Contributed by Rich MacAlpine

Rich MacAlpine is a lab supervisor at Metro Water Recovery. He has 20 years of lab leadership experience and is motivated to improve lab processes for optimized throughput, better data quality, and more sanity.

I was fortunate enough to attend the Rocky Mountain Water Conference (RMWC) in Keystone in August. Per the Rocky Mountain Water Environment Association (RMWEA) website, the RMWC “is the premier water focused conference in our region.” Well, I guess they haven’t heard of the Rocky Mountain Water Quality Analysts Association (RMWQAA) Symposium!

Bragging rights aside, the RMWC was a great experience for me, and I want to share the common themes there that are hugely evident in the water sector and are also increasingly applied to laboratories. These are innovation, continuous improvement, problem solving, meeting challenges, “doing more with less”, collaboration, focusing on customer needs, and experimentation. All the great things that drive us forward and make us better!

Attendee days at the RMWC consist of travelling between half hour presentations from leaders in the industry given in multiple rooms across the convention center. It’s a quick pace that allows for exposure to a wide variety of information. And although the presentations ranged widely from water to distribution to laboratory to wastewater to energy to land use to permitting to wells to customer service and employee engagement, the themes of innovation, problem solving, and process improvement were strongly represented in almost every session I attended.

I highlighted just a few sessions at the RMWC that really showed innovation and improvement:

An Engineering leader from Metro discussing the importance of change management for people. (This is a big step forward from the old way engineers look at problems! The acceptance of a change by the team greatly increases the likelihood that it will be successful, and that’s just fact.)

Lab leaders at South Platte Renew (SPR) showing how to do internal lab audits to not only get ready for external audits, but to assess where you are in relation to where you want to be. (Measuring where you are is an important part of improving, otherwise how do you know you’ve improved or not?)

An Xcel/City of Denver/Metro collaboration to use wastewater to power heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) in buildings. (Resource recovery in action!)

Pilot and Research Center (PARC) Innovation Live – Discussing many of the innovative projects that SPR can experiment with in their new PARC. (Establishing innovation as a core part of everyday work, not something squeezed in after everything else.)

There were also so many other sessions highlighting innovation and improvement, too many to check out. If you work in the industry, you already know that we are a highly innovative, resilient, and dedicated group of people. Seeing so much innovation and improvement all together was so satisfying. The vibe and the knowledge were highly motivating for me to get back to the lab and start improving!

I am already looking forward to RMWC 2026! It will be in Keystone again, and the RMWQAA Education sub-committee and LPC will be hosting a “Lab Track”, a room (or rooms!) dedicated to sequential sessions with lab-specific info.

Anyone interested in presenting their lab experience, that has an idea of something to present, or wants any more information, are encouraged to reach out to Rich MacAlpine at rmacalpine@metrowaterrecovery.com.

There will be a helpful (and not required) gathering of potential presenters on November 6 so that we can support each other in getting our abstracts in by the due date, which is in January. This early due date normally catches us off guard, so this time we are getting ahead of it (small, incremental improvements!).

“Do the best you can until you know better. Then, when you know better, do better” - Maya Angelou