Clean Water Works
CLEVELAND, OHIO: From the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District, an in-depth and fun conversation led by Donna Friedman and Mike Uva on any and all topics related to clean water, wastewater treatment, stormwater management, and the people, projects, and programs serving Lake Erie and our local waterways and communities.
Clean Water Works
Sustainability at the Sewer District
What does sustainability mean for a wastewater utility?
Sustainability Manager Marie Fechik-Kirk shares her thoughts on environmental stewardship at the Sewer District. Under Marie's guidance, the NEORSD has integrated sustainability into its everyday operations and engineering projects.
Listeners will also discover sustainability tips for their own homes to make an environmental impact while helping their budget.
For NEORSD employees:
Employee Resource Groups (ERGs) at the NEORSD provide a great opportunity for employees to learn new things and network with other employees. Learn more about our Sustainability ERG.
Also, sustainability can be integrated into your work goals. Check out our Sustainability Plan to see how we’ve integrated sustainability into many areas, from Analytical Services to Watersheds Design.
For more information, contact Marie Fechik-Kirk at Fechik-KirkM@neorsd.org
The opinions expressed on this podcast are not necessarily those of the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District or its employees. For more information about the Sewer District and its projects and programs, visit neorsdorg. The Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District presents Clean Water Works, a podcast that explores water, sewer and stormwater issues that affect you and your community. Learn about the people, projects and programs that are protecting your health and the environment here in Cleveland and throughout Northeast Ohio.
Speaker 2:This is Clean Water Works, a podcast about clean water, and we are expanding our talent roster. You know, I don't know how long am I going to be here Forever. Someone's got to, we hope. Jessica Schutte, who has been on the program before I have, Is our public information specialist and she's going to play host for this episode of Clean Water Works Big shoes to fill, but I'm up for the challenge. Take it away.
Speaker 3:So yeah, I'm Jessica Schutte, public information specialist here at the Sewer District, and I am so happy to introduce Marie Fetchekirk, who is our sustainability manager here at the Sewer District. So, marie, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself, most importantly?
Speaker 4:how did you get to the district? So I've been here for six years now. I've always been interested in like the environment and science, and I thought I was going to be a science teacher, but I couldn't get a job when I came out of college. So I had the ability to speak German, and so I ended up working at a magnet school as a German teacher, and then, while I was doing my master's in German, I was studying the EU politics related to environmental policies, and so I was like, oh no, this could be a big issue. Changing weather, wilder weather, warmer weather this will impact people. What's the impact going to be? And so I decided I wanted to shift my career to focus a little bit more on environmental stewardship, and so that's what I did, and I found this job at an organization that seemed to really care about sustainability and environmental stewardship and that, you know, was sort of on the front lines of having such a big footprint and being able to do a lot with it.
Speaker 3:Talk, to us a little bit about your background.
Speaker 4:Yeah, so I'm from Pittsburgh. I guess what may be similar to people that maybe grew up in Cleveland in like the 80s is that you know, my grandfather, you know, worked in the steel mill, right, my dad worked there in the summer, like my grandparents didn't have a car and so they walked all over the place. I'd go with my grandma to the grocery store and like buy stuff. So it's sort of this like ethos that no one said it was sustainability, but it was like my granddad did not like to waste things, so he would like duct tape things to fix them, and you know, so it was part of who he was.
Speaker 4:Or my grandma had to deal with her neighbor Elsie, across the street. She would give Elsie the daily newspaper after she was done reading it. In exchange, for at the end of the week, on Saturdays, we get a can like a Folgers can filled with Petzl cookies, and so you know, just this idea of like sharing things and not buying things. You don't need not wasting energy, reusing, reusing that sort of sensibility of like we're going to do as much as we can with the money we have, right.
Speaker 3:We'll ask that depression mentality too, of our grandparents.
Speaker 4:Yeah, Definitely, something that you know has been part of me and how I've grown up.
Speaker 3:Right, so that's always been like an interest of mine. When you're like going through all this research at a young age and you're seeing that there are these problems ahead, what are your first thoughts of like something that you think needs to be handled or addressed right away?
Speaker 4:One of my first things that I did was I met with all senior staff just to get a sense of like where are they coming from, what do they see as sustainability, what does it mean to them? And then I created sort of a definition for us as the district. Then, in 2021, we actually published our first sustainability plan. So you know like middle of COVID, work from home and then wanted to make sure that it was going to grow and you know, and the way that it connected to our work made sense.
Speaker 3:So what does sustainability mean to you, though, marie?
Speaker 4:I see it like forefront, as efficiency, the water you use, the energy, the electricity, all those things but then also how people are moving about and living their lives and, like I think about our utility resource fairs, like that is something that I'm really proud that we do and I'm really grateful that I have the opportunity to go to them and, you know, support people, that they can come to one place and they can get help with their bills and they could learn about our affordability programs, and it makes a lot of sense, it makes people's lives easier. So that's important to me too.
Speaker 3:So could you talk about some of the stuff that you've done since you've taken over as sustainability manager?
Speaker 4:One of the goals in our 2021 sustainability plan was to create a sustainable design checklist for our engineering construction team, and what is exciting about this is that a lot of utilities and even other organizations they'll do like a one-off, like oh, look at us, we have a lead building, leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or Envision, which is a similar environmentally focused certification for civil engineering projects, and we actually have a LEED building, which you might not know. The Renewable Energy Facility is a LEED building, and so we have this because it was part of a big project, but then that isn't like your standard for what you do with all your different types of projects, so what we decided to do is to create a checklist that could be used on every sort of ordinary project that comes through our design team, so it was really important that it was something that was integrated into the work that they were doing. You know you could scale it, you could change it. It was sort of malleable depending on where the focus of the project was, and so that's a big thing, because this gives all the project managers and the folks on the design team a chance to really think about our projects with that lens of you know what is cost effective, that we can do for sustainability, what's going to help our communities?
Speaker 4:One of the challenges that people sometimes lose sight of or forget about is the financial side of sustainability, and that you know. It might be like, oh, wow, shiny new solar panels or we're going to do, I'd like to do this project. It's going to, it's going to help us in XYZ way. You want to really make sure that you're considering, like, what's the payback going to be? Right, right. So we don't want to have something that helps a teeny bit with efficiency but it takes 30, 40 years to pay back, right. And then the other thing is just about thinking about the market and where is the market and how does that relate to our needs for our projects and for the level of service that we provide? So we have in the sustainability plan, a goal to investigate the use of electric powered equipment, and so you might be like, oh, this would be great.
Speaker 4:You know, because if you had just one office building where you're maintaining the grass and you could just plug it in all the time, it would be really easy right to make that switch. And what we found is that, in trying to understand the needs of, for example, our Good Neighbor Ambassador Program, going out into the neighborhoods and really like out for the whole day, the batteries are kind of a challenge. True, because they aren't really able to provide them with all the power that they need so they can do a really good job of maintaining our site. So we're, you know you have to see, like, okay, what technology is there? Will it meet our needs? And, like you know, when is the time to go ahead with these things that help with better and improved air quality in our region?
Speaker 3:What would you say to people out there that want to try to be more sustainable? What are some tips and techniques, not just necessarily in the workplace, but at home or just in their own personal lives?
Speaker 4:There's so many things you could do. So if I start from outside of your house, you know you could think about native plants and the monarchs, right, we all see. Hopefully you see monarchs in your neighborhood and so you could plant plants that are attracting monarchs, especially as we're sort of a stop along the route as they go across the lake and into Canada, and the benefit to us is that a lot of those native plants have longer roots. They can hold more water.
Speaker 4:That's reducing erosion, that's keeping the water in place rather than allowing it to run off of your property, helping with flooding, yeah, you could have a rain barrel as, like, a small way of allowing again the water to sit on your site and be used. And then within your house, of course, thinking about the energy efficiency you know, buying something that's Energy Star certified. If you're buying a big appliance or a television or a computer, getting the Energy Star version as it operates, it's going to save you money over the lifetime of that appliance or the tv. It's going to be more efficient. If you are really lucky and you have a programmable thermostat, like that's a really easy way to save on your natural gas. Or, in the summer, if you have home air conditioning, especially if you're gone for the day, like putting something in place so you're not just wasting energy to heat and cool your house or, like I don't know, your plants and your goldfish.
Speaker 3:Right, or your dogs, or your dogs.
Speaker 4:Yeah, like what's ahead, what's next for the sewer district we have a big goal to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% through energy efficiency efforts, renewable electricity and finding new beneficial reuse options, you know, cutting back on chemical uses, etc. It all helps to reduce our greenhouse gas footprint. Also, we started looking and tracking our potable water usage that's, you know, city water water. So better reusing our non-potable water on site. Potable water is the water that comes out of your tap that's been most likely treated by cleveland water. You can drink it, you can bathe with it, you know, and it's much cheaper than bottled water. So you should do that too. And then non-pot water, like in the case of our three wastewater treatment plans, would be the effluent that's been treated at the end of the process. Right, so you can pull some of that effluent rather than using, you know, fresh, clean water that you could drink for cleaning right, like within the plans, you could use non-potable water to clean equipment, and so it allows you to use the water in a more sustainable way.
Speaker 3:What do you think is the biggest thing in our sustainability plan that you're most excited about? That's going to make the most impact.
Speaker 4:Just at the sewer district. I think the 30% the goal to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions by 30% is big because it's efficiency related, it's waste reduction related. So that's all good stuff. We applied to a program. It's called the my Green Lab Program and it's an international lab certification. We are one of a handful of water and wastewater utilities within the United States that have received this recognition, and it looks at everything from the waste streams to your use of refrigeration.
Speaker 4:So in our labs we have freezers that are very cold, and how you manage those freezers really demonstrates your ability to be more sustainable, because you're using the space that you have more efficiently. And then the other piece of that is that while we were doing the certification, we realized that our lab team felt like more people are aware of what they were doing. We have lab tours and people come in and see what we're doing, and so they hear about all the ways that we're working to be really efficient. And then Will Baker, who's one of our instrument techs, talked about this Like he came from another industry and he was just amazed at like how our lab makes things that the instrument techs need for their work and like, instead of buying them, exactly outsourcing yeah yeah, and it just is so much more efficient and like the things that they provide, like work, you know, like you don't have to worry about.
Speaker 4:Well, is this, this is going to work today? Is it not going to work? Today? We have a composting program at all three of our utilities, plus our environmental services and maintenance center and our main admin building, and so that's an everyday way that you can interact with beneficially reusing materials, adds to soil so we can grow better plants and healthier soils. They can pull in more water and keep the soil around them so there's less erosion. We've had, and continue to have, a program in place to beneficially reuse our district IT assets, and so we work locally with a company that works to refurbish the equipment and then provide them to, sometimes to nonprofits, sometimes to our public school system, so we can continue to have those assets continue their useful life.
Speaker 3:So is there anything else? You want to leave us with Marani?
Speaker 4:So we have a, I guess, before the word of wisdom, we have our amazing story map that shows what are our goals for our sustainability plan, moving ahead and that's on. So you just go to the sewer districts and then a slash and then sustainability. So it has a lot of ideas for what we're doing and explaining what we see are like our kind of principles of sustainability. If you're interested in a career in sustainability, there are many ways that you can do that. Like you can try to integrate sustainability into work that you're doing and you can find a way to to tie sustainability into what you do.
Speaker 3:Well, thank you, marie, it was great talking with you and if you go to our website and find out more about our sustainability programs or contact Marie directly. So, thank you, marie. Great Thanks, jessica.
Speaker 5:Did you know? Eligible customers can save up to 40% on their sewer charges? Learn more about the Sewer District's cost-saving programs and use our discount calculator at neorsdorg. Slash save or call 216-881-8247. 8247. That's N-E-O-R-S-D dot org. Slash save or 216 881-8247.
Speaker 1:Clean Water Works is produced by the Communications and Community Relations Department at the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer District. Our music was composed and performed by GS Schrey. If you have a question or suggestion, or if you'd like to learn more about the Regional Sewer District, visit Norsdorg or call 216-881-8247.
