New technologies rethink wastewater treatment
January 14, 2015 | By
Barbara Vergetis Lundin
Traditional options for managing wastewater treatment use 68 GWh of energy annually in the United States alone and up to two percent of all electric power goes toward managing wastewater, according to Lux Research, but a new generation of technology is offering new solutions. With increasing pressure from growing populations and more frequent severe storm events, there is a dire need to improve this secondary wastewater treatment. As a result, a new crop of technologies could transform wastewater treatment by dramatically simplifying the wastewater process and easily scaling down serve the small facilities in the market, harnessing passive aeration to reduce energy costs and fine-tune the microbial population to significantly reduce sludge production, according to Lux. "Technologies like membrane bioreactors emerged to improve the quality of wastewater treatment, but don't address the energy and sludge concerns, and the smallest facilities struggle to implement them effectively," said Tess Murray, Lux Research associate. "Now, new startups are fundamentally rethinking wastewater treatment and effectively addressing energy consumption and sludge generation, which together account for nearly half of the operating costs at today's plants." Sludge transport and disposal accounts for about a quarter of wastewater treatment plant operating costs, and only about 40 percent of leftover sludge is put to beneficial use in the U.S., according to Lux Research -- for example, spread on land as a low-grade crop fertilizer. Lux sees the technology winners as those that have a variety of ways to implement passive aeration, finding new ways to provide the oxygen that microbes need, reducing energy consumption by as much as 50 percent and sludge production by as much as 90 percent. The combination of savings adds up, and could save the average wastewater treatment plant as much as $1.1 million in operating expenses per year, according to Lux. For more:
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