? I mean, you guys talk to a lot of people in the water industry. I’m gonna take a little, this question is not on our list, so I’m gonna ask it anyways.

What do you hear the most from the people that you talk to around, I guess, the challenges of making sure we sustain our water systems? What are some of the things that you hear from the guests you have around the challenges that we’re facing?

[Adam Tank]
Most frequently, it’s that the infrastructure that, at least in the U.S., I can speak for the U.S., this is in most developed countries.

Most of the infrastructure that’s in place that treats and delivers water is 50 plus years old. Most of it was installed in the 1930s, 40s, roughly maybe in the 50s, 60s.

And it was, the useful life was roughly 50 years. And so now we are two decades or three decades past that. In some cases, we’re 100 years past that and we’re still pulling wooden water pipes out of the ground.

And there is no way that we can possibly keep up with the investment required to either rehabilitate the existing stuff or build new. So you talk to a lot of utilities, and they’re currently on a 1% per year replacement cycle for their pipes, as a simple example. So in 100 years, they will have replaced all the pipes in the ground, which at that point, the pipes are gonna be 100 years old.

So it’s a never-ending cycle. And back to the question that you just asked, Jason, and that Jim alluded to, we don’t pay what, we don’t pay a price for water that is equivalent to what the value of water is worth to us as a society. So you ask someone, hey, what do you pay for your water bill?

Very few people will be able to tell you off the top of their head. What do you pay for your cell phone bill? What do you pay for your Wi-Fi?

They can give that to you in a heartbeat. We don’t, we do not see that equivalent. So when a water utility says, oh, we have to raise rates, whatever, 10% a year for the next three years, people are up in arms.

And it’s like, are you kidding me? One, it’s already dirt cheap. 10% is nothing.

But secondly, what are you gonna do if you don’t pay for it? Like you said, Sheldon, you’re stuck. You’re not gonna be able to go to the restroom in the morning, you’re not gonna have your cup of coffee, you’re not gonna be able to brush your teeth, you’re not gonna be able to cook.

So it’s like, what are we doing here?

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, the other challenge too Sheldon is it’s about people too. Being water isn’t sexy, right? We don’t have the same kind of influx of good young engineers coming into the water space.

And so we’ve got a lot of people retiring, people my age leaving the industry, and we’ve gotta replace them with good, dedicated people. And so the challenge is getting people to understand how important water is. And being a water professional is really a great service to the world.

And so that’s why one of the reasons Adam and I like to tell the story, because we need people to really look at water. We joke about it, it’s not sexy, right? It’s not a sexy industry, like a lot of other industries are, AI, computer programming, things like that.

So we really need good, educated people to follow in the footsteps of those people that have been before them, that are retiring.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, so I mean, obviously, you guys decided to do something about it. You started this podcast, Water We Talking About? Water We Talking About, make sure I’m very clear on that.

Tell me how it kind of manifests. You said earlier, you said, yeah, we got together. I’m a millennial, I’m the not millennial.

And you started it. But tell us a little bit more organically how it started, why did you start it? And what was your goal when you did start it?

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, so Adam and I started, we met, we were both speaking at the same conference. And I sat on in his presentation, he sat in on mine. As we’re leaving, we both found out that we were going to San Francisco.

And Adam had a startup that he was working on. I was living in San Francisco at the time. We got to be friends, we started having lunch.

And then we wanted to do something together. We were going to write, we’re both writers. But COVID came and we said, let’s start a podcast.

And the joke we had was, we weren’t going to talk about water, we were going to talk about talking about water. So we decided to find the best storytellers around the water space, so we could do exactly that. Tell water story in a better manner, and it went from there.

[Adam Tank]
I would say it’s generally, at least in my small bubble of the water world, it’s generally well known that we are horrible at communicating the value of what we do to society at large.

I was speaking with one of my mom’s friends just a few weeks ago, she lives in Tucson, Arizona. And she mentioned that there is a big water reuse plant going in.

And in the papers, it’s called Toilet to Tap. And that the only thing she can think of is how gross that sounds. Not the fact that it is a fricking engineering miracle that we can take dirty water and turn it into something clean.

And drinkable, right?

[Sheldon Young]
Yes, exactly.

[Adam Tank]
And that is just one small example of the work that we need to be doing to tell better stories around water.

Because to the extent we can do that, we’re going to raise the quality of the conversation for everybody, not just water industry professionals, but the general public. And then when we do have to increase rates, or we do have to issue a boil advisory, or we do have to, you know, whatever, acquire land to build a new treatment plant in someone’s backyard, people will better understand why we have to do these things and why it’s valuable.

And in the absence of that, people are just gonna be frustrated and upset that the only time they hear from the water industry folks is when they get their bill, or when something is wrong. And that shouldn’t be the case.

[Jason Moreau]
Yeah. I was curious on the partnership on the podcast. What’s one thing that you’ve, I guess, learned from the other? Because you’re both pretty, like, expert in your respective fields already.

It’s not like Sheldon and I, where he knows a lot and I know next to nothing. Where I’m constantly learning. So I was just curious, as like sort of already two established professionals, what did you pick up from the other that was maybe something surprising that you didn’t expect to learn?

[Jim Lauria]
Well, from my perspective, you know, Adam being in a millennial, one of the things that I gotta say that he really influenced me on was the use of AI. I mean, ChatGPT came out, what, November of 2022. He had me using it January of 2023.

And I’ve been using it ever since. So, you know, from that perspective of looking at what’s new and exciting from the digital space and understanding how, not only that, but how to work with millennials in my business, in my career. You know, it’s been a real opportunity.

And of course, you know, Adam’s an entrepreneur. He really looks at things in that regard. So that’s really been, you know, what I’ve learned from him as an older professional.

[Adam Tank]
Yeah, and Jim is, Jim, I mean, you know, joking like the whole boomer and millennial thing, Jim being old school, me being new school.

Jim has a much more multifaceted career than I have had at this point. So as he mentioned, he’s been CEO, he’s been in different industries, he’s been, you know, worked internationally in many different cases.

And so he always has brought this grounding presence to me. So when I’m, you know, when working on the San Francisco startup, it was a water robotics company. And I’m sure multiple times my hair was on fire and, you know, I was pissed off at whoever it was in the world and we couldn’t get things working right, or, you know, deals were falling through or a contract, negotiating a contract.

And I didn’t have a whole lot of people to talk to, but Jim was one that was always there for me. And being able to bring that level of experience and again, groundedness into those conversations just always was a breath of fresh air. And so I will always appreciate Jim for that perspective, because there was no one else I could talk to at that time in my life that was helping me through these things.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, good stuff. So you both work in the world of water outside the podcast, right? We mentioned kind of your companies.

Can you just talk a little bit about, I guess, kind of how sustainability is an important topic in the work you do outside this podcast?

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, so that’s a good question. And Sheldon, you and I, we were just at the Fuel Ethanol Workshop together in St. Louis. Really great.

And I got to say that one of the key things that was spoken about and probably around the whole conference was process optimization.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh yeah.

[Jim Lauria]
And so that’s kind of been my whole career. And in the work I do now, it’s about how do I take our equipment and show a company how that works in conjunction with process optimization. So in all world, in water treatment and from the equipment standpoint, capital and installation costs are probably a third of the total life cycle costs.

Let’s say a system last 20, 25 years. And two thirds is around operating costs, energy, chemicals, maintenance, and so on. And footprint.

And when I talk about footprint, I don’t really talk about real estate in terms of the equipment. It’s how much concrete, how much steel does it involve in that? How do you reduce that footprint and all that sustainability?

And it’s money, it’s economics. So how do you translate sustainability into an economic conversation? So that whole process optimization of shrinking that down and energy is a big component in water treatment, chemicals, lost water, all that stuff.

So that’s really how I tell our story around the advantages our equipment has around other systems, other processes to have the conversation of double-edged sword, right? Economics and sustainability.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, for sure. Adam and you, your world’s a little different, right?

[Adam Tank]
It is, yeah.

So we’re focused on the planning and design side of wastewater treatment projects. And what you’ll find sort of what Jim alluded to, right?

You talk about CapEx and OpEx and ultimately the totex or the total expenditure for a project. There’s the capital and there’s the operational costs, operational being a big part of it. If you make poor decisions in planning and design, it’s really hard to then try to optimize bad decision-making that happened on the front end, right?

It’s like the proverbial lipstick on a pig or a band-aid on a broken process. So what we are trying to do is drive that conversation around sustainability on the front end of projects by letting software do a lot of this comparative analysis between different types of processes. So what would it look like if you used MBR instead of MBBR or maybe a thick film or SBR, right?

And so engineers typically don’t have time and budget to do these types of analyses. But if you have software that can basically check those boxes and then give you an apples-to-apples comparison to say, hey, here’s what you should be looking at, then they’ll go, oh, wow, we never would have considered a trickling filter over a more biologically active primary treatment. But as it turns out, the trickling filter is far more efficient and sustainable from an energy consumption perspective.

And so those are the types of decision-making that we’re helping engineers do in the earliest phases so that sustainability is an afterthought. It’s part of the project from the beginning. And because we work all over the world, we see different perspectives on sustainability.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, tell me about that. It was one of my questions.

[Adam Tank]
Yeah, it’s really interesting.

So like, you go to the UK as an example, and the trickling filter is a great example of this. You go to the UK, trickling filters are selling like you wouldn’t believe. Everyone and their mom wants trickling filters.

And you come to the US and you talk to a treatment plant and you’re like, hey, have you guys thought about trickling filters? They’re like, no, we’re trying to rip them all out. And- So, okay, tell me why.

Yes, so in the UK, the conversation around water and wastewater is primarily sustainability-driven conversation in many cases. So it is, what is the carbon footprint of the site that you’re planning to build? What is the energy consumption of the asset that you’re planning to build?

In the US, if you go, hey, are you guys looking at carbon footprint for this? Most of the time, you get laughed out of the room. That’s not even nowhere near, not even the top 10 things they’re considering.

[Sheldon Young]
Right. Particularly like a municipal plant, right? For sure.

[Adam Tank]
Correct, correct.

So that’s, it’s interesting to sort of also be able to provide those insights to our customer base to say, hey, you know, I don’t think you ever would have considered this, but check it out now, right? Why not look at this and see what it looks like? Why not give it a go and consider it?

Even if you don’t end up going with it, at least it sort of rewires your brain to start thinking about things a little bit differently.

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, and to carry on with Adam’s conversation, one of the things people have to realize is that the water industry hasn’t been very innovative because look, it’s a public health issue, right? And so if you have a, let’s say an iPhone, it doesn’t work, right? You throw it in the trash and you get a new one.

In the water industry, you have to be a lot more careful about innovation because if you make a change to the type of way you’re treating water, it better work. So in the past, people were afraid to do something different than what they’d done in the past. So adoption of new technologies is a lot slower in our industry than it is in a lot of other industries.

[Jason Moreau]
Picking up on something that you said, Adam, do you find that most conversations are, they don’t start with sustainability, at least here in the U.S.? Because we’ve talked to a few other guests where they even refer to it as like, don’t say the S word, right? It is more about optimization, efficiency, good ROI.

[Sheldon Young]
Total cost of ownership.

Yeah, okay. Sustainability is sort of the sidecar that comes along for the ride. Has that generally been your experience?

[Adam Tank]
Yes, absolutely.

But what’s so interesting is like, you know, sustainability can be a great forcing factor for innovation. And what I mean by that is, what if instead of, you know, looking at, yeah, the totex of a project, you consider the sustainability first, and you use that as the guardrails to figure out what it is you need to build.

So a simple example would be, you have to build a greenfield treatment plant. Okay, well, there’s a couple of ways we can look at this. One way is to think about it from a, well, you know, what’s the population growth gonna look like over the next five, 10, 15, 20 years?

What types of industry do we anticipate coming in? What’s the volume that’s gonna be treated in that plant? And how much do we need to produce on the back end?

And of course, to what degree of treatment do we need to use? What sort of regulations do we need to meet? That’s one way of looking at it, which is a great approach and historically the way that we’ve thought about it.

Now, what if you add sustainability to that conversation? And you think about that as priority number one. What if we have to minimize the site footprint to reduce the amount of concrete and steel and trucking costs?

What if we have to put it closer to the center of a city so we don’t have to build out pipelines miles and miles and miles and miles of them, right? What if our off- Just more to maintain, more to, yep, all that. Correct, what if we instead could put it right where our off takers are, which are the general public or the industry and not have to build out all this other infrastructure around it, right?

What if we use those as the forcing factors, sustainability-driven decisions in the front end? You’re gonna come up with some pretty radically cool options. Now, they may not be commonly used at this point or commonly thought of, but I’ll tell you in places around the world where they’ve had to be innovative because of whatever, massive populations, they don’t wanna displace people or they just don’t have enough land and they have to build smaller or they don’t have enough water to treat from a surface or groundwater perspective so they gotta look at the ocean, right? And they gotta use desal. They think about things so differently and oftentimes the assets that they build are far more sustainable because of those guardrails.

So it’s a bit of a different way of thinking, but I would encourage anyone listening to this who’s responsible for these types of projects, like at least just give it 10 seconds of thought.

[Sheldon Young]
Right, right.

[Adam Tank]
Yeah, and you’d be surprised at what might come out.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, it’s interesting, it’s, again, they just don’t say the S word, right? You know, it’s really, sustainable is good business. If you think about it from the perspective of what it entails, it’s not just, you know, rainbows and unicorns and water.

It is everything that goes into it. It is about resources and resources translate to money. Right, they always translate to money.

And that’s how, Jim, you said earlier, like connecting the economics to sustainable decisions. The ROI, if you do it right, and you think about it from the holistic perspective of what sustainability really entails, it almost always works out. It almost always works out.

And it’s all the things you said just make so much sense is if you just connect the dots. And I think that’s with your podcast and the things you’re doing about, you know, talking about water, you’re helping connect the dots. That’s our goal here.

Our goal is making sustainability real, right? You do that by connecting dots. So on that point, you have a lot of people on.

What are some of the most important lessons that you have learned by talking to your guests?

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, so one of the big things that I picked up, and I use it now, and she was an early guest, was Megan Casey Clever of 120 Water. And she talked about data-driven storytelling, right? It’s not enough to just tell stories.

You really got to tie it to the data. And, you know, Adam told some of the stories, you know, we heard around trickling filters. Really, how does that story get told?

It doesn’t just say trickling filters are better. You got to show the economics, the smaller footprint, the lower energy costs, all the reasons why that’s a good decision, both from an economic standpoint and from a sustainability standpoint. So I’ve really followed that course with all the case studies we do at Macy now, as we’re telling our stories.

It’s, okay, you want some emotion to it? Because we’re a bunch of engineers, and if you just put a bunch of numbers on the screen, Adam and I always joke about it, you know, the pump curve, the pump guys. Here’s my pump curve, there’s their pump curve, my pump curve’s better, your pump curve.

And so we always laugh about that. But, you know, you want to put some emotion to it, you want to have some attractiveness to it in that regard, but you got to show the story in terms of economic numbers. Why is the technology better in terms of CapEx and OpEx?

[Adam Tank]
One of my favorites was from Kelly Deering Smith, so she’s a communications leader at Louisville Water, and she held up a glass of water in her hand towards the end of the show, and she said, effectively, be proud of the water that you produce, or be proud of your role in the industry.

And so the story that she told was around how many times we go to a water conference, and they have unnamed water, right, from wherever it is, or bottled water, God forbid, at some of these. And she made the point that in Louisville, anytime they have any sort of public event, Louisville Water will sponsor or be at least present, and they will be having people drink Louisville water and be able to tell the story of the water that they produce as the utility.

So be proud of the work that you do. Show off all the hard work that goes into producing your product. We’re one of the only industries that spends billions, if not trillions of dollars, producing a product that doesn’t do any marketing for it at all.

[Sheldon Young]
No branding whatsoever.

[Adam Tank]
None, zero, none, none.

And it’s just crazy. You think about any other industry, everything is branding, right?

You look at your cell phone, it’s like, I have an iPhone, I have a little blue message, so that makes me special, or whatever. I wear a certain type of sunglasses. I’m just looking around.

The type of computer that I have, right? It’s all meaningful. In water, people just think water is water.

So we have to be more proactive about being proud of the product that we produce and showing it off to the general public.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, the only place I can think of that takes super pride in their water, it seems to be New York City, because of the pizza and the bagels. They’d say, you can’t make New York pizza without New York water. That’s like the only place I see it really touted as a branded product.

But you’re 100% right, 100% right.

[Jim Lauria]
I grew up with that water.

[Sheldon Young]
I know.

[Jim Lauria]
And I still, when I go back, I still, the best tasting water coming out of the tap I’ve ever had to this day.

[Sheldon Young]
I’ll give, you gotta come try Richmond water is actually really good. It’s really, we have the water quality numbers that we get are really, really good.

And the stuff, the tap water is clean and crystal and delicious. So they really do a good job here. Shout out to Richmond City.

But yeah, so yeah, those are great, great stories. I love hearing these, it’s so important, the story of sustainability, the story of water in your case. It is so important to tell it right, because so much rides on it, right?

So much rides on it. And if we don’t do a job of converting the message to the right stakeholders, and I mean, all the right stakeholders hear it in the way that they want to consume it, it’s never going to take off. It’s a branding problem.

So 100% correct. So speaking of branding, you both have books out, if I’m not mistaken, coming or coming out. So could you quickly just tell us a little bit about, you know, Jim, you mentioned it a little bit, but tell us really kind of what’s the gist of it?

When can they expect it? How can they get it? And start with you.

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, so to know water is to love water. And I said, you know, the byline is the connection between water and everything we hold dear, and all those aspects. So it’s really got two purposes.

Number one is to let the general public know how connected water is to everything, right? And that’s an important part. The other thing is to really pay tribute to the water professionals.

Okay. That they do really good work. I mean, you know, everybody gets their due, doctors, nurses, and they deserve it.

Firefighters, policemen, you know, all the people, military people, everybody gets their due. But I don’t think the water professionals get their due. They’re public health professionals.

At the end of the day, they’re really protecting our health in the terms of how they’re delivering our safe water, how they’re taking our raw sewage and treating it so that it doesn’t cause, you know, problems. Pathogens are in there, other things. So, you know, the book is around that, to really pay, to tell the general public about the importance of water in every aspect of their lives and to pay tribute to water professionals.

[Sheldon Young]
I love it. I love it. How about yours, Adam?

[Adam Tank]
My book was published two years ago.

It is completely unrelated to the water industry. It’s about the role, yeah, of basically a combination of science and science in the role that it plays in luck and success.

[Sheldon Young]
Oh, interesting.

[Adam Tank]
It’s a study of luck and how people can create opportunities for themselves.

[Sheldon Young]
That’s interesting. Yeah. What’s it called?

[Adam Tank]
Luck by design.

[Sheldon Young]
Luck by design. I like it.

There’s always a phrase I used to like. It was, luck is when opportunity meets preparation. That’s what I like.

That’s what I always used to like to say. They’re like, yeah, you know what? It kind of is.

Then you have a little mix of, sprinkle of good faith in there from the world. Look, a little karma on top. Karma Mel.

Okay, so I kind of wrapped this up towards the end here. So real quick, Jim, I want to start with you on this one because I didn’t get a chance to let you talk just a little bit about kind of what you do with your organization outside of your podcast. So just quickly tell us what the company does and how can people learn more and connect with you?

[Jim Lauria]
Yeah, so for the 10 years I was with Mazzy when I started 10 years ago, I was the vice president of sales and marketing. And now I’ve trained my successor. He’s taken over and I’ve moved into a role as vice president of business development.

And that’s why I was at the Fuel Ethanol Conference. It’s a new market application for us. A little bit of success there, but a lot more to learn about it.

And so that’s what I’m doing. Mazzy manufactures equipment for injection of all kinds of oxygen species, air, oxygen, ozone, and injects chemicals, nutrients, fertilizers into irrigation water. And they can find more about it at www.mazzy.net or they can contact me. Please reach out to me on LinkedIn. I’m pretty easy to find there. Yeah, you get great presence there for sure.

[Sheldon Young]
Adam, we talked about your company a little bit, but again, just people want to learn more about you and your company. How do they do that?

[Adam Tank]
Sure, so I’m the co-founder and chief communications officer at Transcend Software Company.

And our software automates the planning and preliminary design of wastewater treatment assets. So we work with utilities themselves, we work with engineering consulting firms, and we work with equipment suppliers who want to be able to showcase the cool technologies that they have and allow engineers and utilities to be able to evaluate them in the earliest phases of projects.

If you’re interested, Transcendinfra.com, like infrastructure, Transcend Infra, or like Jim, reach out to me on LinkedIn. So Adam Tank on LinkedIn.

[Sheldon Young]
Love it, good stuff. Want to thank you both for joining us on No Footprints. Really loved your story.

I loved being on your podcast, loved listening to it. And thank you for the work you’re doing in such an important industry. And thanks again for joining us.

[Jim Lauria]
Thank you.

[Adam Tank]
Thank you.

[Sheldon Young]
And we are back, though we never left, Jason, just like that.

[Jason Moreau]
Just like that.

[Sheldon Young]
Jim and Adam, Jim and Adam, bringing us the world of water in a fun, engaging way. They had fun on their podcast, did you?

[Jason Moreau]
I did. Oh, when we were guests?

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah.

[Jason Moreau]
Yes, yes.

[Sheldon Young]
Of course, you’re never going to say no. No, I didn’t.

No, but you would never say that. Just like, it was a silly of a question.

[Jason Moreau]
I was raised right. But no, I, but the real answer, in all honesty, yes, I did enjoy going on their podcast as a guest, and I enjoyed having them as our guests in this episode. Really, really cool conversation, honestly, about water.

And as a professional, as a person who’s not a professional in that industry, it was like a really, really cool, I think, behind-the-scenes peek at all of the hard work that goes into making our daily life just practical, reliable, easy.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, yeah, it is so true. I think, you know, what I love about their podcast is they take this world of water, which could be, I don’t know, hard to be, I guess, engaging and fun for people that aren’t in it. People that are in it, they love it.

Yeah. Like Jim’s book, you know, to know water is to love water. Right.

But I think a lot of people out there in the world don’t have a lot of connection to it, except for the end product. Like they receive it and they return it, are pretty much the two things they know about water. Like I live literally here in Richmond.

Across the river is our wastewater treatment plant. And I can’t tell you how many times that I talk to friends or people here and we’re down at the river and they’ll say, what is that across the river? And I’m like, that is where everything that we waste goes to get treated.

And then, oh, and it comes out the river? Yeah, it comes out in the river when it’s all completely treated and back to the state of being acceptable for that to be the case. And, you know, again, it’s amazing to me how people just don’t, to me, it’s obvious.

Like, oh yeah, that’s where all the hard work happens. But to most, it’s not. And what I really love about these two is they’re, first of all, they’re a platform that allows others to come in and just talk about how you two talk about water.

And I think I looked at some of their episodes for sure, and I certainly have learned. I’m like, oh yes, that’s a really interesting, that guest brought this to the table. This guest brought that to the table.

And I think if you listen to it, you’ll certainly collect a toolkit of ways that’ll help you, not just in water communication, but communication in general. But water is a particularly difficult topic. So I think if you have challenging topics, listening to how people do it in water is gonna be really interesting.

[Jason Moreau]
Well, yeah, I mean, I think they said it well, where it’s, at least here in the US, it’s something we take for granted. Always, yeah. You know, maybe not in all parts of the world, but for here, certainly we take it for granted.

And I think it was Jim who made the point that it’s all underground, like literally and figuratively. It’s delivered underground, it goes away underground. So it’s just this thing you don’t see.

It’s just kind of humming in the background until it’s not. And it literally touches every part of our life. I think it was Adam who’s like, phone, sunglass, he was just kind of like looking at what was near him in the office.

And he’s like, literally everything near me, water had something to do with its production, its current state of existence. And you start thinking that way, you’re like, wow, it really is the fundamental molecule. It’s just this thing that we should revere and steward and I guess appropriately appreciate the cost of, right?

Like that was the other thing.

[Sheldon Young]
Yeah, that’s the thing.

[Jason Moreau]
We really don’t price it for its value to us.

[Sheldon Young]
In fact, I mean, there’s an expectation that water and wastewater treatment are not, of course it makes sense. If we all paid what we should for those systems, it would be a lot more expensive, but that means it wouldn’t be accessible to people, which is kind of a non-starter for most conversations, right? So it makes sense, but it also lowers value when you don’t have to pay as much for it, it certainly lowers value.

And when you go to like, let’s take California and have droughts and stuff, right? That’s why people like, oh, you know, there isn’t a lot of, I guess, compliance sometimes when it comes to like, don’t water your lawns. Oh, it doesn’t cost us anything, blah, blah, blah, blah.

Maybe they should raise the price up really high for something like that when they have to conserve, right? It’s interesting. It’s a social dilemma as well as a physical one when it comes to delivering the, I guess the resource, but I really enjoyed about them as well.

I guess as a podcast, you and I are a podcast pair, it’s fun to see other podcast pairs and how they interact and what their juxtaposition is. Like theirs is pretty different. It’s almost like the, I’m gonna say odd couple, but it’s not, they’re both from the world of water, but they certainly have different perspectives and different generational aspects of themselves that they bring to the podcast, which I thought was really interesting.

[Jason Moreau]
Well, I liked how they were, yes, as individuals, but I appreciated sort of their business or industry background. Yes. So Jim being more, I think in like, I think it was just sort of like traditional like plants and like capital investment and what does it look like to build that out?

And sustainability for him was like, let’s use less concrete, let’s reduce the like physical footprint, right? So it’s like that is the sense of it.

[Sheldon Young]
And do it at business case for.

[Jason Moreau]
Right, what does sustainability look like there when only a third of the total project cost is the capital, the equipment, and over 20 years, it’s gonna be the process of how do you use less water, how do you use less chemicals, right? And then contrasted with Adam, who’s on like the planning and design part of it before anything even breaks ground.

[Sheldon Young]
And like technology and software, right?

[Jason Moreau]
Correct, and that, but like sustainability there is almost a, it’s playing with those what if scenarios in the software, right? If you use this type of valve versus this type of valve or use this type of, you know, batch reactor for wastewater, right? And so giving people those options to actually see, oh, like this could work much better, right?

And his, I think, thing of like, you know, the best place to sort of address any sort of sustainability or design problems is in the design stage, right? Because afterwards it’s always just, okay. It’s the best we can do given what’s already happened.

And so I just liked that they had those two different perspectives on the like life cycle almost of those types of projects.

[Sheldon Young]
Absolutely, yeah. It certainly was a fun interview and I’m glad you mentioned other companies. Adam’s company is called Transcend and Jim’s is Mazel Injectors.

And so I wanna make sure I give them a little plug on that. And Jim’s got a new book coming out to know water is to love water. And don’t forget their podcast.

Their podcast is called “Water We Talking About?”. And I forget how many episodes they’ve done. It’s a fair number though.

And so if you’re looking for something new to listen to, go ahead and like, subscribe and all that fun stuff. And also like, subscribe, tell your friends about No Footprints Podcast as well. If you want to learn more about us, we have a little website.

It’s nofootprintspodcast.com. And you can send us email at nofootprints.podcast@alfalaval.com, that’s A-L-F-A-L-A-V-A-L.com. And with that, my friend, I say we call it another day, another lovely episode into the archives of No Footprints.

[Jason Moreau]
Like a machine.

[Sheldon Young]
Like a machine. Well oiled, but slightly rusty.

[Jason Moreau]
That’s right. Bye everyone.

[Sheldon Young]
Have a good one.

Our guests come from many industries and companies as we’re talking about how the world makes sustainability real.

Our company, Alfa Laval, is a global supplier of process solutions. So it’s very possible that the organizations our guests are with may use Alfa Laval or even our competitors’ products. This does not mean that we the hosts or Alfa Laval are endorsing any of the company’s guests or the specific ideas that we discuss.