In an era of stiffening environmental requirements and tightening volumes at municipal treatment plants, Dave Hapchuk believes more pumpers need to consider handling their own disposal. And the Washington, Pa., pumping contractor and processing plant operator is aiming to help by opening the doors of his Wheeling, W. Va., disposal plant for tours in September.
“It makes you more independent. Your ability to do business isn’t depending on someone else’s plant where they can shut you down at any point,’’ Hapchuk says of the prospect of pumpers nationwide adding their own processing plants.
SEEING IS UNDERSTANDING
Hapchuk’s main office and processing plant will be the host sites for the fifth annual National Association of Wastewater Transporters Waste Treatment Symposium Sept. 15-16. Visitors will get a look at a successful and growing dewatering facility, Liquid Assets Disposal Inc. (LAD), where Hapchuk pretreats septage from his operation and seven others in the region southwest of Pittsburgh.
The 10,000-square-foot plant is permitted to process 200,000 gallons per day and currently processes an average of 100,000 gallons daily. Haulers back into a fully enclosed, heated bay and offload into a Lakeside Raptor screening system for solids separation. The solids are then dumped into a grit chamber.
The septage is auto-fed into four 15,000-gallon Pittsburgh settling tanks. From the settling tanks, the sludge is pumped into a four-chamber Fournier Rotary Press. The sludge cake from the press is then hauled to a landfill in Wheeling or other nearby locations.
In addition, a new dewatering system has been tested by LAD for the distributor, Crystal Environmental. The 6,000-gallon PolyWick filtering dewatering container is made of high molecular weight polyethylene and is pH-resistant, allowing it to process such material as grease or lime-stabilized solids. PolyWick containers are manufactured by Bucks Fabricating.
LAD is pumping water from its press and its supernate decant water from settling tanks directly to the new dewatering box. The resulting effluent is piped to an equalization tank, aerated, and then discharged to the City of Wheeling at an equal, continuous flow.
TESTING NEW TECHNOLOGY
Symposium attendees will see the entire process in operation, how trucks unload, and how municipal and state reporting paperwork is properly completed and submitted. They’ll also learn what led to the dewatering process upgrade.
“I thought about it at 2 a.m. as I was lying awake trying to figure out how to save costs and make sure we’d get our (treatment plant discharge) permit renewed,” recalls Hapchuk. He knew that with tightening restrictions and increasing volume pressures on the plant, effluent quality was going to become an increasingly important factor in permit renewals.
“I wanted to lower my surcharges for TSS (total suspended solids) and BOD (biochemical oxygen demand) by sending a better quality of water to the city plant. Hapchuk says tests show more than 60 percent of suspended solids are removed through the new system.
Processing volume, he says, “depends on the amount of solids you’re putting through it. We ran 80,000 gallons through in two days. Then it was time to clean (the dewatering container), which was just vacuuming it out with a tank truck and washing it down.”
TEAM EFFORT
What really enthuses Hapchuk is the quality of the effluent compared to his previous product. “When I got results back from the first test, I was ecstatic with them.’’ Inflow and outflow samples for TSS and BOD were analyzed by an independent lab. “That was one of the things that really moved our new permit for discharge into the City of Wheeling treatment plant along a lot faster,” Hapchuk reports.
He says Therese Wheaton, his representative from Crystal Environmental, helped expedite the process so he could decide whether to move forward with the new technology. He credits Wheeling’s plant staff with remaining actively interested in and responsive to his testing results.
“Pumpers who want to do their own pre-treatment need to realize that putting these processes in place is a team effort between all the players. It’s important to have good relationships with vendors and compliance staff. We made sure to let the city know we were changing our process, which was directing the water through the box instead of just going down the drain.”
It was worth all the cost, testing and time, Hapchuk says, to put the new container through its paces. He’s considering adding one more PolyWick box. “We are considering expanding our facility to accommodate the boxes by adding 4,500 square feet, which may be under construction at the time of the symposium.” Final testing will reveal how much the plant upgrade will increase LAD’s processing capacity.
SEEK COOPERATION
Hapchuk stresses it’s important for pumpers to understand that it’s only through the cooperation of the people at the sewage treatment plant this kind of efficient processing can get done. “You have to give them confidence that you’ll do what you say you’re going to do,” he says.
He emphasizes this cooperative attitude as one of the ongoing positive aspects of the NAWT symposium over the years. “I’ll learn as much from the guys who come to the event as they will from me,” he says. “We all got as far as we are by working together and learning from each other.”
