The city of Pompano Beach’s 8.6-million-gal-per-day wastewater filtration facility has relied on Parkson’s DynaSand continuous up-flow sand filters to produce high quality effluent water, which has been reused for landscaping irrigation on golf courses, medians and city plantings.
However, while continuous up-flow sand filters are capable of producing extremely high quality effluent (e.g., 0.03 mg per liter of phosphorous), they often result in reject water that needs to be treated again. Typically this reject water is pumped back to the beginning of the treatment plant to be processed again. The city incurs some expense for this reprocessing and the associated pumping costs.
Earlier in 2010, Parkson announced the new, patented EcoWash addition to its long-standing DynaSand offering. After learning about this option, the city of Pompano Beach launched a pilot project to test the results against its traditional DynaSand filters (the city has a total of 24). In May 2010, Parkson modified two filters and commenced full-scale testing against the standard DynaSand operations. According to Parkson, the EcoWash enhanced filters delivered better filtrate quality while reducing reject water by 90%. In addition to the reject water savings, which has a direct energy savings impact, the test indicated that the EcoWash option is able to handle high solids loading events.
The city of Pompano Beach decided that to add the EcoWash upgrade to all 24 of its filters. The upgrade will save the city an estimated $120,000 per year and result in a fast payback to the city. The effort is still underway and Parkson hopes to complete the upgrade by the first quarter of 2011.
Source: Parkson Corp.
