Since becoming executive director of the Water and Wastewater Equipment Manufacturers Association (WWEMA) in January 2014, I have been on a mission to eradicate one specific word from our industry’s lexicon: vendor. If you look up the word “vendor,” you will find a number of definitions ranging from:
• A person or company offering something for sale, especially a trader in the street;
• Someone who sells things such as newspapers, cigarettes, or food from a small stall or cart;
• A person or company whose principal product lines are office supplies and equipment;
• An individual or company that sells goods or services to someone else in the economic production chain; or
• The entity that is paid for goods that are provided rather than the manufacturer of the goods themselves.
And that is my problem. The word “vendor,” which is often used to refer to equipment manufacturers in our industry, fails to fully recognize the criticality and importance of the products and services that we provide. Without technology manufacturers who see a problem, invest tens of thousands of dollars in research and development (R&D) to find a solution to the problem, and invest even more money in piloting, testing, and ultimately proving the technology, we would not have the quality of drinking water and the clean environment for swimming, fishing, and recreation that most of us enjoy today. I know that we may still have a long way to go in some areas and with some contaminants, but my point is that without those companies investing the money and making the sacrifices to improve drinking water and environmental quality, we would not be in as good a shape as we are today.
Think back to the early 1900s and the advent of chlorine and slow sand filters. Those early technology developments paved the way to eradicate waterborne diseases like typhoid, cholera, and dysentery and were responsible in large part for the 50 percent increase in life expectancy that has occurred in developed countries during the twentieth century. The technologies and treatments made our cities livable by providing piped water and removing and treating human waste. They allowed people to live and work together and helped create the groundwork for the industrial revolution.
In the 1960s, crusaders like Rachel Carson were responsible for studying, documenting, and sharing the dangers to our environment in books like Silent Spring and the Sea Around Us, advancing the global environmental movement. And who was there to help find solutions to our environmental degradation problems? Technology manufacturers.
Innovation is still happening today. When baby wipes were invented and promptly clogged water and wastewater utility treatment pumps, it was the pump manufacturers who leapt into action and, through their engineering expertise, developed improvements to their pump design to prevent baby wipes from causing further damage to equipment and ultimately saving utilities significant money. This is only one example of the types of innovation that we see today. The important message here is that the manufacturers saw the problem and invested their own resources to find solutions. Neither the utilities nor the federal government paid them to come up with these technologies. And manufacturers are still investing today to meet the ever-changing needs of our society and the world around us.
So the question becomes, how do we describe these innovators if not as “vendors”? I propose a number of options for our consideration: technology or equipment manufacturers, environmental solution providers, water and wastewater technology providers. Anything but vendor. WW
