The International Water Association (IWA) established the Project Innovation Award Programme (PIA) to recognize excellence and innovation in water engineering projects throughout the world. The programme’s goal is in keeping with the IWA’s founding mission of “connecting water professionals worldwide to lead the development of effective and sustainable approaches to water management.” Now, IWA has announced the global winners of the 2008 award in five categories.
This biennial Award was initiated in 2006, with the first global award presented at the World Water Congress in Beijing. The winners from the three regional heats in North America, Europe and East Asia & Pacific advanced to the global competition. The awards will be presented on Sept. 10, 2008 at the IWA World Water Congress and Exhibition in Vienna.
The awards are open to individuals, companies, organizations, governmental bodies or any combination of the above, whether or not the organization is a member of IWA. For each region, an international panel of judges drawn from IWA membership is used to evaluate the submissions against a set of criteria that focus on excellence and innovation in project conception and results.
The awards are given in the following categories: applied research; planning; design; operations/management; and small projects.
The winning projects have in their own unique ways contributed significantly across the world to the advancement of technology, the quality of the environment and water, and the efficiency of managing it.
The 2008 global winners included:
• Brown and Caldwell for a biosolids treatment process that upgrades the sludge to highly nutritious fertilizer, substituting chemical fertilizer and relieving overused landfills in Georgia, USA. (Superior Achievement Award and winner in the category “Applied Research”);
• Donohue & Associates for a global first in disposing wastewater biosolids in Illinois, USA, that turns this “waste” into a reusable, marketable glass product (winner in the category “Design”);
• DWAF/IMESA and Emanti Management for rolling out an electronic water quality management system across all municipalities in South Africa (winner in the category “Operation”);
• PUB Singapore for replumbing Singapore’s sewage systems deep into the ground (winner in the category “Planning”); and
• Joe Brown & Mark Sobsey (University of North Carolina) for easy household-scale filtration for Cambodia (winner in the category “Small Projects”).
Source: International Water Association
