GBD Principal Kyle Andersen drew a large crowd at an education session about Hassalo on Eighth’s NORM (Natural Organic Recycling Machine) at the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo in Los Angeles this week. Greenbuild is the world’s largest green building conference, attracting professionals from across the building industry to learn about innovations in design and operations.

Kyle shared the stage with Wade Lange of American Assets Trust, Kirk Davis of Glumac, and Tom Puttman of Puttman Infrastructure, all of whom were instrumental in the development of NORM, our country’s largest residential water processing system. NORM lives at Hassalo on Eighth in the Lloyd District of Portland and diverts around 45,000 gallons of sewage from the city’s treatment system every day.

The session “Rethinking Water” looked back on a year of operations data from NORM. Many audience members were returners who had attended a session on NORM at a prior Greenbuild. They were eager to learn about NORM’s successes as a built, highly sustainable, decentralized approach to water filtration. We hope to have inspired developers and architects to apply infrastructure systems thinking to their own projects and expect to see more of these innovative systems revolutionizing cities in the future.