OMAHA, NE, Sept. 24, 2012 — Joe Cleary, a senior vice president in the HDR|HydroQual office in Mahwah, N.J., will receive the prestigious WEF Industrial Water Quality Lifetime Achievement Award at WEFTEC 2012, the upcoming 85th annual technical exhibition and conference sponsored by the Water Environment Federation.

The WEFTEC 2012 conference is scheduled for Sept. 29-Oct. 3 at the Morial Convention Center in New Orleans.

A professional engineer, Cleary has 40 years of experience providing environmental engineering consulting services to both private and public sector clients in the United States, Puerto Rico, Mexico, South America and Europe.

He currently serves as the chairman of WEF’s Industrial Waste Committee and is a former chairman of the WEF Microconstituents Community of Practice. He also has served as a chairman at industrial wastewater specialty conferences and workshops for WEF and participated in webinars and technical practice updates.

During his career Cleary has designed treatment systems in the pharmaceutical, chemical, food and beverage, pulp and paper, refinery, power, textile and microelectronics industries. Cleary has worked with these industries to solve problems associated with the treatment, permitting and management of industrial wastewater, water reuse and energy recovery.

His body of work also includes hazardous waste site remediation, surface water quality modeling, NPDES and stormwater permitting, fate of microconstituents in treatment systems, treatability studies and process modeling, and design of municipal wastewater treatment and biosolids systems, including food waste to energy and co-digestion of biosolids and food wastes.

In addition to receiving his award, Cleary will present a paper and serve as an assistant moderator at WEFTEC 2012.