Improving The Economics Of Wastewater Treatment

By Daniel Williamson, President,
In-Pipe Technology Company, LLC

Municipalities around the world face similar challenges as they work to diligently serve the public. They collectively face the task of treating growing volumes and organically loaded wastewater produced by increasing population and industrial growth. This is often coupled with environmental pressures to improve plant performance and improve water quality either for direct discharge or beneficial water reuse applications. These growing demands must be met with an aging infrastructure and a tightened or reduced budget. User-fee increases are viewed as political suicide. However, public expectations for improved performance and services continue to escalate despite the universal push towards reducing taxes and, therefore, municipal budgets. Capital investments in new infrastructure are particularly difficult to fund, and cities often find themselves unable to borrow the money required to build or repair the required facilities. These economic dynamics are particularly manifested in the public utilities department and are especially acute in the area of wastewater treatment.

Most wastewater managers believe that treatment starts at the headworks. The collection system is viewed as simply a means to transport the wastewater to the treatment facility. The capital and operation and maintenance (O&M) costs associated with the collection system can be a very large portion of the utilities department budget. There are many hours, if not days, of residence time in the collection system that, up until now, have been nonbeneficial to the treatment process. In fact, the indigenous biological growth within the collection system is generally detrimental to the treatment objectives at the WWTP. In an effort to combat this residence time, one company has developed a technology and service that converts the existing passive collection system into a meaningful treatment step prior to the water arriving at the wastewater treatment facility.

The technology involves the introduction of a proprietary formulation of naturally occurring, facultative, planktonic bacteria into the outermost reaches of a municipality's collection system. With continuous dosing, the beneficial bacteria become the dominant organisms. Within a period of time, the added bacteria convert the biofilm on the walls of the system piping into a controlled, beneficial biological population, creating a pretreatment reactor that selectively inhibits the growth of the sulfate reducing bacteria (SRB) that are odor causing. They also metabolize fats, oil, and grease (FOG) in the collection system and at the treatment plant. This collection system biofilm reactor provides beneficial treatment in the collection system by accelerating metabolic conversions and thereby reduces organic, nitrogen, and solids loads entering the WWTP.

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