A sewage treatment plant being built in Central PA will use waste to produce electricity and reduce the amount of harmful chemical elements that end up in the Susquehanna River.
The Milton Regional Sewer Authority serves an area about 20 miles south of Williamsport. Its main customer is a plant where the giant food company ConAgra makes grocery staples including canned pasta and microwaveable dinners. ConAgra sends the plant about 2 million gallons of sewage a day, twice what's generated from all of the authority's other customers combined.
The new plant is expected to be done by July 2014. In its new setup, waste from the ConAgra plant will generate methane gas, which will power a generator. This generator is expected to produce twice the electricity the treatment plant needs to operate. George Myers, the plant's superintendent, says the authority's current electric bill is about $30,000 per month, but it will sell power back to the grid once the new plant is operating. “We're pretty fortunate to be involved with this,” he says.
The plant will also have a machine called a sludge dryer, which removes the water from sewage. The methane-generated heat will go to this sludge dryer, and the dried waste will be converted into pellets that can be used for fuel or fertilizer.
The new system at Milton will also remove more nitrogen and phosphorus from wastewater before it's discharged into a tributary of the Susquehanna River. This is significant because high amounts of these chemicals lead to excessive growth of algae.
Source: George Myers, Milton Regional Sewer Authority
Writer: Rebecca VanderMeulen