Wastewater World: Yorkville wastewater team celebrates first-in-world tech that saved $19 million

When people flush the toilet, many don’t think twice about where the water’s going. But trillions of bugs forming an organic biomass at the wastewater treatment facility in Yorkville, are ready and waiting.

Using first-in-the-world technology to double their bugs, the Yorkville-Bristol Sanitary District is the center of attention in the wastewater world, saving the city $19 million in expansion costs in the process.

Cyrus McMains, executive director of the facility, celebrated the pilot study’s end with his team and project partners, including tech providers Veolia Water Technologies & Solutions and scientific experts with Notre Dame University.

The study was so successful, now more than 30 cities globally are following the innovation first tested in Yorkville.

McMains said the facility’s team takes pride in helping set the new industry standard.

“The Fox River and Blackberry Creek are key attractions to the city, and to use those, you need good clean water,” McMains said. “Most people never think of wastewater, but if you don’t have this infrastructure to break down byproducts, then you’re poisoning the river. This also affects the drinking water for other towns downstream.”

The facility is designed to treat 3,620,000 gallons of wastewater per day. However, with the area’s population boom, the facility was not well-equipped to handle newer homes’ wastewater which is higher in organic constituents and lower in carry water, stemming from newer homes’ low-fixture faucets and tighter sewers.

McMains and his team were posed with a tough decision, to build a new $25 million facility across Blackberry Creek, or to invest $6 million in a novel technology to maximize efficiency without new construction.

In 2017, the team chose to install Veolia’s tech, which is like a Shangri-la for bugs, or the microbes in the treatment plant, the Membrane-Aerated Biofilm Reactors (MABR), paired with a piston-like water corkscrew device that helps maximize the number, health, and productivity of the bugs.

Jeff Peeters, innovation and incubation leader with Veolia, said his company was thrilled to have Yorkville for their groundbreaking tech, the ZeeLungMABR and the continuous flow zeeDENSE water device.

“Yorkville was the first full-scale implementation and an important demonstration of our tech’s ability to increase bug density by 50%, enhancing treatment capacity without needing to build new tanks,” Peeters said. “If your plant needs to expand but there’s no space, this is a lower capital and smaller footprint solution, that’s also a more sustainable solution.”

Peeters said the tech takes advantage of the bugs’ voracious appetite for two things, wastewater and the oxygen they need to metabolize the waste.

“In a conventional plant, your bugs are in a big soup in the tank and you pump oxygen to them in the form of bubbles,” Peeters said. “The bugs consume some of that oxygen, but most rises too quickly and goes off into the atmosphere. Our ZeeLung transfers oxygen directly to the bugs using molecular diffusion for higher efficiency. Bugs clump along our plastic polymer threads for the extra oxygen. If bugs have the food they need, which is the wastewater and oxygen, they will come.”

The busy bugs consume the carbon in wastewater into manageable carbon dioxide, and the ammonia into nitrogen gas. Eliminating nitrogen is crucial because if excess nitrogen is discharged into the river, naturally occurring bacteria will consume all the river’s oxygen, resulting in a dead river for all other forms of fish and wildlife.

Once engorged on their meal, they are separated from the water in a big tank, called a clarifier, where the heavier bugs settle and get pumped back into the feeding tanks, versus the lighter stringy floating bugs that have to be discarded, slowing down efficiency.

For $30K, the facility installed Veolia’s ‘hydrocyclone’ pistons, rapidly spinning the bug soup, helping the heavier bugs clump and settle to the bottom faster. Overall, this allows the facility to treat higher volumes of wastewater without building larger tanks.

McMains said the team was quick to choose the innovative tech because they are all environmentalists at heart, caring about the health of the river ecosystem.

“We’re like zookeepers for the trillions of bacteria,” McMains said. “The bugs are a biomass, like a large living organism, but made up of a trillion tiny organisms. We can even train their diets. We can create environments where they easily digest phosphorus, then we have them cough it up, so the next time they’re hungry, their stomachs are stretched and they can collect an extra 20% more food.”

Nourishing the bugs helps ensure the continued health of the arterial infrastructure making up the heart of the community.

“Our workers often gravitate to this field because they like finding smart solutions for local problems in a way that protects our shared environment,” McMains said. “The more we understand the effects of what we put into our rivers, lakes and streams, the more we can try to mitigate the impacts.”