News Looks like a big algae scrubber to me!

Really interesting. I would enjoy talking with them, carbon dosing in our tank started based off carbon dosing in sewage treatment plants. Considering the substantial infrastructure cost of this vs carbon dosing I wonder what they hope to achieve or how it might work differently. They would really have to plan on peopel using a lot of algae as fertilizer to recoup costs vs carbon dosing I would think. Here are a few carbon sources various treatment plants use:

• Acetate
• Acetic acid
• Acetol
• Acetyl
• Ethanol
• Ethylene glycol water mixture
• Glucose
• Glycotat
• Methanol

I am also curious about the current N and P discharge rates in sewage in Iowa and how much that impacts our drinking water as most of our issues can be traced directly back to farm runoff.

In tropical areas water hyacinth and water lettuce are used to some extent for waste water purification but those cost nothing, a big benefit in those areas but would freeze here.

 

Ha! My wife worked for DMWW until recently and I have been trying to come up with an algae solution to fix the water problem. They have marshland on the grounds that is attempting to alleviate it somewhat. Solving this in a cost-effective manner is a million dollar idea.

A massive hydroponic greenhouse to run the water through was something I was trying to blueprint. Glad someone is putting this in action.

 

Does the DMWW use any sort of carbon dosing for the waste water? What is the goal of the marshland, N and P reduction or other elements? If other elements is there a concern of, say heavy metals, building up and a potential disposal or hot site issue? Does she happen to know the N and P levels that the wastewater averages?

 

This.

No idea about the test results, though.

 

That is interesting, I know marshes are becoming popular with city storm sewers and even in croplands but I would have thought the volume of the DMWW would quickly flood a marshland unless it was absolutely gigantic. I know the water has to have some retention time for nutrient utilization, happen to know where that marsh is and what % of the waste water is directed to it?

 

The marsh is located near the giant piles of dirt/sand off the Fleur entrance. It's a couple acres currently and they're drawing up plans to possibly turn the back of the park into a giant marsh area.

No idea on the volume/percentage they're running through it, as far as hard numbers go.