I’m flying Airtran (www.airtran.com) back to Milwaukee this past Sunday morning after having attended the 4th (my 1st) annual National Association of Wastewater Transporters (NAWT, www.nawt.org) Treatment Symposium in Orlando, Florida. NAWT (the acronym’s pronounced naught, as in “naughty” without the "y") primarily attracts professionals from the septage, grease trap and biosolids industries. These members have a desire to collaborate on issues, ideas, innovations and best practices with a goal of continuing to improve their respective operations while progressively moving their entire industries forward as well.
It would have been easy for me to skip the NAWT Symposium (as I obviously have the previous three years), since AWS (www.advancedwasteservices.com) doesn’t typically deal with septage, grease traps or biosolids. I was attracted to go, however, because I read that the symposium included a tour of an Orlando-based grease and septic processing plant called Select Processing of Orlando (no website), and I was curious to see how the operation looked and operated.
The two-day NAWT Symposium included, besides the tour, a jam-packed lineup of presentations on a range of issues from treatment to regulation to odor control to equipment to basically, well, you name it. While I wasn’t particularly interested in every single topic, I was in most, and I came away from them with great information and several promising ideas for us to consider employing at AWS.
Whenever that happens, I feel like my time was well spent.
Besides the Orlando heat (95⁰, give or take), the Select Processing tour was great. The company receives and processes septic, grease trap and biosolid wastes and, not unlike a CWT, uses physical, chemical and mechanical screening, precipitation and dewatering to produce a clean water suitable for discharge and a sludge suitable for landfill disposal or land application. The other neat thing about the tour was that NAWT had arranged for equipment vendors to be on site. These vendors didn’t just have their equipment, they showed how it worked, using Select Processing’s waste for the demonstration. Cool! We saw belt filter presses, receiving station screening systems, rotary presses, dewatering boxes and more. It’s one thing for an equipment manufacturer to talk about their product and quite another to demo it “live” in front of an audience of experts. NAWT deserves a lot of credit for that, and I hope to see future symposiums include an even wider range of collection and processing equipment.
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