MEET BYRON HEPPNER

Our team has experts with years and years of experience to help you find the best solutions for your treatment needs – and Byron Heppner meets that description! While he’s helped work in multiple areas of the company, he started in the engineering department and is still with our team as the Project Engineering Manager.

Q: How long have you worked for Nexom?

A: 18 years (since 2006)

Q: How did you get to the position you are in now? You’ve worked for Nexom and in the industry as a whole for quite a while, so it’s safe to assume you’ve held other positions before this one.

A: I started with Nexom as the other half of the Engineering department with Lionel. I’ve worked in all kinds of areas in the company in addition to engineering, including R&D, warranty, project manager, field technician, and conference presenter. As our department has grown, my current position just formalizes the leadership and mentoring I was already doing for the other members of our team.

Q: What is your favorite part about Nexom and our technologies to talk about and why?

A: I think the best thing about Nexom’s technologies is the simplicity and long-term reliability of our systems. Having been on a lot of plant sites, I’ve seen countless examples of treatment equipment that has just been pulled out and abandoned because it hasn’t functioned the way it was supposed to or cost too much to maintain. And oftentimes that results in poor or no treatment, which affects the health of the communities and the environment around them. I’m proud of the fact that after almost 20 years in the company, almost every project has met our original project objectives.

Q: What project or technology have you worked on or completed recently that you’re most proud of and want mentioned here?

A: We have a number of sites in small northern communities where the existing treatment facilities were simply not working, and we have been able to provide simple, reliable lagoon and SAGR systems that just work. Access to highly trained operators is always an issue for these communities, but we are able to set up systems that need a minimum of attention and maintenance. For example, when I did a pre-construction visit at one site, the existing plant was functioning so poorly that the effluent coming out of the plant was barely better than what was going in. In a community that relies on diesel power generation (with all the fuel trucked in on ice roads), we were able to integrate our system with solar panels to reduce the load on the power plant while still providing excellent treatment. All this in a fly-in community at the very northern edge of Manitoba.