“The OWASA operations team expressed an interest in studying the efficiency of the Quick Wash process to reduce phosphorus loads in the filtrate coming off of the plant’s rotary press. Our goal was to demonstrate that we could capture and recover nearly all of the phosphorus in the plant’s side stream and eliminate the cyclical nature of sending phosphorus-laden filtrate back to the head of the plant,” said Larry Sandeen, Renewable Nutrients’ Technology Director.
“The Quick Wash process has been piloted at several municipal waste water treatment facilities in Pennsylvania, Maryland, and North Carolina, but OWASA represented a unique opportunity for us to test Quick Wash at a plant with anaerobic digestion,” said Mike Schmid, Renewable Nutrients’ Chief Marketing Officer. “The phosphorus concentration in anaerobic digester sludge is pretty high, and the digesting process itself serves to release a lot of the phosphorus that has been chemically bound to the solids further upstream in the process flow. So it was important for us to validate our process and technology at a facility like OWASA and establish that Quick Wash can not only recover most of the phosphorus in the filtrate from the dewatering of anaerobically digested materials, but provide a solution to eliminate the practice of recirculating the phosphorus-laden side stream back to the head works,” added Schmid.
