Initially wanting to enter the police force, Chantal Keane has spent the last few years working as a Futures Strategist for Urban Utilities. She has grown from strength to strength as a Young Utility Leader program participant.
Chantal Keane never imagined it would be the case, but her love of science and a well-timed run-in with a lab manager has led to five fast, fun-filled years at Urban Utilities that she wouldn’t change.
“I had my sights set on going to the police force, wanting to use my chemistry degree for forensic science,” said Keane. “I was working at Coles while studying and happened to serve a customer who worked in the water industry. He was managing the analytical lab, and he offered me a job when he needed a chemist and heard that I was studying chemistry, so it was perfect timing. I’ve just never left.”
She helps the people of Urban Utilities to make decisions in an uncertain future. The goal is to keep at the forefront of regulatory, industry and global activities to best inform the company’s strategies and achieve its goals.
“My specialty is in chemistry, particularly around contaminants of emerging concern and the circular economy,” Keane said. “I opted for chemistry because I thought I could find a job more easily than with a mathematics degree. In fairness, there is still a lot of maths involved in the chemistry field, particularly when looking at how things work at a molecular level.”
Keane has regularly sought out challenges in her life, which saw her transfer from a degree in film into chemistry.
“I found that chemistry was one of the more challenging subjects at school,” she said. “As much as I enjoyed film as a hobby, I found that chemistry would provide more challenges for me from an intellectual perspective.”
Emerging contaminants of concern
Keane is not one to back down from a challenge, which is one of the reasons she is undertaking a PhD at the University of Queensland (UQ). She is focusing on sources of contaminants of emerging concern in wastewater networks and is due to finish her PhD in 2027.
“When I first started at Urban Utilities, I was in the laboratory,” she said. “After three years, I moved to the trade waste team, managing big industrial customers and their wastewater discharge to the sewer. That is how the opportunity to start a PhD came about, as it looks at trade waste sources of contaminants of emerging concern. That includes things like pesticides, pharmaceuticals, drugs and PFAS. It’s well known that these contaminants are increasingly causing havoc to water and wastewater systems worldwide, particularly when they enter our waterways and receiving environments.”
In her work, Keane and her team found intermittent pulses showing elevated contaminant levels running through the wastewater system. They theorised that these contaminants could be coming from the larger industrial users of the system.
“That’s what my PhD is looking into,” Keane said. “Despite extensive research on wastewater, including treatment processes, a fundamental unanswered challenge for sustainable waste and water management is source control. The gap lies in unknown sources of contaminants, given that wastewater monitoring at treatment plants fails to distinguish sources upstream. This project aims to address this pressing challenge in collaboration with water utilities, environmental authorities, and health departments. Ideally, we can manage these contaminants at the source rather than downstream in the wastewater treatment plants.”
Impact in Australia
One aspect of Keane’s findings so far is that there are different contaminant loads in different parts of Australia and, indeed, the world. South East Queensland tends to have specific contaminants or substances in its water, while other states, countries, and regions have different loads.
“In some regards, Australia is lucky in that it does not have manufacturers of some of these chemicals on our shores,” she said. “Many chemical manufacturers are discharging nasty chemicals into the water in America. While having these employers in the past might have been good, the impact on the water supply has been dramatic. That’s particularly the case to have many of these companies on one continent.”
The role of different industries in each country means that the distribution of contaminants like PFAS varies from country to country. In relative terms, Australia has a somewhat diluted presence of PFAS.
“We’ve got a ban on the import of all the PFAS chemicals into Australia in large quantities,” said Keane. “Any traces of PFAS that we see in the sewer system typically come through waste treatment facilities, landfills and firefighting facilities. That’s good, as Australia can operate highly targeted source control campaigns.”
Communication is key
People working in the sciences are often accused of not being good at communicating their research. UQ has long faced this challenge with aplomb by hosting the Three Minute Thesis competition, also known as 3MT®. The 3MT is an academic competition that challenges PhD students to describe their research within three minutes to a general audience. 3MT celebrates the discoveries made by research students and encourages their skill in communicating the importance of research to the broader community.
Keane’s presentation, “CSI: Trade Waste Investigations,” finished second in the 2024 School of Pharmacy/Queensland Alliance for Environmental Health (QAEHS) competition. She believes that this is an excellent idea for up-and-coming researchers to get involved in.
“I think that if you can’t explain your research in simple terms to the layman, you don’t understand your research well enough,” she said. “Having that opportunity is fantastic. Depending on your program’s length, you can try multiple times and rejig your presentation. Three minutes is slightly longer than an elevator pitch but remains very efficient.”
Leadership
This level of excellence has extended to her participation in the Water Services Association of Australia (WSAA) Young Utility Leaders program in 2022 and 2023. The program exposes young members of the water utility industry to senior leaders within the urban water sector. Participants also work alongside those senior leaders on Board Committees and at thought leadership events and initiatives. The intervention of a mentor and supervisor saw Keane put her hand up for the program.
“Colin Hester, one of my favourite managers, said he thought this would be a good opportunity for me,” Keane said. “It’s been the story of my life that I have developed these mentor/mentee relationships with people who have looked out for me.”
Keane found the experience eye-opening and described it as phenomenal. The pathway forward for her that arose from the program provided insights into the strategic and higher-level discussions within the water industry.
“Being connected and linked with all the like-minded young emerging leaders was exciting as well,” said Keane. “The other young utility leaders have been wonderful people with diverse backgrounds, and we all learnt from and have grown off each other.”
She highlighted the many opportunities that had arisen from the experience, including being surrounded by the industry’s top tier of senior leadership across Australia and New Zealand.
“We also had excellent workshops with Bek Christensen from the Peter Cullen Trust,” Keane said. “She helped us learn a lot about ourselves and each other. Part of that was looking at our strengths and weaknesses so we could play to those strengths and accommodate our shortcomings in the leadership space. I took away the new understanding that leaders have different personalities.”
Applying circular thinking
As a Futures Strategist for Urban Utilities, Keane is part of the circular economy group. The team seeks to remain at the forefront of regulatory and global developments within the circular economy to see what might be applied to an Urban Utilities context. They also aim to introduce relevant best practices to improve organisational decision-making.
“Essentially, I come up with a circular economy strategy that will evolve, and we will do the best we can with the information we have,” she said. “Understanding what we do well is essential for the water industry, and those circular economy outcomes can be far more successful if done in an integrated fashion.”
As an example, Keane cites keeping supply chains short to minimise disruptions. It also brings costs down. One of the big challenges she is facing is working through the conflicting initiatives that arise from transitioning to a circular economy.
“While we are transitioning to a circular economy, the economy as it stands right now is not designed for circularity,” Keane said. “It’s why we must be mindful when working through the conflicting initiatives. Do they conflict with each other, do we need to adapt the existing ones, or do we need to completely change tact?”
It’s also important to remember that many drivers can achieve circular outcomes. Keane believes that people in this field fall short by forgetting the importance of the connection between circularity and the bigger picture.
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