Zach Gallagher
President & Chief Operating Officer
Natural Systems Utilities
Biography
Mr. Gallagher is a licensed Professional Engineer and LEED Accredited Professional holding BS and MS degrees from Rutgers University in Bio-Resource and Civil/Environmental Engineering. He is currently President & Chief Operating Officer for Natural Systems Utilities (NSU) and is past Vice Chair for the Board of Directors of the US Green Building Council, NJ Chapter. With almost 40 years of innovation and leadership in the water industry NSU operates one of the largest bases of natural treatment and direct water reuse systems in the United States. Mr. Gallagher has over 20 years of experience with decentralized/onsite water reuse systems, has been published by Forbes and serves as a Guest Lecturer on the subject at multiple universities across the Country.
Rutgers Climate Bridge Panel 2: Impact on Place
Abstract
Our limited supplies of water are being continuously decreased and climate change is magnifying the problem. Returning treated water back to its original source, reducing overall reliance on regional watersheds, and ‘keeping water local’ using innovative onsite treatment solutions helps communities achieve and maintain the crucial water balance that ensures sustainable local water resources will be available for future generations. Keeping water local’ is becoming widely embraced as a mainstream design approach by municipalities, businesses, institutions, and developers turning to onsite or community based decentralized water treatment and reuse systems to tackle the many challenges that lie ahead. In addition to water scarcity, drivers to consider water reuse now include aging or inadequate infrastructure, resiliency, resource recovery, flooding/wet weather impacts, green building initiatives and increasing costs for conventional water and sewer. Onsite or distributed systems are also located closer to the source and point of use making it more efficient to recover and reuse both the water and the embedded energy for net neutral or net positive energy systems. Another important balance is to build the mutually beneficial industry equilibrium between decentralized or onsite treatment systems and traditional large-scale centralized wastewater treatment infrastructure. Centralized treatment networks grappling with shrinking capital budgets, aging infrastructure, and looming climate-change challenges are increasingly recognizing the savings and benefits of integrating decentralized treatment systems throughout their network. They are discovering how today’s surge of new decentralized and onsite treatment capacity can help to offset expensive capital improvements, while providing more system resiliency and reliability to their backbone infrastructure.