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Biosolids SPOTLIGHT

Biosolids SPOTLIGHT: A focus on the people of biosolids who work in our region

November 2024 - MABA Biosolids Spotlight 

Provided to MABA members by Bill Toffey, Effluential Synergies, LLC 

SPOTLIGHT on Piscataway Bioenergy Plant

When WSSC Water’s Theon Grojean was introduced at a construction industry seminar in 2017 to an “alternative delivery system” for public works projects, one message he heard from the dais was this: “if you are starting on your first Progressive Design-Build (PBD) project, start small.”  But there was nothing small about what WSSC Water was looking at; it was nothing short of a total reconstruction of solids handling, affecting all of its WRRFs, the largest capital project in agency history. As Grojean and his bosses saw the project, everything about solids handling would change – stabilization processes would be moved to a centralized facility, its long-standing lime stabilization processes would be ended due to risks of community odor complaints; and anaerobic digestion would be introduced to reduce solids and capture energy. These plans for solids were also following on the heels of WSSC Water’s upgrade to liquid treatment with enhanced nutrient removal, a process that would inherently change solids dewaterability in the wrong direction.

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The Piscataway Bioenergy Project is a regional facility handling solids from the Piscataway WRRF, WSSC Water’s largest plant at 30 MGD flow, and from 4 of the agency’s other facilities that together have a flow of about 65 MGD.

Yet, “PBD” had worked for DC Water in its half-billion-dollar biosolids project at Blue Plains, and that was encouraging to Grojean. The promise of PBD, as laid out by the Design-Build Institute of America, hit all the right notes. As DBIA asserts, PBD is “a highly collaborative, fully integrated undertaking that is built on trust, mutual respect, teamwork, innovation and creative problem solving.”  If a project could benefit for collaboration and integration, the concept hatched for WSSC Water’s Piscataway plant in Accokeek, Maryland, was it. Jumping ahead 8 years, PBD was the mechanism of public infrastructure investment that has brought the Piscataway Bioenergy Project to the point of near completion. 

The first step in PBD is the selection by WSSC Water of an “owner’s agent,” who could effectively watch for the agency’s interests in all stages of the complex processes -- planning, design, costing, bidding and constructing.  WSSC Water selected HDR, Inc., a national comprehensive engineering firm with a strong presence in the mid-Atlantic and with a vice-president who had worked for many years on WSSC Water projects, Larry Hentz. Hentz, who for many years served on the MABA board of trustees, came to the role of owner’s agent with deep experience of the WSSC Water’s wastewater system, including being a lead on a biosolids master plan in 2005 that preceded the emergence of the centralization plan. Hentz thought he was heading toward retirement when the call came in 2018, but he has now seen the WSSC Water’s bioenergy project through to its near completion today.  This project has been a good fit for Hentz’s interests, as he has helped guide other important and complicated biosolids projects, such as in Howard County and in Baltimore County. 

The key step in PDB is selection of the firm that is the lead in coordinating design, engineering, and construction. This is a competitively bid contract, and for WSSC Water the firm PC Construction, out of Vermont, provided the best offer. PC Construction was not new to wastewater projects, with highly regarded projects in Fairfax and Prince Williams counties. Neither was it new to the Cambi Thermal Hydrolysis Process, a technology pre-selected and purchased by WSSC Water for solids pretreatment, as PC had been part of the DC Water project.  

Important to WSSC Water was PC Construction’s selection of a design and engineering team with which WSSC Water was well acquainted – Stantec and Hazen and Sawyer. Matt Van Horne, associate vice president at Hazen, threw himself into the project, leaving his voluntary position on the MABA Board of Trustees to devote his full attention to the Piscataway project. Among the elements that provoked Van Horne’s early attention was the design of the digesters.  As Piscataway is across the Potomac River from historic Mount Vernon, digesters were required to have a low profile, but poor foundation conditions and hydraulic issues prevented their deep placement. Rapid Volume Expansion within digesters can arise from a combination of rich feed and difficult mixing, posing a risk of overflows and spills. This concern led to several innovative design solutions, including a flume that would direct overflow from the digesters back to the headworks and a system to deliver emergency electricity to digester mixers in the event of plant power outage. Another design concern was in struvite control, an issue made salient by recent conversion of several WSSC Water’s plants to enhanced nutrient removal, which can cause phosphorus release during anaerobic digestion, leading to a risk of deposits throughout the digested solids and filtrate treatment systems.  Several proprietary systems for handling struvite served as options for phosphorus extraction as a fertilizer or for phosphorus sequestration within the solids. The use of ferric chloride to sequester soluble P as a near term solution was the approach selected for Piscataway.

Piscataway has benefited from serendipity.  WSSC Water embarked on its plans to replace odorous lime stabilization and to consider centralization prior to DC Water’s success at its Blue Plains plant with the Cambi Thermal Hydrolysis Process (THP). But with this nearby facility as a successful model, WSSC Water could have confidence in DC’s experience. WSSC Water’s team then extended that experience with visits to Cambi projects in Europe that included regional treatment of multiple solids sources, as WSSC Water was considering.  Having selected THP, and having proceeded with its purchase in 2018, WSSC Water then managed to dodge the unforeseeable supply chain disruptions that later occurred during the covid pandemic, thus enjoying a serendipitous timing. 

A second serendipity is the value of the biogas WSSC Water will be producing at Piscataway.  The nation-wide value of renewable natural gas (RNG) derived from municipal digesters became more predictable and actionable as Piscataway planning proceeded.  WSSC Water could count on revenue from selling its RNG to Montgomery County to help power about half of its fleet if natural gas Ride On buses and to the utility Washington Gas under the Renewable Fuel Standard Program. 

A third serendipity is the value of the biosolids product WSSC Water will produce.  With DC Water having invested substantial effort and time in its marketing of its Bloom biosolids product, WSSC Water will be using “lessons learned” with Bloom and the experience of DC’s marketing team at Blue Drop in designing a WSSC Water utilization program.  Malcolm Taylor has been a fierce investigator into maximizing the quality of the biosolids and balancing those features with the potential customers. Taylor introduced his “Handleability Index” to help inform the targeted product users. WSSC Water has teamed up with Hazen and Material Matters, another key biosolids consultant and MABA member, to develop a marketing plan. 

A fourth serendipity is emergence of approaches to ammonia removal from filtrate produced at the belt filter presses, a process known as “deammonification.”  A potentially serious downside of centralized dewatering of anaerobically digested solids is high ammonia in return centrate from dewatering, making compliance with effluent nitrogen standards difficult to achieve.  Systems deploying a class of bacteria known as “anammox” can convert ammonia to nitrogen gas with significantly less oxygen and supplemental carbon requirements, an approach which has come on the treatment scene in the past two decades and a process far more energy efficient than alternatives.  WSSC Water is installing anammox treatment to keep ammonia return to the headworks within levels that enable the agency to attain nitrogen loadings assigned to its WRRFs in this very sensitive watershed of the Chesapeake Bay Watershed. 

A fifth serendipity is with the status of WSSC Water’s project to the global evolving concern with the class of so-called “forever chemicals,” or per- and poly-fluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). While the EPA has not yet issued its evaluation of risks to human and environmental health from PFAS-bearing biosolids, WSSC Water believes that its current commitment to a high-quality, recyclable product at Piscataway is a sound one, nonetheless. 

October 30 was the official grand opening for Piscataway Bioenergy Facility.   The WSSC Water press release was titled “We’ve Got the Power! WSSC Water Celebrates Grand Opening of its Poop-to-Power Bioenergy Facility.”  Congressmen, local elected officials and agency senior staff, as well as the MDE Secretary, joined in the ceremony. This marked the moment, according to the press release, when WSSC Water “officially opened its $271 million Piscataway Bioenergy Facility in Accokeek, Maryland. The innovative plant, which was completed on budget and on time, will turn “Poop to Power” by turning methane gas into Renewable Natural Gas (RNG) to power Montgomery County Ride On buses. …and [it] transforms how Maryland’s largest water utility handles biosolids…. Once fully operational in early 2025, all biosolids from WSSC Water’s five water resource recovery facilities (WRRFs) will be delivered to the new plant.” 

Websites for Stantec and Hazen and Sawyer covered the significance of the project.  Stantec’s article explains: “The facility is projected to generate approximately $4 million per year in revenue, save WSSC Water customers approximately $3.4 million per year in operating costs, and further reduce WSSC Water’s greenhouse gas emissions.”  Hazen’s article explains: “The utility officially cut the ribbon on the $271 million bioenergy system on October 30…. This facility greatly reduces the amount of treated biosolids that need to be hauled away, which means fewer trucks and less fuel….”  Hazen elaborates on the elements of the new biosolids treatment system: 

  1. cake silo storage for the Piscataway cake and bins for receiving raw solids from the 4 other WSSC Water plants;

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Piscataway Bioenergy will accept truck deliveries of dewatered raw solids from all plants for blending and feeding into stabilization equipment

          2. the Cambi Thermal Hydrolysis Process (THP) system for pretreating solids for enhanced digestion; 

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The Cambi Thermal Hydrolysis Process reactors, shown effective at DC Water’s Blue Plains plant, use high temperature and pressure steam to pretreat wastewater solids for high performance mesophilic anaerobic digestion.

         3. steam generators and associated piping for supplying pressured steam to the THPs, designed to accept various fuels from biogas and natural gas sources; 
         4. cooling heat exchanger to reduce the temperature of the sludge feed ahead of mesophilic digestion;
         5. two 1.5-million-gallon mesophilic anaerobic digesters;

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WSSC has built two conventional mesophilic digesters, each 1.5 million gallons in capacity, to digest the hydrolyzed wastewater solids, reducing organic matter by better than 50 percent, and converting it to biogas.

         6. belt filter presses to dewater the class A solids; 

         7. gas storage to contain the biogas produced during volatile solids destruction for clean up to remove moisture, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon dioxide to produce Renewable Natural Gas (RNG); 

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Biogas from digestion is upgraded to high value by removing moisture, CO2, siloxane and sulfur compounds, such that the final gas is equivalent to natural gas, but with an attribute as renewable natural gas that confers high economic value.

         8. three 1.5 MW cogeneration engines to produce electricity from the RNG; 

         9. two anammox sidestream reactors for treating filtrate to remove ammonia prior to filtrate return to the head works;

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The sidestream treatment system uses a novel technique called deammonification that removes ammonia by using special bacteria grown on plastic media roughly the shape and size of wagon wheel pasta.

         10. covered storage and a loading station from which the biosolids product is distributed.

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Class A biosolids are dewatered by belt filter presses to remove excess water and sent to this loading station or to the adjoining covered storage area.

Ever since the Piscataway team – WSSC Water, HDR, PC Construction and engineering firms Stantec and Hazen, together -- reached its 30% design mark back in 2018, a principal goal was to have Piscataway run dependably with WSSC Water’s own operators. At the center of this goal emerged Will Mapes, the Chief Plant Operator, Bioenergy Facility. Over the period 2018 to today, Mapes’s role at WSSC Water has expanded with the expansion of the facility.  Mapes is particularly proud of the team of operators he has recruited.  Mapes has had a special focus on effective screening of sludge feeds to the THP and digester of trash, fibers and grit, to avoid equipment downtime and maintenance time. He has been also a keen advocate for treatment that minimizes odors in the final biosolids product, to avoid site odors and to keep product moving to customers. Mapes brings these kinds of overarching goals to the systems he will be living with every day. 

Supporting Mapes on the operability of Piscataway along the way has been Amanda Harris, the senior Commissioning Manager for PC Construction. She worked with PC Construction on Blue Plains as her first THP experience, and applied valuable lessons learned there to the WSSC Water project. When Piscataway is completed, Harris then will be taking on her third THP-MAD project, that of the facility planned for Arlington County Water Pollution Control Bureau.   For Harris, Piscataway has been a “dream,” and she gave a shout out to the commitment of WSSC Water to ensuring the facility will be designed and built with operations staff top-of-mind. Her current challenges include bringing the innovative sidestream deammonification system fully online and completing the installation of the boiler for the Cambi THP.  The boiler has been delayed by supply chain challenges but also by the requirement that it take all types of fuels in addition to RNG, including surplus biogas and exhaust from the generators.  

WSSC Water’s Piscataway Bioenergy Facility is very, very close to completion.  Over the next several months, solids from the outlying WRRFs are introduced to the receiving station, thereby expanding the volume of solids flowing through all components of the treatment train. Now that a final dewatered digested cake is in production at Piscataway the very significant “what’s next” for distribution of the dewatered cake is center stage. 2025 will be the year in which all parts of the dream, which took shape in 2018, are in place.

Congratulations to this amazing team.  

For more information, contact Mary Baker at [email protected] or 845-901-7905.
 

October 2024 - MABA Biosolids Spotlight 

Provided to MABA members by Bill Toffey, Effluential Synergies, LLC 

SPOTLIGHT on Co-Digestion at Rahway Valley Sewerage Authority

Successful implementation of innovative technologies at wastewater reclamation facilities is very often a consequence of the support of a tenacious champion with operational knowledge and engagement.  Rahway Valley Sewerage Authority, a New Jersey WRRF serving a quarter million people, is an agency that has stood apart for its innovative technologies for energy and solids management.  James Meehan served as the executive director for the RVSA from 2010 through 2022 and championed this philosophy.  Under his leadership, the RVSA explored many options to leverage the assets of the RVSA and was on the forefront of environmental initiatives, including co-digestion of food waste, beneficial reuse of biosolids, and eventually renewable natural gas.  

Working with RVSA to manage the challenges of those innovations has been John Buonocore.  Over the past fifteen years, Buonocore served first as chief engineer, later as assistant director, and since 2022 as the authority’s executive director.  Every workday Buonocore continues Meehan’s vision and presses for projects that implement a vision of maximum utilization of his agency’s assets to improve financial health and reduce operational risks.  Foremost are questions of using the capacity of RVSA assets to reduce energy budgets, to manage biosolids costs and risks, and to use resources in the private sector to bring in technology and to share risks. Through it all, Buonocore has navigated a complex field of staffing, board policies, procurement options and regulatory considerations, and against the backdrop of unexpected events, such as the kinds posed by PFAS or that of key equipment failures. 

Several metrics of the RVSA operation stand out as key to its program innovations. These metrics reflect the geographically central location of RVSA in the NY-NJ Metropolitan region, with particularly good transportation access, with potential flows of carbon-rich organics by sewer and truck, with a specific set of environmental standards set by the NJDEP’s approach to water and air quality.  

Extra capacity in RVSA anaerobic digesters prompted RVSA’s interest in food waste supplementation. The US EPA had funded a pilot of co-digestion of food waste with wastewater solids at East Bay Municipal Utility District (East Bay MUD) in Oakland, California. Its findings were widely reported in such documents in 2008 as “Turning Food Waste into Energy at the East Bay Municipal Utility District” and “Anaerobic Digestion of Food Waste.” The Water Research Foundation issued a series of publications on this topic, notably “Co-Digestion of Organic Waste Products with Wastewater Solids (2014),” finding “the practice of adding waste organic feedstock directly to anaerobic digesters is becoming an attractive way for utilities to generate revenue from tipping fees while boosting biogas production “ Buonocore muses, “I don’t know why every agency with digesters doesn’t explore co-digestion.” 

WM Organic Recycling was ready to step up to RVSA’s interest in co-digestion.  Dan Hagen, Director of Business Development for WM Organics Recycling, has been the go-to person for RVSA.  WM was able to offer its CORe® system technology, the centralized organic recycling equipment, a proprietary process that converts commercial source-separated food waste into EBS®, an engineered bioslurry product.  This is a “milk-shake-like” flowable liquid of about 15% solids concentration and with an energy-rich COD concentration of about 200,000 mg/liter.  Hagen brought to RVSA the success of CORe at the Los Angeles facility that fed digesters at LA Counties Sanitation district, and two other East Coast operations, one in Brooklyn, producing EBS for NYCDEP’s Newtown Creek WRRF, and the other in Boston, producing EBS for Greater Lawrence Sanitation District in North Andover, Massachusetts.  All three of these reference facilities successfully enhanced biogas production without adverse effects on digester operations.

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WM Organics Recycling provides a reactor for creating a slurry of the screened source-separated organic wastes, mostly collected from commercial sources. CORe stands for centralized organic recycling equipment.

Using the vehicle of a competitively-bid Public-Policy-Partnership proposal, subsequently negotiated successfully with WM Organics Recycling and WM’s Greater Mid-Atlantic Market Area, WM built at RVSA a 210,000-gallon EBS receiving facility and installed its CORe food waste receiving and process system in Elizabeth, New Jersey.  In full operation now for several years, WM ships on average 30,000 gallons of EBS daily five to six days each week. The receiving tank at RVSA is sized to allow plant operators to feed the digester 24-7, for the kind of even feeding important for steady digester operations and rates of biogas production. Both the Elizabeth CORe and the RVSA receiving facility have capacity for future expansion. But at present, EBS deliveries are such that the mass of volatile solids from the EBS are roughly equivalent to the mass of volatile solids coming from primary and waste activated processes.

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The Public Private Partnership between RSVA and WM resulted in the installation at RSVA of a Food Waste Receiving Station.

In addition to extra digester capacity, RVSA had other assets and opportunities within its fence line. One of these is biogas fueled electric generators. Four 1.5 MW Caterpillar internal combustion engine (ICE) generators had been installed at RVSA in 2007, a genset complex that enables RVSA to operate fully should electrical service to the plant be lost. The ICE generators had been equipped with dual fuel controls to allow for digester gas, natural gas, or blended digester and natural gas. With the EBS supplementation, one of the ICE engines can run 24/7 on straight digester gas.

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RSVA has a genset with a combined power potential of 6.5 Megawatts, though it is presently set up to operate one CAT internal combustion engine with biogas from the co-digestion of wastewater solids and engineered bioslurry.

RVSA has also a biogas clean up system in support of the fueling of the ICE generators. This is a Unison brand system that removes hydrogen sulfide, drops the moisture, filters particulates, and then passes the biogas through a carbon filter to remove siloxane. It then compresses the biogas, which results in additional moisture reduction. At this point, the gas typically has 650 BTUs per cubic foot of energy value. The Unison system is currently providing cleaned digester gas to power a single generator on a continuous basis, but is at maximum capacity and cannot handle additional biogas. To process the additional digester gas produced through the co-digestion process, RVSA is pursuing a new system to remove the CO2 component of biogas, to bring it up to the energy content of natural gas, and RVSA is discussing this option with WM Organics Recycling. 

Another asset at RVSA is its Komline-Sanderson indirect paddle dryer, installed in 2004 and now 20 years old.  The dryer was designed explicitly to draw upon ICE generator waste heat, though it can also be heated directly by a natural gas boiler. The dryer is sized to evaporate nearly 5 tons of water hourly, about twice the requirements for the mass of centrifuge dewatered cake that RVSA had been producing through its Centrisys centrifuges. The waste heat from two of the cogen ICE units is sufficient to meet the energy requirements for the dryer when in operation.  The capacity of the dryer is sufficient to handle more than current digested solids, so additional solids from supplementation of the digesters pose no issue.

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The Komline-Sanderson indirect paddle dryer is set up to use waste heat from the electric generators. The dryer is operated continuously for a four day period each week, and at present the dried biosolids is used for alternative daily cover at municipal solid waste landfills, a category of use designated by NJDEP as beneficial.

As one of the MABA region’s biosolids leaders has been known to say: “between the cup and the lip is many a slip.” The path for RVSA has had its tortuous aspects, and Buonocore has provided his colleagues in the wastewater profession candid assessments of challenges RVSA has faced during NJWEA conferences 2022 through 2024.

Dried product conveyance is a challenge. Buonocore has described in presentations on his facility the conveyors of dried biosolids from the dryers to truck loading as a “chutes and ladders” system, a design determined by the building layout. The conveyance system contributes to degradation of the dried biosolids, resulting in a dusty product unwanted by farmers and other customers. RVSA installed a system to spray oil on the dried biosolids to suppress dust, but this is an expensive additive with downstream risks, including increased self-heating.  

In 2023, nineteen years after its installation, the dryer suffered a major leak to its thermal oil, requiring months to empty and clean the dryer and complicated confined space welding to add hard facing of the paddles. 

Buonocore is tracking several factors that can influence RVSA solids handling. One of these is PFAS. Should national standards for biosolids use be amended to reflect risks of PFAS in a way that would limit the recycling of RVSA biosolids, then Buonocore might focus a search into thermal processes that can reliably destroy biosolids-borne PFAS, and perhaps other micropollutants. This could be such technologies as gasification, pyrolysis and supercritical water oxidation. But Buonocore is looking for successful reference facilities at municipal plants elsewhere before moving ahead. 

Another factor Buonocore is tracking is innovative drying technologies. At present, repairs made to the Komline indirect paddle dryers will extend this equipment for several years going forward.  RVSA biosolids disposition program does not presently accomplish the circular economy goal of nutrient and carbon recycling to land.  RVSA received priced proposals for handling RVSA’s biosolids, both its cake and dried forms, and reached an agreement with WM for its contract. Today, WM is using the RVSA biosolids almost entirely for daily cover at its municipal solid waste landfill operations. This category for use meets the New Jersey definition for beneficial use.  Further out, RVSA may look at recent experiences with new dryers, such as radiant belt dryers, and reconsider direct rotary dryers for the quality of the product that would attract farmer use, which would better fulfill the kind of environmental sustainability that has been a key to the RVSA goal. 

Another area of concern for Buonocore is flaring.  Biogas yield is highly responsive to the rates of feed of the bioslurry into the digesters, and challenges of balancing that feed to the separate streams of thickened primary and WAS solids can result in spikes of biogas that must be flared.  Buonocore seeks to minimize flaring through use of the cogeneration engines and the proposed RNG production. 

WM and RVSA have been working on the bioslurry program since 2018. Lessons were learned on the way the slurry is handled. This includes the type of metals and coatings used to protect equipment from the acidic and corrosive properties of the bioslurry.  RVSA learned how it can deploy automatic monitoring of liquid and gas flows so that it can respond, for instance, to variations in organic loadings, gas quality, and digester temperatures. RVSA and WM have been able to show that RVSA can readily double the production of biogas with bioslurry, and the mesophilic digesters remain stable, even when organic loading from the bioslurry is in a 50:50 proportion to the wastewater solids. The total mass of biosolids handled by RVSA has increased only slightly despite the significant loadings of bioslurry, and its dewaterability and its dried product quality have not changed appreciably.  

RVSA has been pursuing a new biogas project -- the treatment of biogas to the standard of renewable natural gas (RNG). RVSA has within its reach the 100 PSI natural gas main of Elizabethtown Gas. The potential for sale of NRG to Elizabethtown, with the significant financial incentive provided by an environmental attribute known as RINs, makes the extra costs of biogas clean up and CO2 removal a clear financial benefit.  The strategy under consideration is having all biogas directed at production of RNG. In this case, regular natural gas is used to run the ICE genset, and waste heat is used in the biosolids dryers. Flaring could be thereby significantly reduced, and complications of running the genset on biogas could also be avoided.

While significant projects lay ahead, RVSA’s accomplishments to date with co-digestion, biogas utilization, and beneficial solids use place RVSA as a national role model for sustainability in wastewater treatment.

For more information, contact Mary Baker at [email protected] or 845-901-7905.
 

September 2024 - MABA Biosolids Spotlight 

Provided to MABA members by Bill Toffey, Effluential Synergies, LLC 

SPOTLIGHT on BLOOM

DC Water’s biosolids product, Bloom, “sparks joy!” While influencer Marie Kondo’s “spark joy” tips no longer focus on tidiness, she now advises on the “little activities that bring peace and joy on a deeper level.”  Any biosolids manager who reviews the case studies and testimonials of Bloom users, easily found on Blue Drop websites and social media, cannot help but enter a zone of peace and joy. The District’s plan for a first-in-the-U.S. technology embraced some 15 years ago envisioned “biosolids product(s) that will have maximum potential use in the marketplace” (WEFTEC 2010, “Development Criteria in the Age of Sustainability – DC Water’s New Paradigm for Biosolids and Energy Management”).  That dream has been actualized, and that “sparks joy.”

The birth of Bloom as a soil product followed closely upon completion at DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant of the biosolids treatment process that combined the Cambi Thermal Hydrolysis Process with new mesophilic anaerobic digesters and new belt filter presses. On January 17, 2017, the DC Water Blog offered this announcement: “One Drop Begets Another: We launched [Blue Drop] 54 days ago with the goal of marketing products and services DC Water has already developed – to generate revenue and improve the state of the water sector.”  This brought the “new paradigm for biosolids” to reality.

Seven years of market development have brought Bloom to a peak place among biosolids products. But for the venerable Milorganite, nearing its 100th anniversary (1926 to 2026), Bloom, with its tagline “Good Soil, Better Earth,” has developed an unexcelled breadth of its product reach compared to exceptional quality biosolids worldwide. Its markets range from city sites to rural lands, from community gardens to large farms, from homeowners to highly esteemed professionals. Bloom is available in its “fresh” form (Fresh Bloom) and in two blends, the Woody Blend and the Sandy Blend. Specification sheets are available for all three forms, describing physical and chemical characteristics, and use information sheets are available for each. Market segments have coalesced into landscaper and resellers, contractors, farmers, and homeowners.  For all markets, Blue Drop prepares a photographic gallery and testimonials of successful product uses, many backed up by 18 webinars viewable on YouTube.

As is true for most successful ventures, committed, forward-thinking champions comprise the Bloom production and marketing enterprise.  At the head of the enterprise is Chris Peot, who for 25 years has been one of the nation’s foremost advocates for biosolids recycling and high-quality product formulation. He arrived at the DC Water and Sewer Authority when the agency was knee-deep in substandard, odor-prone residuals, determined to change its off-kilter course and poor reputation. He was a key advocate for the treatment train announced in 2010 to create a product with the promise that was to become Bloom. He helped conceive the marketing program for the Bloom biosolids product that would launch Blue Drop. Chris now serves the dual role of Interim President of Blue Drop and the Director of Recovery and Wastewater Treatment for the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water). 

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Chris Peot, Director of Resource Recovery, giving a tour of Cambi Thermal Hydrolysis Process units at DC Water’s Blue Plains AWTP

Chris Peot’s pledge was to create the highest value biosolids product that would yield the District and its ratepayers the highest returns. To accomplish this, he would have DC Water create versatile products and markets.  DC Water would turn to soil and plant experts, notably Ron Alexander, to assist customers on technical issues, and the agency would support related practical and university end use research, as with Drs. Greg Evanylo and Gary Felton.  Peot needed a vehicle, Blue Drop, to assist with marketing, engaging a staff of problem-solvers and passionate advocates for the product. Today in 2024, Bloom is supported by the brilliance of April Thompson, Holly Kiser and Victoria Alleyne. 

Marketing Bloom has become a unique success with April Thompson, who leads the Bloom marketing and sales efforts. April holds an MBA and an MA in International Development from American University and a BA from the University of Virginia, which led her to work in more than a dozen countries. She has worked in non-governmental organizations on important causes, such as food security and child labor. She is also a freelance journalist, particularly on sustainable lifestyle topics, and is passionate about urban agriculture and conservation, having completed the master gardener and naturalist programs. April now brings these commitments to important issues and these talents in marketing, communication and project management to her position as Senior Director for Bloom. And she does so in the context of a strong effort at DC Water to make a great product.  "The team at DC Water deserves a ton of credit," April is quick to say, "as they actually blend our beautiful product in house, they help deliver to our customers and they work literally day and night to get trucks loaded."

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April Thompson, Senior Director, bragging about the results of Bloom

April holds up golf courses as a growing type of customer for Bloom, overseen by Bloom Sales Manager Victoria Alleyne. Victoria is the Bloom Sales Manager working with landscapers, contractors, land resellers.  While born in the US, Victoria was raised in Barbados, the origin of her love of plants.  She earned a BS in Environmental Sciences and her MBA from the University of Maryland Global Campus.  Prior to Bloom, Victoria spent more than four years at Maryland Environmental Services, where she was part of MES organics diversion, composting, and recycling, including the marketing and distribution of Leafgro.

Golf courses are by no measure easy customers for Victoria, as Bloom is not a familiar soil amendment, and much is at stake in successful product performance. The expectations by golf course superintendents for their soil products is for even, deep green landscape, for spotless, disease-free turf, and for the precise balance of good drainage yet adequate moisture holding characteristics. Over the past several years, Bloom has managed to earn the trust and respect of expert consultants in the golf industry, who help tailor the Bloom product to the exacting, dependable performance needed by courses.  

April and Victoria have come to appreciate the expert voice of Jeff Michel, Vice President of M&M Consulting, who in a recent training webinar spoke alongside Allen Turner, Superintendent of Four Streams Golf Course on specific aspects of Bloom that are highly valued. These include sand blends that have a controlled release of nutrients at a pace matching turf needs, not over-fertilizing (which weakens the grass) not resulting in leaching below the roots (which is a waste of money). The result is turf that is deeply rooted, a key to drought resistance and plant health.

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Before and after pictures of green restoration using the Sandy Blend Bloom product at the Four Streams Golf Course

In the “Bloom fan club” also is Ben Ellis, superintendent of the golf course at Andrews Air Force Base. Ellis speaks to how Bloom builds soil cation exchange capacity with its organic matter, how it sequesters carbon for sustainability and how it provides a kick of extra iron and nitrogen for super green color. But it was the cost-effective availability of the Bloom Sand Blend in high volumes that was the lifesaver at a project he managed at Fort Belvoir, when he restored ten acres entirely devoid of topsoil and organic matter. At his post at Andrews, his eye is now on a large delivery of Bloom for development of a driving range.  

Victoria is also responsible for large contractor jobs.  She points to the South Capitol Bridge, the largest Bloom project to date, as a capstone event. Also known as the Frederick Douglass Memorial Bridge project, plans included highly visible landscapes, challenging grades and paths for public accessibility for bikers and walkers. This mandated high quality turf and plant establishment for what was to become a world-class landscape, hence the need for Bloom as a dependable foundation for success. The soil specification for the DC Department of Transportation called for a significant increase in organic matter to bring the existing topsoil to a quality suitable for sustainable plant growth. Landscape architects and soil scientists came together to find an optimal blend that included Bloom for its capability to provide a rich quantity of slow-release nutrients.  The Bloom-amended soil could provide drought resistance through good water holding capacity, disease tolerance from its balance of plant nutrients, and good soil structure for water drainage and storm management control.

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Fresh Bloom applied for in situ incorporation with existing soil fill at South Capitol Bridge project

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Capitol Bridge South with high value landscape plantings completed

Holly Kiser, Blue Drop’s Agricultural Liaison, calls herself a “farm kid.” She was raised on a dairy farm, and today lives with her farmer husband and two children on Radley Bend, a multi-generational farm producing hay, dairy, and cattle, and of course pigs her kids tend as 4H projects. She has personally witnessed biosolids benefits to crop production and soil health, so is able to compellingly represent Bloom as an affordable and natural fertilizer.

Blue Drop has posted a case study of an agricultural application of Bloom at the Lorn Carlee farm. Carlee’s 600-acre farm in Washington and Frederick Counties in Maryland is on a path to improved soil health, greater crop yields and sustainability with the use of organic matter sources.  Carlee started using chicken litter and then moved to Bloom, committing to transforming his cultural practices over a five-year period. He is using 20 tons per acre of Bloom on sorghum and 10 tons per acre on soybeans, resulting in larger sorghum heads and greener leaves and soybeans that are taller and more productive.  Without Bloom, Carlee had been barely achieving 100 bushels of sorghum per acre, but with Bloom Carleereaches a yield of 135 bushels per acre.  Carlee has discovered that Bloom makes crops more resilient to drought, and he expects that future soil tests will show improvement in his soil’s improved cation exchange capacity. With improved soil health, Carlee expects to move his target of corn production from 200 bushels per acre to 250 bushels.  Through Bloom, Holly has introduced to Lorn Carlee Fresh Bloom as a source of organic matter and natural nutrients that puts into real action sustainable farming.

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Bloom applied to farm fields results in notable improvements in crop vitality

The highly skilled and dedicated Blue Drop sales team has a key foundation of support back at DC Water – James Fotouhi, the Resource Recovery Program Manager. James has been with DC Water for nearly 7 years, providing Blue Drop’s sales team with the regulatory, science and logistical foundation necessary for this unusually wide-ranging and necessarily transparent sales program. James has a civil engineering degree from the University of British Columbia, which engaged his interests in energy and water efficiencies and that propelled him in his early career with Engineers without Borders and with water technology consultants BlueTech Research. At DC Water, James has worked on energy efficiencies, carbon management and greenhouse gas emissions, and he has provided avenues for program efficiencies to reduce costs in the Bloom marketing. His technology and science skills have made him a key staffer, supported by able staffers such as Antoine Wroton, in addressing current issues with microcontaminants.

James underscores the importance of Bloom product quality in the entire recycling enterprise.  James says “one of the keys to Bloom’s success is consistent product quality. When operated correctly, THP can produce a very homogenized, low odor material, and DC Water does a great job keeping it functional. Operations has discovered a lot of flexibility in the system, finding that even with entire digesters or CAMBI trains down for months at a time, the Class A VSR [volatile solids reduction] and time/temperature requirements [for further pathogen reduction] can still be easily met. In 10 years since commissioning, the biosolids treatment process has always met and exceeded our permit requirements.”

Keeping the biosolids treatment process working is a committed team of wastewater treatment professionals at DC Water.  James called out Eric Barnett, in Process Engineering, and Dennis Morris, Program Manager Department of Maintenance Services, as heading the teams that keep the process moving dependably 24-7.  Dennis emphasized: “[Cambi} is not a set-and-forget process. We have good people who really care about their jobs, and they need to be constantly aware. Thermal hydrolysis is a good process, but we have needed continuous improvements for changes to optimize it.” Dennis is always in search of young people to train as the next generation to keep the Bloom product excellent.

DC Water and Blue Drop together are the global leaders in the production, distribution and sales of exceptional quality biosolids for use in urban and nearby agricultural landscapes. The progress across the 15 years from concept to full implementation has been a steady perseverance and commitment to principles of sustainability, circular economy and resource use efficiency.  This endeavor is a shining example for all of us in the biosolids profession, an example that can spark joy.

For more information, contact Mary Baker at [email protected] or 845-901-7905.
 
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