OWC Innovation Showcase Summer Series: Advancing Water Innovation Across Ontario
This July, the Ontario Water Consortium hosted its Innovation Showcase Summer Series, a three-part webinar program highlighting applied research and emerging technologies across Ontario’s water sector. With close to 200 registrants, the series convened municipal leaders, researchers, engineers, and technology developers around practical solutions to the complex challenges facing water infrastructure, operations, and climate resilience. The series opened with a spotlight on flood forecasting, an increasingly urgent need as climate-driven hydrological extremes grow more common across Ontario. Dr. Andre Erler, [...]
Investigating PFAS in Canadian Water Systems: Cross-Sector Collaboration Advances Research on Emerging Contaminants
On June 5, 2025, the Ontario Water Consortium (OWC) hosted the second in a series of webinars exploring the progress of a major collaborative research initiative focused on per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in Canadian water systems. Co-led by Professor Scott Hopkins (University of Waterloo) and Professor Franco Berruti (Western University), the project exemplifies how academic, municipal, and private-sector partners can work together to address one of the most complex and urgent issues facing water systems today. The initiative began [...]
Transforming Anaerobic Digestion: New Research Shows a Path Beyond Biogas
In October 2024, the Ontario Water Consortium published “Going Beyond Biogas”, introducing the Waste to Chemicals Alliance - a multi-partner collaboration exploring how anaerobic digestion (AD) can evolve from a conventional energy recovery tool into a platform for producing high-value chemicals from organic waste. On June 10, 2025, OWC hosted the Alliance’s first public webinar to share progress on this initiative, now entering its final year. The session highlighted key findings in microbial community engineering, product recovery, and process optimization, [...]