Wastewater Solutions for Sustainability
For technologies and solutions that meet the challenge of a rapidly evolving climate for wastewater treatment and resource recovery.
Strategic Solutions for Resource Recovery
Effluential Synergies provides planning and consulting services to select programs and technologies that meet current needs and future risks.
Are you looking for innovative wastewater technology & solutions for wastewater solids management? Effluential Synergies maintains a deep inventory of facility planning documents, manuals of practice, manufacturers brochures, evaluations of reference installations, and performance case studies reported at industry conferences, all across the array of processes – stabilization, dewatering, composting, drying and thermal processing – and of management options – land application, landfill disposal, incineration and storage. We have a library of over 1,000 journal articles on the science of biosolids treatment and use. A five-year catalogue of many hundreds of media articles, along with communications tools, support our advocacy services.
Our list of services is as follows:
Comprehensive biosolids management planning
Innovative technology reviews
Contracting options
Sustainable nutrient and energy recovery
Advocacy to the public and media
Comprehensive biosolids management planning
Effluential Synergies can be a partner with a team from public agencies and their engineering consultants in comprehensive planning for biosolids management. Bill Toffey, firm principal, has over 4 decades of experience in comprehensive planning, at all system and time scales. His perspective can lend freshness to traditional approaches, often tied to elaborate numerical rating systems. To the planning conversation can be added a broad range of technology, climate, and economic futures.
Innovative technology reviews
A tension exists between the risk of conventional technologies and solutions missing out on significantly improved economic and performance outcomes and the risk that innovative technologies fail to deliver on promised outcomes. To this dilemma is added the opportunity for partnerships between public and private sectors to share risks and rewards as together they seek innovative technology solutions.
Contracting options
Public contracts, either as requests for proposals or as invitations to bid, and either short term or long term, strongly affect the nature of technology and services that are procured for biosolids treatment and use. New performance based contracts aire available on the model of “guaranteed energy savings contracts.” Although no one approach is “best,” a thorough review of RFPs, ITBs, and other contract forms can raise alarms of missed opportunities or pitfalls. Effluential Synergies can be a public agency’s advisor on contract provisions.
Sustainable nutrient and energy recovery
Management of biosolids is a vital aspect to accomplishing sustainability goals, as it is through the biosolids processes that products in the form of fertilizers, soil amendments and biofuels are available for use in the community. In some cases, the products can generate revenue that offsets, even in a small way, cost of operation and capital. The goodwill generated to the community from distribution and marketing of biosolids can be great.
Advocacy to the public and media
The very great exception to the norm is a person who can tell the destination of his daily flush and the ultimate use of his personal nutrient discharge. Why is not every utility customer not a friend of biosolids? Effluential Synergies is part of a national initiative to change the relation of the flushing public with their community treatment plant, an initiative of which all can be made part, through traditional and social media and community events.
Why "Effluential"?
“Effluential” is an invented word Just as “biosolids” was two decades ago. This new word connotes the importance of effluent as a resource, beyond its usual identification as wastewater. It contains nutrients and organic carbon, ready for harnessing.
Why “Synergies”?
The inventiveness of technologies that can be “synergistically” applied, as in nutrient recovery, energy capture and organic matter stabilization. The big vision?
How does the Vision work?
Read more about recovering resource value from wastewater and biosolids at Effluential Visions blog.