Building Work Starts on the World's Most Expensive Leachate Treatment Plant

Construction work has begun on the world's most expensive leachate treatment plant which at $27 million will be the most expensive ever built in the world to date. 

A number of plants are estimated to have been built at up to $15 million previously, but this one is significantly the most expensive in terms of the (assumed) capital cost, and it will only pre-treat the leachate which will then be discharged to the public sewer.

There will be an additional charge for that, levied by the Wastewater Treatment Works operator on top of the running costs for the leachate pre-treatment plant - but that cost pales into insignificance when compared with this level of investment.

We have found the following information on the web about the project:

JOHNSTON — The Rhode Island Resource Recovery Corporation (RIRRC) recently broke ground on a $27 million leachate pre-treatment plant. The new facility, which will be built on RIRRC property, will utilize green principles to create an energy-efficient system capable of properly treating wastewater before it is released into municipal sewer systems.
“This new facility will help to ensure that Resource Recovery is completely compliant with all modern wastewater treatment standards, and will employ approximately 160 Rhode Island workers in the construction sector through early 2015,” said Mike OConnell, RIRRC’s executive director.

Central Landfill Getting $27M Leachate Facility - Composting ...

It is not clear whether the £27 million quoted includes for operational costs for a period after construction, but at this price the plant must certainly be the most expensive contract ever.

A second US leachate pre-treatment plant which has just commenced construction is also in the news, this time it is located at the Monmouth County Reclamation Center in New Jersey.

The investment must be substantial, and in thic case the contract does include operational of the plant after construction, but no figures have been given in the press releases we have seen.

We include further information on this second leachate pre-treatment plant below:

Applied Water Management (AWM), a wholly-owned subsidiary of Natural Systems Utilities (NSU), has broken ground along with Middlesex Water Company on a new leachate pretreatment facility at the Monmouth County Reclamation Center in Tinton Falls, New Jersey, US.
The companies have partnered to design, construct and operate the facility under an initial 15-year contract with Monmouth County.
Monmouth County Reclamation Center superintendent Richard Throckmorton said that a long-term public-private partnership with the local New Jersey companies enables the county to have in place a system to manage wastewater with long-term reliability and flexibility, designed to accommodate future regulations.
The project includes a new wastewater treatment plant, which employs an advanced membrane bioreactor (MBR), pump station and pipeline that connects to the local sewer utility.
The MBR technology provides a high level of treatment that helps protect the environment by removing over 500,000lbs of nitrogen and over 1,000lbs of heavy metals from the waste stream every year.
NSU-AWM executive vice president Richard Cisterna said that using an advanced MBR reduces the amount of untreated leachate hauled off-site, significantly lowering operating costs and positively impacting the environment.

New Jersey begins construction work on new leachate pretreatment ...

These two plants, due to the cost involved, must surely raise the profile of leachate treatment in the US, both within the public who will in the end be paying for them, and the water treatment industry which will need to create specialized water treatment process systems for the special nature of leachate, if these plants are to operate reliably and efficiently.

How Would You Recognize Leachate Pollution If You Saw It?

Some types of leachate are immediately recognizable by their smell, but that isn't always true and others and much harder to distinguish from the low levels of pollution from septic tanks, and the presence of animals living on the land or nearby.

Steve Last, (Principal of IPPTS Associates) has published an article about the 3 most important indicator substances for the diagnosis of the presence of leachate contamination in soil or river/ stream water, which provides a handy guide to the first steps which might help identify a leachate pollution problem when leachate escapes from a landfill.

Don't stop here if you have an interest in this subject, visit the following link to the leachate expert website.

Why a Landfill Leachate Pollution Incident is so Dangerous to River and Stream Life

Leachate water pollution is a really serious problem when it takes place. I picture how major it is when nasty sewerage overflows in a city district. The encounter is not a pleasurable one for us human beings when we could quickly use our feet and move far from the contamination resource, but the plants and fauna that reside in waterways and streams have nowhere to go when pollution escapes into their living space underwater.

(Image: jschoen2000 via Flickr)

Now think about that landfill leachate which is (depending on the landfill it came from) between 10 and 100 times more powerful compared to sewerage, and take into consideration just how harmful that could be to all-natural organisms in our waterways and streamflows.

Throughout a leachate water pollution event the organic contamination in leachate which is represented by the concentration of BOD (Biochemical Oxygen Demand) feeds micro-organisms in the water which take air from the water in order to increase. This means that there is little or no oxygen left for greater organisms such as fish to breath, and the initial result of leachate water air pollution is generally that witnesses observe lifeless fish belly-up on the edge of the stream or drifting in the direction of the flow.

Nevertheless, when this occurs you can wager that a whole host of undetected creatures that would generally support the life of the fish are likewise suffering and dying. The result is that the whole ecological balance of the watercourse is hindered and could take lots of months, or years, to recover to its initial clean and living and population booming normal condition.

However, aside from the effect of minimized oxygen levels which we have explained, leachate includes numerous other contaminants. The hardest to get rid of and most damaging to flows and river it might enter into is ammoniacal-nitrogen. (People have frequently called this ammonia, yet ammonia in water is a mix of liquefied ammonium and gaseous ammonia - so we will certainly call it ammoniacal-nitrogen to make it clear that we called the complete ammonia (gas) and ammonium (dissolved)).

Ammoniacal-nitrogen is typically existing in sewerage at in between 10 mg/l and FIFTY mg/l (10 ppm to 50 ppm), but in a controlled garbage dump leachate from a regular sanitary waste landfill it will certainly be found to be between 500 mg/l and 3,000 mg/l.

Now consider just what level of ammoniacal-nitrogen greater organisms could allow in typical pH neutral river and stream water, and it is about in the 5 mg/l to 50 mg/l range that they start to end up being stressed and would be likely to perish. From this it is logical to conclude that also an ordinary strength landfill leachate would have to be watered down at least 10 to 100 times prior to it comes to be benign from the perspective of ammoniacal-nitrogen.

So, leachate water contamination is a very seriously unsafe pollution to our waterways and flows, and it is beneficial for society to use up a great deal of care and money to avoid leachate water pollution happening.