Melinda Byrne of Solenus explains how circular economy thinking requires viewing a whole plant as one system, not isolated processes. Chemical selection, dosing, and optimization must account for how changes ripple across pulping, utility water, and wastewater treatment. Big-data monitoring and external partnerships are essential to make it work.
Hi, I'm Angela Godwin with Water World magazine, coming to you from the Bluetech Forum here in Vancouver. Joining me this afternoon is my guest, Melinda Byrne. She is with Solenus. Melinda, thank you very much for joining us today.
Thank you very much.
Now, you are leading a roundtable at the discussion this year, and the topic is the future of chemistries and chemicals in a circular economy, which sounds like a fascinating topic. What are some of the key themes there?
Sure. So if we think about the economy today and circular economy, we think about should we be using chemistry to begin with, how can we optimize it, and then ultimately, how can we recycle it, reuse it and so forth. So traditionally, think about chemistries and chemistry use. You think about using it in unit operations. So across a whole plant, it could be looking at point A, point B, maybe at the end. And traditionally, that's how we would do it. We'd choose the best chemistry for a particular unit operation or series and then we'd optimize it. But as we start to think about the circular economy from the beginning all the way through the end, you have to step back and you actually have to look more broadly. You have to look across not just one unit operation, but across the whole plant. So, for example, in a pulp and paper mill, you might start with a pulp step and then you would move on into the other steps. Across the mill, you might have somebody who's looking at that pulping process and be an expert there, and they'd be optimizing on that. Then you'd have somebody else potentially looking at the utility water treatment, you'd have somebody else looking at waste water treatment. As we start to look at recycle reuse, you can't look at these individually, but you have to look at them as a whole. So you have to take a holistic approach to water management, to chemistries, across the entire mill or plant. And part of that is choosing the right products, not just for that unit operation, but across the whole thing, where that chemistry is dosed and how it's dosed, and then also looking at things like monitoring and control. Because now with big data, you can start to look at a lot more things and start to see how making a change over here could impact what's happening over there.
So let's talk a little bit about open innovation and how technology providers can sort of partner with each other to attack some of these challenges that we're having in the industry.
Absolutely. And I think it's really important because I think in order for us to get the best solution, to really think out of the box, we have to be willing and open and looking for solutions that are outside. So we, for example, are always looking for external partners to try to get new technologies, new approaches, new ways of doing things that we may not have the capability to develop in house, or quite frankly, may want to have that partner for their expertise and bring them in. So we're always looking for that. And I think that's a really important part of this industry. And I think today at BlueTech already we've seen how important it is to be looking at ways to work together to come up with the ultimate best solution.
That does seem to be one of the really unique factors about this particular event, is that there is a lot of that collaboration and discussion happening.
It's great. And certainly the discussions at the roundtables really started to foster some of that. So it's very neat to see how people have started to interact and then how the conversations have continued.
Melinda, thank you so much for your time today. Really appreciate your insights.
Thank you.
For Waterworld magazine, I'm Angela Godwin.
