Atlantium Technologies Ltd. announced at ACE 2013 that its R-200 system has been awarded the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Environmental Technology Verification (ETV) for achieving 4-log virus credit water disinfection—the only ultraviolet (UV) disinfection system in the world to achieve this distinction, guaranteeing water bio-security according to EPA dose and performance criteria.
The ETV is an EPA program that enables innovative sustainable technology vendors to do a single verification of their claims. Atlantium was accepted into the ETV program in 2010 at the NSF Drinking Water Center, contractor for the EPA to verify drinking water technologies.
The EPA ETV verification corroborates Atlantium’s original 2009 validation—the first full scale validation with live Adenovirus—for full 4 log virus EPA credit and compliance. Until now, EPA rules declared that UV could not be used to meet the 4 log virus credit dose of 186 mJ/cm2 benchmarked on Adenovirus—a significant target water pathogen—because no reliable validation had been performed.
“The ETV validation is an important milestone for Atlantium, and demonstrates that a properly validated UV dose of medium pressure photons, uniformly distributed, can reliably achieve 4-log virus credit without chemicals,” said Phyllis Posy, Atlantium, vice president of regulatory affairs.
Posy continued: “It is also an important milestone for small community groundwater providers, on whose behalf Atlantium embarked on this validation process. After our original validation was done, an engineering study showed that Medium Pressure UV was cost-effective compared to chlorine, but many utilities and regulators were hesitant to make the change. Now, for the first time, a reliable and sustainable UV solution to provide 4 log virus disinfection, proven and documented, has passed the EPA ETV verification and validation procedure. The EPA examined it from all sides and said, ‘OK, here is one that will do the job.’”
The possibility of 4 log adenovirus disinfection has engaged many water experts and environmental engineering leaders since Atlantium launched the project in 2007. The work covered by the EPA ETV was led by Dr. Karl Linden of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Karl Scheible of HDR/HydroQual, under the guidance of officials at the New York Health Department and Dr. Jim Malley of the University of New Hampshire. Atlantium has since completed another full-scale validation with live adenovirus on a different unit.
Source: Atlantium
