The Starkville Board of Aldermen received a preliminary evaluation of the city's waste lagoon, and potential ways to address its capacity during their work session on Friday.
The presentation was made by Vice President and Utilities Service Line Leader at Volkert Inc. Kirk Mills, where he addressed the current status of the lagoon and ways the city can address it.
Mills said there was a solids analysis and regulatory review. He said their initial plan is to identify alternate plans to proactively mitigate the full lagoon.
He said they will take a deeper dive into the details, to provide a more thorough analysis of which approach the city should take.
He said the existing lagoon is about 25 acres, which has about a total of 47.8 million gallons of material in it.
"It's accumulated sludge from the treatment process over 30 plus years, so it's full," Mills said.
One of the statistics Mills presented was there are 4.4 million gallons a day average flow, that yields about 1.4 cubic yards of dry solids materials every day, which goes to the pond as a wet material. He said that is what's contributing to fill up the lagoon.
"The solids is what we're focusing on, because you're kind of at the break point where you've got to do something," Mills said. "Right now I would say it's at or above operating capacity."
Mills said the Mississippi Department of Environmental Quality is asking what the city's plan is to address it. He said as far as a schedule goes, the lagoon was projected to be full in 2017.
"Solids is a product where there is a lot of value that can be recovered," Mills said. "So there's a push in regulations to kind of drive biosolids to land applications for beneficial use."
For the city, Mills presented three alternatives and paths it could take on addressing the capacity of the waste lagoon. The first was for the city to increase its on-sight capacity.
There would need to be removal of some solids from the lagoon and there would not be any operational changes to the plant for the removal.
The second option, was for the city to begin removing solids from the lagoon. Mills said vendors could come in and pull out all of the materials all at once to create a new starting point, but it would be expensive.
Mills said they could also look at having a vendor remove materials from the lagoon on a periodical basis, rather than all at once. He said they will identify what it would take financially for operational costs for either of those to occur.
The last option Mills presented was to create a Class AA biosolids product. He said this would make an operational change of the plant, which would require construction of the facility.
The process would take sludge from the lagoon, dry and treat it into a product that can be land applied. The product can be used as a nutrient, or fertilizer in soil.
Mills said the biosolids product is marketable and makes it easier to deal with the capacity issues of the lagoon. He said they are currently in discussions with Mississippi State University, who could potentially use the product in the future.
With the product, Mills said the city could use it, and the members in the community could use the product as well.
"So, we're evaluating that, is there a market for that product," Mills said.
He said the next update he will provide to the board will have more specific cost ranges and numbers for a more realistic idea of what their options are moving forward.
Mills said said if they can finish the analysis in July or August, start a design in the fall and begin permitting in the spring the city could address the solids issue by the end of 2019