MBR Case Study: Santa Paula, California

The City of Santa Paula, Calif. is home to the first large membrane bioreactor (MBR) installation in North America to use PURON™ membrane filtration modules. It is also the first water recycling facility built under a California government code to encourage private investment to solve public infrastructure needs.

Santa Paula's outdated wastewater facility was in violation of several discharge requirements issued by the Los Angeles Regional Water Quality Control Board, and had received more than 3,000 violations and $8M in fines.

To comply with the increasingly stringent requirements, Santa Paula opted for a Design-Build-Operate-Finance strategy to construct a new state-of-the-art membrane bioreactor water treatment facility. The project was awarded to a team including Pacific Environmental Resources Corporation (PERC), Alinda Capital, LLC, Pacific Advanced Civil Engineering, and Trussell Technologies, Inc.