Water. desalination + reuse

COMMENT eDitoR'ScoRneR Keeping up with change WITH TECHNOLOGICAL innovation in desalination and water reuse moving so fast, sometimes one needs a place to benchmark everything. The International Desalination Association (IDA) World Congress is actually that place, where people present the very latest innovations and report on how recent technologies and techniques have worked in practice. Papers presented at the Congress are quoted for decades afterwards (some of them anyway!), while people remember that it was at a particular Congress that they first saw that strange device that later came to revolutionise the industry. And this Congress will be a landmark as well as a benchmark, being the first in China. Your then rather green editor got told off long ago for suggesting IDA should go to China not Singapore. It turned out that I was wrong, because the Singapore event was a great success, but I have got my wish at last and in a few weeks many of us will be assembling in Tianjin. So much has happened since then. Delegates were complaining that banks still saw desalination as a risky investment, ERI's pressure exchanger was just beginning to change the energy-recovery landscape, Singapore was just beginning its first large desalination plant and D&WR published its first paper from China about using RO and EDI in a hospital water supply. The 12 years since then have seen the massive burst of desalination in Australia, an inexorable rise in wastewater reuse culminating recently in very serious talk of direct potable reuse, ever larger plants springing up in the Middle East and the rise of multiple small companies boasting new technologies, including the spectacular success of NanoH2O. Boosted by the Spanish decision to base Mediterranean coast water supplies on desalination, contractors from Spain led by Acciona Agua and Cadagua challenged the previous might of Veolia and Degremont. IDE Technologies used a similar boost in Israel to climb to the top. Latin America has opened up new horizons in desalination and reuse, while India is gradually developing its own indigenous desalination industry. And IDA itself has become more proactive. It has led investigations into desalination and energy, and the impact of desalination on the environment, particularly the Gulf. It has launched the IDA Desalination Academy, the Young Leaders and the IDA Journal of Desalination & Water Reuse. Remember, there is only one way to keep up with changes on this scale – keep reading D&WR! Robin Wiseman Valves for Optimizing and Protecting Desalination Systems A.R.I. has been operating worldwide in the field of desalination since 2000. The company has developed a wide range of valves adapted to operate in harsh conditions such as in corrosive environments, seawater environments and high salinity water drillings. The valves are used on brine and saline water transmission pipelines in industry and in desalination systems. Visit us at booth A72 ida world congress 2013 20-25 Oct. tianjin china | 4 | Desalination & Water Reuse | August-September 2013 www.ari.co.il

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