This episode of Simple Civics: Greenville County is brought to you by Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library, providing free books to children zero to five throughout Greenville County. To sign up, visit greenvillefirststeps.org/freebooks.
South Carolina is currently the fastest-growing state in the country, bringing tens of thousands of new residents - and a massive, unseen demand on our local infrastructure. To understand how our community handles this rapid expansion, we sit down with Rebecca West, CEO of ReWa, to discuss the vital role of regional wastewater management. She explains how her organization actively processes 44 million gallons of water every single day, ensuring our rivers and streams remain safe and clean.
We explore the fascinating 100-year history of Renewable Water Resources and its evolution from mitigating the textile industry's early pollution to utilizing state-of-the-art biological treatments today. Rebecca shares the behind-the-scenes planning required to support Greenville and its rapid economic development. You will hear exactly how her team anticipates billion-dollar infrastructure expansions, navigates the complexities of affordable housing developments, and trains microorganisms to turn what she jokingly calls "water with personality" back into pristine headwaters.
If you are curious about local government, environmental conservation, or how civic infrastructure adapts to booming populations, this episode is for you. Tune in to gain a whole new appreciation for the dedicated civil servants and hidden biological systems that keep our communities thriving without us ever having to think about it.
Episode Resources
Introduction to ReWa and Wastewater Management
Katy Smith: South Carolina is the fastest growing state in the country, and thousands of new residents mean tens of thousands more toilets flushing, dishwashers running, and baths and showers taken each day. How does our community handle all of that wastewater? I'm Katy Smith with Greater Good Greenville, and on this episode, you'll learn how from Rebecca West, Chief Executive Officer of ReWa, Greenville Renewable Water Resources.
Katy Smith: She's interviewed by Kelly Byers, local government aficionado and member of Travelers Rest City Council. Rebecca discusses ReWa's impressive 100-year history and how they are bringing their decades of innovation to planning for what's next. Lest you think wastewater sounds uninteresting, I'll entice you by sharing that Rebecca instead calls it water with personality.
Katy Smith: And you'll hear how ReWa is number one in dealing with number two. This is one of those conversations that makes me proud of our civic servants who keep our community running without us even having to think about it. Take a listen to learn about wastewater in our region and the work of ReWa.
Overview of ReWa's Service Area and Customers
Kelly Byers: I am so glad to be here with Rebecca West today. And Rebecca, why don't you start us off with an overview of ReWa?
Rebecca West: ReWa is known as Renewable Water Resources, and we are the regional wastewater provider for five counties in the Upstate. We serve predominantly in Greenville County, parts of Anderson County, Laurens County, Spartanburg County, and then also by contract to Pickens County. In that area that we serve, we serve a little over half a million people in close to 100 industries.
Kelly Byers: Tell us more about the 100 industries that you serve.
Rebecca West: The 100 industries vary in size and focus. We have a number of industries that may be related to the food and beverage industry. We have some that are related to the chemical industry. We also have some that are in advanced manufacturing.
Rebecca West: The Upstate especially is known for its advanced manufacturing. We support those industries and their needs as they move to town, and then we work with them to understand what products they generate and what potential wastewater they may produce.
A 100-Year History: Textiles and the Origins of ReWa
Kelly Byers: Can you tell us a little bit about the connection between our textile history and the need for an entity like yours?
Rebecca West: Absolutely. That's a great segue for me to share that we just turned 100 years last year. We look pretty good for 100 years old! If we go back and look at our history, it's focused on textiles, as you mentioned.
Rebecca West: What's really interesting that not many people may know about the history of Greenville is that it was a very forward-thinking city. Back in the 1920s, the city leaders decided they wanted to focus on protecting public health. They decided they wanted to be one of the first sewered cities in the United States.
Rebecca West: They were one of nine sewered cities in the United States to look at putting public sewers in to collect the wastewater from the city. They also focused with their textile business leaders and said, as you're building your mills, you too should put sewers in.
Rebecca West: What's interesting at the time is they put the sewers in, and then they discharged all those sewers to the Reedy River. The concept of building a wastewater treatment plant was not in their thoughts at that moment. How Renewable Water Resources was born was that Conestee Mills, which is downstream of where our Mauldin Road Water Resource Recovery Facility is today.
Rebecca West: The Reedy River was really polluted and dirty, and Conestee Mills sued the city because they allowed for all these sewers to go into the Reedy River because the water quality was just terrible. I like to think we were born out of a water quality crisis.
Rebecca West: From that lawsuit was eventually born Renewable Water Resources. What's interesting is that the treatment facility built at Mauldin Road was state-of-the-art for the time. ReWa has continued with that progressive mindset throughout our history.
Rebecca West: In fact, we have nine water resource recovery facilities within our service area, within those counties that we serve. Every day we clean 44 million gallons of water. We take all the water that's used from houses, businesses, and industry, clean it to drinking water quality standards, and put that water back into the Enoree, the Reedy, the Saluda, and the Tyger River basins.
Rebecca West: That water can be used downstream. Forty-four million gallons of water is like 67 Olympic-sized swimming pools. That's how much water we put back in so it can be used again with our friends down in Greenwood to Columbia, all the way to the coast.
Rebecca West: I share that because it's so important that we clean the water to the highest standard since it gets reused over and over. The technology we have at our facilities is state-of-the-art and has been known regionally and across the country as some of the best. We do that to protect the headwaters of the state, at least in our portion of South Carolina.
The Wastewater Treatment Process: Biology at Work
Kelly Byers: Well, we know Greenvillians are very passionate and opinionated about water. Thank you on behalf of all of us for cleaning it, getting it back to nature, and for being concerned with how it affects others in the state as well.
Kelly Byers: I have always wanted to be the host of Dirty Jobs. Sitting in this clean conference room with you is about as close as I'm getting to that experience. Spare me no details on telling us about the treatment process of when water leaves our homes, how it gets to the treatment facility.
Rebecca West: When water leaves our homes and businesses, we refer to it as wastewater, but we don't waste any water. I like to refer to it as water with personality.
Kelly Byers: Great.
Rebecca West: It's really the water that we drink with other stuff in it with different personalities. As that water is transported from homes and businesses, it goes through our service area. We have 450 miles of sewer lines, and 450 miles of sewer lines also have lift stations or pump stations.
Rebecca West: We're a hilly area. Water flows by gravity to the bottom of the hill, but then you've got to get it over the hill. We have 86 pumping stations across our service area that take this water with personality to one of our nine water resource recovery facilities. We recover the great water from it plus other resources.
Rebecca West: As it gets to the treatment facility, we then employ biology. We take nature, what's happening out in nature, and we consolidate it within our treatment processes. We use biology to clean the water.
Rebecca West: I like to say we have a really tough job because, number one, we don't know what's coming in to our treatment facilities every day. If we have large rain events, we can collect extra stormwater, and who knows what gets shared from homes and businesses down the drains. Our job is to anticipate what that quality is going to be.
Rebecca West: We have quality standards for the water that goes back into the rivers and streams, using that biology with a little bit of chemistry and a little bit of engineering to clean that water through various processes. It's different at different times of the year. You're talking about microorganisms, so they don't like to be cold. In the wintertime, they act differently than they do in the summertime.
Rebecca West: It's really a neat process. What's always fascinating to people when they come to our resource recovery facility is the realization that we actually use biology to make that happen. We are taking microorganisms, growing them, and training them to take the personality or the bad things out of the water so that by the time it gets returned back to the rivers and streams, it is drinking water quality.
Returning Cleaned Water to the River System
Kelly Byers: Great. And when you talk about returning the water back to the headwaters, how does that process work?
Rebecca West: We actually have a large pipe that goes underneath the river. We have another pipe with a lot of holes in it, and it basically blends the water in with the flow of the river.
Rebecca West: The only time you would notice it is if you were walking in the Reedy River at that point. It might be a little shallow, and then all of a sudden you go from knee-deep to waist-deep. That is where the water is added.
Rebecca West: I used to work at Spartanburg Water, and we had one of our treatment facilities discharge back into the Pacolet River. We had the best rapids on the Pacolet River. I would say, "Oh, we're shooting the rapids with wastewater that's been cleaned."
Rebecca West: We don't quite have that here in Greenville, but that's how it gets returned. It's blended in. From standing and looking at it, you would just notice there's more water at that point in the river.
Adapting to Population Growth and Infrastructure Needs
Kelly Byers: Can you tell us a little bit about how the system continues to grow and adapt to the needs of the area?
Rebecca West: That's a great question. When you asked me earlier about the textile industry and the impact that it had on Greenville at that time, think about this: each textile mill that we know about today that is being turned into redeveloped areas for living typically had its own wastewater treatment facility. If you look back on ReWa's history, we acquired a number of those treatment facilities as the textile industries went away.
Rebecca West: Our job at that time was to regionalize those facilities. We had well over 20 treatment facilities that over time have been consolidated into the nine that we have today. We still need to consolidate more over time. That is one way that we respond to changes in business and how business impacts the needs for wastewater treatment.
Rebecca West: Today, our needs are a little different as we see growth happening in the Southeast and especially in South Carolina. I think I just read something the other day that we're the fastest, we're number one. So we've got to think about what we're going to do with number two!
Rebecca West: My job is to make sure as we have more people coming to our area, we have the infrastructure ready to take care of their wastewater needs. How do we do that? We work closely with all five counties that we serve. We understand what their comprehensive plans are and how they design their communities to be.
Rebecca West: Likewise, we work with all the municipalities within those counties because those communities decide how they want to grow and how they want their communities planned. Based on those plans, we overlay where we have existing infrastructure and where population growth may happen.
Rebecca West: Then we translate that into gallons of water a day and decide: are our sewer lines large enough to accommodate that amount of water? Are our treatment facilities large enough to accommodate that?
Rebecca West: As we sit today, we have about $2.1 billion of infrastructure improvements to make. Now, all of that is not associated with growth. That also supports our ongoing maintenance and operations of our existing facilities. We've got to figure out what treatment facilities need to be expanded.
Rebecca West: We have our Durbin Creek facility that is number one for expansion, serving southern Greenville County and parts of Laurens County. Next, we have our Georges Creek facility, which is serving western Greenville and portions of Anderson County. Those are our two facilities that we have to look towards expanding.
Rebecca West: In addition, we are expanding our sewer lines on the main corridor that collects wastewater from Travelers Rest all the way down to our treatment facility off of Mauldin Road. As you can imagine, those are some pretty large pipes. We're working now to size those pipes so that we can accommodate not only the infill of the city, but also what may happen in the western Greenville portions of the area, portions of Travelers Rest, and going up north towards Travelers Rest.
Rebecca West: For those areas, we're trying to figure out what we need to do to make sure we've got adequate capacity to bring that wastewater down to our treatment facility.
Rebecca West: The other thing we're doing is trying to lengthen the time for our next expansion at Lower Reedy because expanding a treatment facility is very expensive. Imagine what a gallon of water looks like. Right now, it costs about $50 per gallon of wastewater to expand our treatment facility. If I look at those needs long-term, that's why our budgets are as large as they are. You think long and hard before you make those expansion decisions.
Rebecca West: We feel like we're at times playing whack-a-mole. I don't know how else to describe it, but this is where growth is going to go, so do we have enough capacity? I don't know if I mentioned it, but it takes anywhere from five to 10 years from the start of thinking about that expansion to the time it actually gets completed. You have to be ahead of the curve.
The Role of Wastewater Management in Economic Development
Kelly Byers: We've talked around this, but can you talk about how wastewater management plays a role in the economic development of that region?
Rebecca West: I'll focus primarily on industrial and commercial. As we plan for any type of economic development relative to bringing jobs to a community and attracting industry, we work closely with our economic development partners.
Rebecca West: We sit down and understand the regions that are not only zoned for industrial but also have all the right components to support industry. That's usually rail, energy, water, and sewer. We look at areas they want to try to market for economic development and make sure that we're planning for adequate capacity.
Rebecca West: Let's say an industry comes in and it was something that we hadn't planned for. At those times, we ask for support from state commerce and other areas to help provide the funding to put that infrastructure into place, in addition to the industry moving to the area. We do that so those costs aren't borne by our existing customers.
Rebecca West: We work closely to make sure that as we're planning that infrastructure, if we know we might need additional capacity, we plan for that a bit. But if there's an immediate need, we try to ensure we get the funding to support that.
Rebecca West: The other side of that is the downstream effects. As you have an industry or bring jobs to a community, what do the housing needs look like? Where are some of those housing needs going to be? We have been working closely, especially within the past four to five years, on how to bring affordable and workforce housing to meet the needs of additional people moving to the community, as well as the existing people that live here.
Rebecca West: Those needs are a little different as we're thinking about infrastructure, and I can share a great example. We had one situation where we had just recently rehabilitated some wastewater infrastructure in an area zoned for single-family houses. The flows from single-family houses are not like a multi-use large complex that has a lot of units. We went from a 10-acre area where you may have had 20 houses to now 50 to 200 units.
Rebecca West: We had just recently upsized some infrastructure, this new affordable housing development popped up, and then we had to go and have that infrastructure replaced. That cost was borne by the affordable housing development, which operates on the margins anyway in terms of building.
Rebecca West: We're trying to get smarter about that and understand the plans for the cities and the plans for the counties for those opportunities. As we're making improvements to our system, we size it for that so we can help support those needs as they are being met in the community.
ReWa's Organizational Structure as a Special Purpose District
Kelly Byers: ReWa is technically a nonprofit. Is that right?
Rebecca West: We are technically a nonprofit. Yes, we're a special purpose district that was formed by the State of South Carolina. What that means is that our board is appointed by the governor based on the nominations and recommendations of the counties that we serve.
Rebecca West: It's a very complex process that we will need two more podcasts to explain, but it allows representation in the communities that we serve. It also allows us to have a board that is very focused on trying to provide those regional needs, looking at that bigger, broader picture.
Rebecca West: Our responsibility is to make sure the water used in these areas is cleaned to the best that it can be cleaned, planned based on the needs of water downstream of us, and that we're very focused on cleaning that water. Having the type of structure we have allows us to focus on doing that. It also allows us to think down the road. Our focus is what we need to do for planning for the long term.
Future Projects, Technology, and Conservation
Kelly Byers: What are some projects that you're most excited about?
Rebecca West: Well, certainly the expansion of our treatment facilities. I'm a biologist by trade, so I get all geeked out on what kind of cool technology and biology we can put in place as we make these next expansions.
Rebecca West: We'll find different ways of doing it better and cheaper, with a mindset of conservation. We're very focused on reducing our energy footprint for the long term, as well as our water footprint. How can we do that in a more sustainable way?
Community Engagement and Environmental Partnerships
Kelly Byers: Tell us about ReWa's other community engagement initiatives.
Rebecca West: We see ourselves as a community partner, and looking at that responsibility now, we look at opportunities for, number one, educating the community about water. Water is the core of what we do, and we want to ensure that we are helping people understand the value of that water. Our engagement is really focused on that education.
Rebecca West: The other thing that I mentioned is we have been focused on affordable housing. We're looking at ways we can remove some of the barriers to affordable housing and working closely with the city and the county to help meet that need.
Rebecca West: We have a group called ReWa Gives Back. We volunteer for organizations across the community, whatever they want to participate in. We have a certain number of hours allocated a year that they can use during their work time to give back to our community. We support the United Way.
Rebecca West: We work with so many of our environmental partners: Conestee Nature Preserve, Roper Mountain Science Center, the Upstate Alliance. We also work with Friends of the Reedy and Save Our Saluda. We're all partners to help focus on water and what's important for our community.
Rebecca West: We're heavily engaged on a state and national level to continue to preach and talk about water. We strive to be that voice for water, but more importantly, how do we invest in others? We know that investing in other people to understand that importance is one of the most important things we could do.
Kelly Byers: Well, you are such a great community partner. Thank you for your leadership with ReWa and for joining us today.
Rebecca West: Well, thank you.
Credits
Simple Civics: Greenville County is Produced by Podcast Studio X.
A Greater Good Greenville project.
