On the far western side of the UMass Amherst campus—conveniently situated between the Town of Amherst’s Wastewater Treatment Plant, the Mill River, and the UMass Central Heating Plant—is an invaluable resource for researchers pursuing sustainable, efficient solutions for current water and water-energy challenges. The UMass Amherst Water and Energy Technology (WET) Center offers a unique setting to test new technologies in water treatment and purification. Its secret weapon: raw wastewater, directly on tap.

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The WET Center is believed to be the only university-based testing facility on the East Coast, and one of only a few in the United States, with direct piped access to municipal wastewater. 

“If you’re a researcher trying to study wastewater, there’s an inherent challenge in getting access to it—all the logistical complications around transporting, storing, and disposing of wastewater,” explains Patrick Wittbold, research engineer at the WET Center. “Having wastewater on tap is quite a valuable asset that we offer clients using this space.”

The WET Center also provides access to local surface water from the Mill River, rainwater from a roof-based catchment system, and treated tap water from the Town of Amherst, and it is hoping to offer groundwater through an on-site well by 2026. The center supports research targeting critical challenges in water treatment, including addressing both conventional and emerging contaminants—such as PFAS chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and disinfection byproducts—and seeking to lower energy costs for conventional treatment through approaches like Internet of Things (IoT)-based energy monitoring and real-time motor performance analysis. It also aids in evaluating new and emerging treatment methods and technologies.

“For UMass faculty, the WET Center is an incredible resource to bridge partnerships with industry, government agencies, and utilities,” says Caitlyn Butler, faculty lead at the center, as well as professor of civil and environmental engineering and associate dean of research and graduate affairs in the UMass Amherst College of Engineering. “This site allows for collaborations at scale, bringing the research and demonstration closer to the application and giving our students exposure to real-world nuances of technology development.”  

While there is excellent work going on at the center, Butler says that they are currently constrained by their facilities. Funds have been committed toward building a new facility for the WET Center, and the staff is actively working to raise the remaining funds needed.
 

At the Leading Edge of Water Pollution Control

The WET Center’s origins date back to the earliest days of water pollution control in the United States. The establishment of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1970 and the passage of the Federal Water Pollution Control Act amendments (today known as the Clean Water Act) in 1972 produced an urgent need for innovation in water pollution control. The state of Massachusetts was ahead of the game, with the Massachusetts Division of Water Pollution Control (MDWPC) funding a series of grants to UMass Amherst to study wastewater treatment and aquatic environmental protection, beginning in 1969. This led to the construction of the UMass Water and Wastewater Pilot Plant (WWPP), predecessor to the WET Center, to support this research.

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But by the late 1980s, following the widespread construction of wastewater treatment plants across the country, state funding for the WWPP dried up, and the facility was taken offline for wastewater research. During this period, the site was used for other research activities through the UMass Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, later lying dormant. Then, in the early 2010s, John Tobiason and David Reckhow, now emeritus professors of civil and environmental engineering, received a grant from the U.S. EPA to study an innovative technology for drinking water treatment. This project and the associated funding spurred an effort by Tobiason and Reckhow—along with Wittbold, then a master’s student—to revive the former WWPP. With support from UMass undergraduates, the facility was brought back to usable condition, and in early 2017, municipal wastewater from the Amherst plant began circulating through the facility for the first time in more than 30 years. In 2018, it was renamed the UMass Amherst Water and Energy Technology (WET) Center.

With funding from the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center, UMass also established a mobile innovation laboratory trailer to conduct testing at sites around the state. Meanwhile, Reckhow’s involvement in the New England Water Innovation Network led to several start-up companies using the WET Center for pilot and bench-scale studies. 

Facilitating Research and Innovation on Campus and Beyond

Today, the WET Center supports about half a dozen projects each year. It is used by researchers in academia and at state agencies—as well as entrepreneurs and established companies—for testing, product development, and piloting new water treatment devices. The center’s base at UMass Amherst offers researchers access to experts from a variety of disciplines and state-of-the-art research facilities, both at the WET Center and across the campus, including the Core Facilities at the UMass Institute for Applied Life Sciences.

“A lot of start-up companies hit a roadblock in product development when it comes to demonstrating effectiveness,” explains Tobiason. “The WET Center plays an important role by providing a place to test technologies in development with real wastewater.”

Jeremy Fink, associate director of project development at Oldcastle Infrastructure, has worked with the WET Center on several projects to develop new product features to be used at wastewater treatment plants.

“The working relationship that the WET Center has with the City of Amherst Water Treatment Plant allowed us to pilot and characterize equipment that needed to be tested under ‘real-world’ conditions,” Fink says. While his company’s product development team maintains its own hydraulic test facility, Fink notes that “ultimately, [they] need to see the effects of real wastewater as well.”

The first two projects Fink worked on at the WET Center have resulted in commercialized products, with one currently on the market and the other due to arrive in 2025. “The completion of these projects would have been impossible without the help of the WET Center staff,” says Fink. “To have a team on-site that can work independently and autonomously as partners, not just contractors, is indispensable to our product development process.”

He adds: “In our most recent project, the WET Center staff conducted well over a hundred bench-scale tests using primary treatment effluent to characterize a chemical treatment process to be utilized in a new piece of equipment currently under development. Their patience and expertise with these sorts of experiments gave us a significant boost in our understanding of this process, and we are now moving into prototype design with a level of confidence that we couldn’t have achieved on our own.”

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The WET Center also partners on research with the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) through its drinking water program. According to Tobiason, several UMass faculty are studying technologies to address emerging contaminants in drinking water, and the center’s mobile innovation laboratory trailer facilitates on-site work in small communities around the state in partnership with DEP. One such project studied faucet-mounted filters for PFAS removal from a drinking water well source. UMass also plans to conduct laboratory studies of emerging contaminant removal for DEP.

The WET Center supports other types of research related to wastewater, including wastewater epidemiology. Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Butler’s research group has studied the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in wastewater from the UMass campus and beyond. This research, which is ongoing, has played a critical role in the campus and regional response to the virus by helping to gauge trends in COVID cases. [Read more about this research.]
 

Driving Workforce Development

The WET Center also contributes to workforce development, with undergraduates gaining valuable immersive experience while supporting research projects.

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William Fang, who earned his degree in informatics, with a concentration in data science, from UMass’s Manning College of Information and Computer Sciences in 2024, worked on three separate projects at the WET Center as an undergraduate. This work included analyzing data from power sensors installed by a previous team of undergraduates at a water treatment plant to identify opportunities to improve energy efficiency. “We wrote this analysis into a white paper, and then adapted it into a paper that was published in an industry journal in October 2024,” says Fang.

Fang also assisted with setting up a test bench to analyze the impact of inconsistent and “unclean” power on motors and pumps, and with a project to analyze power usage at a farm in Kenya to gain insights into how poor electricity quality impacts industrial or commercial operations.

Fang's experience working at the WET Center helped him gain interdisciplinary transferable skills in electrical engineering and civil engineering. "[It] allowed me to implement skills I learned in class in a semi-real-world environment and adapt my knowledge to experienced situations,” he says.

This story was originally published in January 2025.