The year 1972 saw the passage of the Clean Water Act (CWA), an act that provided incentives, penalties, as well as funding for communities to clean their water. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the time estimated that over two-thirds of the waters in America were unfit for fishing or swimming; a number that was cut in half after the CWA was established. Almost 50 years later the early success of the program has declined. A combination of funding cuts, aging infrastructure, and new pollutants has pushed the responsibility for water treatment back upstream to the facilities that produce the wastewater. This means food and beverage processors and other manufacturers that generate copious amounts of wastewater.

Historically, large centralized publicly owned treatment works (POTWs) were the beneficiaries of the CWA, says Daryl Mandoza, product manager for wastewater treatment solutions at Kurita America.* (Kurita, formerly U.S. Water, treats both incoming water and wastewater.) Funding and regulatory changes made investment in these POTWs beneficial for the communities and production facilities that used their services.