Metro Vancouver Moving Ahead with MicroSludge
As Metro Vancouver continues its commitment to ongoing betterment of its wastewater treatment process, companies like Paradigm Environmental Technologies are starting to become more and more integral to this commitment. Not only does Metro Vancouver want to reduce the waste it must dispose of, the city wants to start to capture the value in that waste. Paradigm’s MicroSludge technology provides ways of achieving both these goal and Metro Vancouver has bought into the product.
In their July 13 Waste Management Committee Regular Meeting, Metro Vancouver “moved and seconded” the plan to go ahead with the Lulu Island digester improvements that Paradigm had proposed to them to help extract biogas and reduce waste. The proposal was moved based on a number of criteria being met which are outlined in the municipal committee agenda. This is good news for Paradigm who has been looking forward to showcasing its technology and highlighting the many benefits it can provide to a municipal wastewater treatment facility.
Click on Image to Enlarge
In a document published by the U.S. Department of Energy, the activity of digesters is summarized in simple terms: “Wastewater treatment in larger facilities involves anaerobic digestion where, in the absence of oxygen, bacteria digest residual solids and create methane gas as a byproduct”.
This gas can be converted to significant amounts of energy and with minimal processing can be used as a substitute for natural gas.
In the Canadian Manufacturing April 19, 2011 article entitled, “BC pilot turns production waste into nutrients and biogas”, Kim Laudrum discusses the many advantages of adding the MicroSludge process to a digester. Although this article speaks to the digester being used in a pulp and paper mill (Paradigm has a Microsudge unit set up in this capacity at a mill in Crofton), the benefits are similar for wastewater systems. The value proposition is clear. Not only does it take less time to get to methane state which means you can manage with a smaller unit and yield the same results, the MicroSludge process can help create more nitrogen and phosphorous which can either be used by the plant or sold to others if they do not need it. By creating new revenue streams for municipal wastewater treatment facilities while reducing the operating cost of waste disposal and decreasing the initial capital required to build the smaller digester, it seems only a matter of time until MicroSludge technology is highly sought after.
According to Environment Canada “wastewater effluents are the largest source of pollution by volume to surface water in Canada”, making the need for water treatment technology that much more necessary. And the market size for this technology is huge. With just about every major municipality having wastewater treatment facilities that use digesters, MicroSludge is well positioned to capitalize on any municipality’s desires to create new revenue and reduce costs.
To learn more about Paradigm’s MicroSludge please visit the Paradigm Environmental Technologies page.