https://stories.uiowa.edu/helping-small-towns-meet-wastewater-needs-affordablyA very recent story just published which should excite a few of you!
The University of Iowa civil and environmental engineer is on the precipice of making good on his personal promise. After nearly 25 years of research, funding, advocacy, and partnerships, a wastewater treatment system being tested in Dow City, Iowa, appears poised to meet federal guidelines and be permitted by the Iowa Department of Natural Resources. That system would fulfill federal rules to treat wastewater fully. It also presents an option that would significantly lower upgrade costs for the hundreds of towns in Iowa that treat their wastewater using lagoons, or human-made retention ponds.“For many towns, the only option would be to build more lagoons, which is a capital-cost loan they’re going to have to pay off for 30 to 40 years, and it doesn’t create any jobs, either,” says Just, Donald E. Bently Professor in Engineering in the College of Engineering. “The system we’ve been testing in Dow City has a much lower upfront capital cost and an affordable monthly cost, and it also can create jobs for small businesses in the area that want to help maintain these systems in partnership with these small towns.”
But whether it was a moving bed biofilm reactor, a submerged attached growth reactor, or some other permutation, no single model fulfilled the Big Five objectives. Then, in October 2022, Just traveled to the Water Environment Federation Technical Exhibition and Conference (WEFTEC) in New Orleans. He attended talks on the latest research in wastewater, water quality, and other issues. During one break, he took a stroll in the capacious exhibit hall.“I was going to a bunch of booths and just checking out what the latest was in wastewater treatment operations, in container configurations, or otherwise,” Just says. “I was looking for small-town solutions.”
At one booth, staged by a Minnesota-based company called Fluence, Just learned about a wastewater operation that achieved the Big Five. It had a small footprint, was simply designed, and could be moved and installed anywhere.“I came back from WEFTEC and told BES, ‘I think you’d be a lot better off just buying one of these rather than making your own,’” Just recalls. “They agreed, especially if I purchased it.”Just used $250,000 of his IEDA funding to buy the Fluence model, to be shipped and tested for the first time in Iowa — in Dow City.The bottom line is that in a 20-foot by 50-foot footprint — about the length of a semitrailer truck — Dow City’s wastewater is getting the full treatment, with incoming sewage taken in and cleaned effluent discharged into the nearby Boyer River. The system, in tests since June, will meet all cleaning, disinfection, and discharge requirements. Just expects the DNR to grant it a provisional permit — an expected first step toward a full permit — by early 2025.
Now, Just’s journey with wastewater — his quest to find the optimal solution for small-town Iowa, in the form of a miniaturized unit that is mobile, that can be expanded to meet a town’s future needs, and that satisfies all federal and state requirements — may be at hand.“I mean, candidly, it is a bit emotional,” Just says, tears welling. “I didn’t have to do this, but yet it had to be done. And I felt that our program at the University of Iowa provided the space to make this happen. I was encouraged to do these types of things, and here we are.”
