By collaborating with California-based wastewater solutions provider Baswood Corp., the city of Ottumwa Iowa, and Dr Pepper Snapple Group (DPS) created a partnership through which DPS installed an upstream secondary wastewater treatment system to reduce the demand on the city’s facilities. The city, meanwhile, agreed with DPS to lock in reduced wastewater surcharges.

The system gives Ottumwa the capacity to service more than 7,000 additional homes without having to modify existing facilities. In February 2016, Baswood installed an equalization tank and three BioViper pretreatment reactors at the DPS facility in Ottumwa. An equalization tank, often called an EQ tank, aims to provide a more uniform effluent to downstream processes. The stable, fixed-film biological system was originally designed to treat up to 165,000 gallons per day (gpd) but has since shown the capacity to handle more than 200,000 gpd. The result is that the Baswood system reduced the plant’s hydraulic load by up to 120,000 gallons per day. Also, the overall biochemical oxygen demand levels in the effluent discharged to Ottumwa have been reduced by up to 91% on average.

Altogether, the new system gives the city of Ottumwa the capacity to service more than 7,000 additional residential homes without having to modify its existing facilities. Because the Baswood solution uses significantly less energy, has a smaller physical footprint, and provides superior biosolids reduction compared to traditional wastewater systems, DPS was able to reduce its overall operating costs as well as its environmental footprint.

DPS and Baswood stated that the project could lead to a trend of treating, recycling, and reusing water to a higher treatment standard while increasing energy efficiency.