[AirUP, On Site] Tackling Green Algae to Improve Water Quality... All the Innovative Ideas Gathered

Korea Water Resources Corporation 'Innovation Challenge'
Sharing Employee Work Know-How
Expanding Collaboration with Venture Companies
10 Ideas Selected This Year
Awarded to Gyeonggi Dongnam Branch

On the 25th of last month, participants of the 2022 Innovation Challenge event held at the headquarters of Daejeon Water Resources Corporation are directly experiencing a VR interactive exhibit in the field of safety innovation.

Korea Water Resources Corporation's 'Innovation Challenge' is one of the corporation's annual flagship events where employees share work ideas and know-how. The event, which began in 2006 as a knowledge-sharing initiative, has now reached its 17th year. A key feature of this event is that it continuously provides solutions and inspiration for major water management issues through internal ideas.

Initially focused on sharing internal ideas and verifying their usefulness, the event has gradually expanded in scale. Since 2018, it has strengthened practicality by collaborating with private startups, venture companies, and others to foster the national water industry. Major achievements obtained through the Innovation Challenge include solutions to problems such as algal blooms around dams and water pollution caused by plastics in rivers.

At this year’s Innovation Challenge held on the 25th of last month, over 160 entries were submitted from all branches of the Water Resources Corporation. After a month-long evaluation, 10 key ideas were selected. With the enforcement of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, the scope was expanded to include safety this year, and the event was divided into four categories: regional coexistence addressing issues like aging and population decline alongside local residents, administration, and work innovation.

The grand prize this year went to the ‘Customized ISO22000 (Food Safety Management System) Standard Model for Water Purification Plants’ presented by the Gyeonggi Southeast Branch. This model is based on the international ISO22000 standard introduced by the corporation in 2020 to alleviate public anxiety about tap water and fundamentally block the occurrence of larvae. It establishes a customized standard model for water purification plants to reduce the workload on corporation employees. Through this, it guarantees tap water hygiene and safety while reducing annual work hours by 15,000.

The gold prize was awarded to the Unmun Dam Branch for developing an underwater safety inspection device. This system integrates an underwater video camera, lighting, and other equipment into a single unit that can be remotely controlled to prevent accidents during safety inspections of underwater facilities, which mainly occur at water management construction sites. It replaces the inspection work previously done by underwater diving with an unmanned system.

Park Jaehyun, President of Korea Water Resources Corporation, is taking a commemorative photo with Jeong Jieun, Manager of Water Quality Management Practice at the Gyeonggi Southeast Branch, who won the grand prize at the 2022 Innovation Challenge event held at the headquarters of the Water Resources Corporation in Daejeon on the 25th of last month.

The ‘Daecheong Dam Floating Algae Control Field,’ developed with a counterintuitive approach of using algae to reduce algae, also attracted attention. Every summer, algal blooms occur in the Daecheong Lake watershed in Chungbuk due to high non-point source pollution and winding terrain. The idea was to overgrow algae to consume the nutrients that feed them. To test this, a 60,000㎡ ‘algae control field’ was created in an upstream section of Daecheong Dam to reduce nutrient flow downstream. As a result, nutrients upstream were reduced by up to 43% after passing through the algae field, leading to no algae bloom warnings this year. This idea won the silver prize at this year’s Innovation Challenge.

The ‘Plastic Mill’ idea from the Juam Dam Branch in Suncheon, Jeonnam, also received high marks for environmental preservation and community coexistence. The Juam Dam Branch succeeded in producing upcycled products by recycling river plastic waste voluntarily collected by residents. This effort not only focused on collection but also created jobs for residents, earning it the silver prize as well.

A notable bronze prize-winning project was the virtual sensor technology to prevent water meter freezing in winter. Earlier this year, the corporation developed a ‘Freezing Risk Information Service’ to prevent water meter freezing in winter, but it required installing separate sensors inside each household’s meter box to measure internal temperature, which was cumbersome. To solve this, they developed a virtual sensor based on artificial intelligence (AI) that can predict the internal temperature of the meter box and notify freezing risks via smartphone.

Alongside this Innovation Challenge, the corporation also held a separate ‘Tech Conference’ focused on research and technology development in the water sector. Bae Su-jeong, head of the Social Value Creation Department at Korea Water Resources Corporation and organizer of the event, said, "If the Innovation Challenge can help more employees empathize with and spread problem-solving cases through new perspectives and approaches different from before, we will be able to overcome any environmental changes and crises."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.