Issue link: http://psai.uberflip.com/i/877076
WEEKLY EDITION September 20, 2017 Why It Matters By Sam Cooper The portable sanitation industry is certainly unique in the places it will bring you in life. When I explained to my wife that I wanted to travel half way around the world to Singapore to attend two days' worth of meetings discussing fecal sludge processors, she was more than a little curious. My background is somewhat unique for our field. Sure, PolyJohn is my family's business, and I am very proud of that legacy. I am incredibly thankful for the opportunity to work with my father, uncle, brother and all the other PolyJohn employees (that I pretty much consider family) every day. But I did not always think I was going to end up at Poly John. My background is in engineering. After graduating college in 2012, I started my career as an engineer at Siemens Energy in Houston, Texas. I had double majored in chemical engineering and chemistry at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, MI, and was ab le to use their great alumni network to find a job where I would analyze the safety and relief systems of large oil refineries. The oil and gas industry was booming at the time, and I had picked a very large company that was doing incredible things. Arou nd the time I left in 2014, Siemens Energy had over 83,000 employees (just in the energy sector of the company alone) and over 25 billion dollars of revenue. CONTINUED ON PAGE 4 PSAI Participates in Second Meeting on Community - Scale Resource Recovery Fecal Sludge Trea tment Units More than 70 participants from organizations and agencies around the world gathered in Singapore earlier this month to continue work on an International Working Agreement (IWA) focused on community - scale resource recovery fecal sludge treatment units. PSAI Executive Director Karleen Kos attended the two - day meeting on behalf of the PSAI. Sam Cooper, PolyJohn Enterprises, also attended as a representative of his company. Check out Sam's impressions of the event below and continued on page 4 of this newsletter. The goal of the IWA is to establish an internationally recognized set of technical criteria by which to assess the safety and performance of community - scale resource - recovery fecal sludge treatment units. The standard aims to cover machine and materials safety, pathogen removal, energy recovery, conversion of excreta into beneficial products, and compliance with health and environmental regulations such as air emissions, noise, and effluent discharge . A draft diagram of the IWA's scope is shown to the right within the blue dotted line. CONTINUED ON PAGE 2