{"id":2324,"date":"2026-02-17T08:12:43","date_gmt":"2026-02-17T08:12:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/petermbach.com\/?page_id=2324"},"modified":"2026-05-04T20:35:37","modified_gmt":"2026-05-04T20:35:37","slug":"062-anacleto-rizzo","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/petermbach.com\/index.php\/podcast\/062-anacleto-rizzo\/","title":{"rendered":"TGC Podcast Episode 062 – Anacleto Rizzo"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Grand Challengers Podcast Episode #62<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

Throwing your heart beyond the fence with treatment wetlands and NBS<\/h1>\n\n\n\n

Guest: Anacleto Rizzo<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

May 5th, 2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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Overview<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

What does a horror-game-loving Italian engineer have to do with cleaning your wastewater? More than you’d think… and the journey starts in a paddy rice field.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Episode #62 of The Grand Challengers Podcast<\/strong>, host Peter Marcus Bach welcomes Dr Anacleto Rizzo<\/strong> \u2014 Partner at IRIDRA Srl<\/a> in Florence, President of Global Wetland Technology, and one of Europe’s most active voices on nature-based solutions (NBS)<\/strong> for the water sector. They begin where two self-confessed geeks should: David Lynch films, Resident Evil<\/em> vs Silent Hill<\/em>, and the perils of playing first-person horror games next to a sleeping spouse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From there, the conversation winds through Anacleto’s serendipitous journey into engineering, a randomly chosen civil degree at Politecnico di Torino that ended, unexpectedly, in a PhD on methane emissions from paddy rice fields<\/strong>. He explains why Italy’s Piedmont rice country is a methane hotspot (with a vivid biological analogy involving plant aerenchyma), and how a single review paper on treatment wetland modelling, read at the right moment, redirected his career toward nature-based wastewater treatment.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Treatment wetlands<\/strong> are the through-line of this episode: a quietly revolutionary technology with 30+ years of practice, capable of treating tens of thousands of population equivalent, yet still chronically misunderstood. Anacleto and Peter unpack what they actually are, surface flow vs subsurface flow, French Reed Beds, aerated wetlands, why a few “Wild West” early failures in Italy still haunt adoption decisions, and how IRIDRA evolved from a treatment-wetland specialist into a multidisciplinary NBS practice covering sponge cities, green walls and circular water loops.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The deeper thread is the academic-practitioner bridge<\/strong>. Like Bill Hunt’s perspective on America’s evolving stormwater management<\/a> and Jon Hathaway’s “Swiss Army Knife” framing of green infrastructure<\/a> among many other episodes on NBS, Anacleto argues that treatment wetlands matured because<\/em> practitioners went out and monitored real, full-scale systems, generating the unglamorous “Q2\/Q3 papers” that lab-scale studies could never produce. He shares why “throwing your heart beyond the fence”, a wonderful Italian idiom for calculated risk-taking, is the only way to escape the technological-readiness-level trap.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Flagship projects include the Gorla Maggiore water park<\/strong> in Lombardia (a multifunctional CSO treatment wetland featured in the FP7 OpenNESS ecosystem services project), the Orhei wastewater treatment plant<\/strong> in Moldova (20,000 population equivalent, among Europe’s largest), and ongoing Horizon Europe work in HYDROUSA<\/strong>, MULTISOURCE<\/strong> and CARDIMED<\/strong>. The episode closes with reflections on innovation, multidisciplinarity, two career-defining mentors (Luca Ridolfi and Fabio Masi), and a moving tribute to Anacleto’s late father.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recommended for civil engineers, water professionals, NBS practitioners, urban planners, sustainability researchers, sponge-city designers and anyone curious about how nature does the dirty work better than concrete ever did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Episode Teaser<\/h2>\n\n\n\n
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