Across the U.S. and Canada, local governments continue to tighten restrictions on waste disposal. Pumpers — even those who currently have solid arrangements for land application — can no longer ignore the changing attitudes toward this practice. Every day, more ordinances are being adopted to further restrict surface waste spreading. This may be good for the environment, but it’s making things tough for many pumpers. These liquid waste haulers reveal what they’re doing to deal with the ever-growing disposal challenge.
“We’re still currently land applying in conventional form,” explains Jim Saul, owner of Central Sanitation. “Our intent is to build our own dewatering system and discharge the effluent to a sewage treatment plant. We want to have a composting facility and then continue to land-apply those solids. We’re not there yet, but that’s our hope.”
Saul was unable to attend last year’s Septage/Grease Trap Waste Treatment Symposium, sponsored by the National Association of Wastewater Transporters Inc. as he had hoped. He was interested in gathering information on the best dewatering option for his company’s needs.
Though he’s been actively planning to build his processing facility for the last decade, Saul says it could happen, realistically, in the next 3-5 years.
“Our biggest holdback is government. We’re not asking for money or favors. We just need the right legislation and permits to carry it out. Unfortunately, there’s a great deal of confusion at the government level about what is required and who will regulate the process.”
Saul has some contacts inside the Ministry of the Environment, his province’s governing body for such matters. “They are cooperative, certainly very interested in seeing this proposal move forward, but it’s complicated. It brings provincial government together with municipal government, so there has to be cooperation on all sides.”
Fortunately for Saul, these governing bodies will eventually have to work out a process for handling this type of application, since it’s clear Central Sanitation isn’t the only company in the province struggling with disposal issues. Saul says, though, he’s not satisfied waiting for government to impose something on haulers. He wants to be involved in formulating legislation so it will be something effective and worthwhile, and that everyone can live with.
It’s already been a long slog for this pumper, and the drawn-out process is wearing on his nerves. “I’m a little disappointed that we’ve been unable to implement this plan I’ve had for 10 years,” Saul admits, “but that’s why I stay current on new technology. Even in the years since I started thinking about this, dewatering technology has really changed so much.”
Kendall Todd owns Atlantic Pit Service Inc. and his struggle was what to do with grease trap waste, which isn’t allowed to be land applied in his home state of Georgia. “There are four or five disposal plants in the state of Georgia that accept waste from other people. I was taking it to another gentleman who owned a plant, and we decided we wanted to hold our own destiny by controlling our costs.”
This decision was already in the works when the state issued new FOG (fat, oil, grease) regulation, which Todd says “eliminated a lot of the pump-and-dumpers.” All pumpers now had to create a hauling manifest for their loads so waste could be tracked. “We’d always manifested our loads, but now it was being required and everyone had to show what was happening to their material. It helped,” Todd says, to level the competitive playing field for all pumpers.
When all disposal factors were weighed, controlling costs ultimately meant building his own treatment facility. “We started looking for property, then had to go through the whole permitting process, which took about a year.” In another year, the facility was ready for business. It includes two Auto-Vac rotary water vacuum systems (Alar Engineering Corp., www.alarcorp.com) — to remove 90 to 95 percent of the liquid from the septage and grease waste. The dewatered cake is trucked to a landfill, and the clarified effluent is recycled back into the plant for use in equipment prep/cleanup and other processes. Todd’s company accepts waste for processing from other pumpers, adding another revenue stream.
Todd is satisfied with his decision to bring disposal in-house. “It’s working pretty good for us,” he says.
“A lot of people around here still land-apply,” says Tony Johnson, co-owner of Johnson Septic Service, “but they’re starting to sway toward the treatment facilities that are starting to pop up.” Having to use a treatment plant for disposal isn’t something that concerns him or his wife and business partner, Theresa Johnson. They still land-apply, as well as perform soil injection and make use of a waste storage tank. The Johnsons don’t expect to ever have to worry about disposal again, unless restrictions really tighten up. Why? Because they own the farm fields used for land application.
Several years ago, the state tightened regulations for disposal, driving up the cost of plant treatment and making many of their application options disappear. The Johnsons did the math and decided it would be worth the cost to buy their own farm, so they wouldn’t have to worry about waning field opportunities.
Now, they’re active in farming as well.
“We kind of got swayed into it when we bought the place,’’ Tony Johnson says. Happily, the couple realized two unexpected results from the move. Their land application provides an endless supply of free fertilizer for their crops, and the income from farming has helped diversify their business. It’s a nice cushion against declining fortunes in either industry.
