Over the past four years, Montague has quietly pioneered a way to save hundreds of thousands of dollars for area towns through the most unglamorous of methods.
The operators of the town’s sewage treatment plant seem to have discovered a way to completely digest the sludge that is the end product of conventional wastewater treatment — sludge that towns normally have to ship to incinerators in Rhode Island or eastern Massachusetts at great cost.
The plant’s unique system has worked so well, in fact, that 24 sewage plants around the region have been sharing in the savings by trucking their sludge the shorter distance to Montague to be digested.
“It’s truly unique,” says Grant Weaver, the plant’s interim superintendent. “Nobody in a small town probably anywhere in the world would think their town would be on the cutting edge. But in this weird niche, Montague is.”
And saving Montague taxpayers about $350,000 a year.
The Greenfield Road plant, which runs at only about half its capacity of 1.8 million gallons of liquid waste a year, runs with maybe five times the concentration of bacteria as a typical plant, according to Weaver.
“By doing that, we’ve created an environment that’s proven it can break down the sludge, to everybody’s benefit. It’s evolved over five years, and in the last three years, it’s gotten to a really good point.” says Weaver, who’s worked on and off as a Connecticut-based consultant to Montague for the past five years. “There’s nobody in the country, nobody in the world that we know of, that’s doing this, that trucks in other people’s sludge, dumps it in the liquid stream and doesn’t truck anything out.”
But we suppose that even in the world of wastewater there can be too much of a good thing.
Montague’s unorthodox system has come to the attention of its state regulators at the state Department of Environmental Protection after a month-long overflow at the plant in January that town officials say was unrelated.
DEP has called for technical and scientific research to define exactly what’s going on in this (sludge-eating) process. In the meantime, Montague has been forced to stop taking sludge from its neighbors.
That’s doubled sludge hauling costs for surrounding towns, according to Jan Ameen, executive director of the Franklin County Solid Waste District. “Montague was the regional solution for about four years,” she said.
Greenfield’s wastewater plant has been forced to ship its four 9,000-gallon weekly loads of sludge to Cranston, R.I., according to Supervisor Mark Holley of Greenfield Water Facilities.
“We much prefer Montague’s method,” he said. “It’s more ecologically sound.”
Montague’s town administrator, Frank Abbondanzio, said he has begun discussions with DEP and area legislators about the need to provide funding for the research, and down the road, to pay for capital improvements — perhaps in the millions — to automate the process .
Weaver says no one is certain exactly why the system is working as well as it does, while admitting Montague’s method has “grossly overloaded” the system by traditional design criteria and requires a “tremendous amount of staff attention.”
The town is hoping to convince DEP that it needs to look at the bigger picture, which Weaver says could intensify over the next 12 to 18 months as the half-dozen regional sludge incinerators try to comply with tighter federal emission standards or simply give up.
If DEP expects Montague to prove its system not only works well but also doesn’t cause any collateral harm, then we think the state should pick up the bill for the study and perhaps pilot project upgrades that would automate the process, because what’s learned could be replicated across the state, saving everyone money and probably helping the environment.
Ameen agrees the state should support this unexpected money-saving process.
“It seems with DEP that there’s a disconnect with how serious it is,” she says. “There are a limited number of outlets. How few can you go to before it gets backed up?”