Wasted Opportunities in Ludington

[XLFD]

Back in 2018, Ludington Wastewater Treatment Plant (LWWTP) Supervisor Chris Cossette described some of the changes coming to the plant where 24 million dollars of upgrades were planned for the immediate future.  For around half a century, the LWWTP used outdoor sludge storage ponds that would fully treat wastewater over a period of 45 days, a change to the treatment process would introduce a new system that would reduce that period to 1-2 days.  

As early as 2019. The WWTP was in transition from a plant with an aerated lagoon to a plant featuring an earthen base and activated sludge.  Activated sludge consists of a mixed blend of microorganisms, 95% of which are a variety of mostly aerobic species of bacteria, according to Science Direct. Activated sludge (aka waste activated biosolids) mixes with influent wastewater inside aeration tanks.  

In the process, flocs of bacteria are suspended and mixed with wastewater in an aerated tank, and the bacteria use the organic pollutants to grow and transform it to energy, water, CO2 and new cell material. The flocs can be removed in the secondary clarifier by gravity settling and some of this sludge is recycled from the clarifier back to the reactor. The effluent can then be discharged to final polishing.

The activated sludge process is a multi-chamber reactor unit that uses highly concentrated microorganisms to degrade organics and remove nutrients from wastewater, producing quality effluent.  In 2021, Chlortainer would announce that the LWWTP was becoming a state-of-the-art facility, leading with a ChlorTainer containment vessel as they couldn't chlorinate the effluent in the clarifiers.

The current overhead map of the LWWTP (seen above) shows to the west of the main lagoon some smaller cells, where aeration, equalization, and sludge storage occur.  In a May 2019 meeting of a city council committee of the whole, Cossette would explain what was going to happen with many, many years of sludge buildup that had been where those cells currently are:

Those plans were later annulled by state agencies for some unrevealed reason, as revealed in a public utilities committee meeting in October 2019:

Over the next couple years, there would be some concern over environmental contamination to the eastern portion of the LWWTP, but it would not seem to affect the sludge, and land application was still being considered, but the state agencies were wanting only dry applications of the sludge, which was deemed cost prohibitive.  Consequently, in August 2022 the city sought a contractor for removal of the sludge, and while they said they had two bids for a three-year contract, they would only display one bidder and bid in all of the packets, meetings, and memos:  Biotech Agronomics.  Instead of an annual amount they charged by the gallon of biosolids removed from the sludge and used for land application:

 

This was portrayed as the most cost-effective method and approved by EGLE in a memo to the council from City Manager Mitch Foster, even though it would typically cost the city an extra $100,000 or more per year when compared to their old method of letting the sludge accumulate (which is more difficult to do with the new system).  We recently received a FOIA response for the city's expenses going to the company and found last year's payments to BA rounded to the nearest thousand was $100,000.

In their first meeting in January 2025, the city council would approve a renewal of the contract, keeping the $0.0621 rate for 2025 and 2026, and put it up to $0.0640 in 2027.  No attempts at looking for competitive bids were noted, but at least the rate remained the same for the first couple years.  Barring any change, we will pay $100K each year to a company from Beulah to haul it to their facility to dry and sell our city's waste products as fertilizer.  

Courtesy of us, the community of Beulah not only benefits financially from hauling this fertilizer out of our county, but they also make a lot more from the resale of same once they test and dry it.  In the several years from 2019 to 2022 that they were deciding they would need to get rid of a bunch of sludge/biosolids, why weren't city leaders considering the possibility of selling or even donating their sludge to local agricultural concerns (ones that would have the capability of hauling, drying, processing and testing the biosolids) so that the money and other crap would stay in our community? 

This isn't a revolutionary idea; other localities have used this scheme as a money-maker.  Milwaukee, Wisconsin’s largest city, for a whole century has stripped its wastewater of liquid effluent, pathogens, heavy metals, and some chemicals to produce “biosolids” that it converts into a nitrogen-rich fertilizer. Trademarked as Milorganite – short for Milwaukee organic nitrogen – the turf grass fertilizer is bagged for commercial retail sale in home-and-garden centers in 49 states.

St. Joseph, Missouri leaders decided to cut their costs when they bought their own biosolids dryer and saved about half of their budget for sludge removal, plus they were able to sell the fertilizer by-product for even more cash to local farmers.  Chicago uses a 'water reclamation district' entity for treating Chicago’s sewage and has been converting “biosolids” into usable compost since 2016.

Rather than ship this brown gold out of the county at an expense of $100K, and rather than have the compost piles at Cartier Park be hauled away to the town of Sears at about $50K per year, why couldn't some in-county enterprise be encouraged to buy drying equipment and set up a facility to create our own fertilizer and retain our composted soil, with our agricultural community benefitting from this retention of our resources, and reintroduction of them into our soil to keep it fertile?

Why should Beulah and Sears get our money when we go to the store and get compost and fertilizer generated from our own yard and bathroom?

[Freedom Seeker]

I bought some of that Milorganite from Milwaukee to fertilize a new patch of grass. As I was almost done raking it in, I couldn't help but think what kind of toxic ness might be left that gets into Milwaukee's public sewers. How many chemicals (drugs and viruses for example) are not tested for and are left behind? Just my thinking but I would never put it in the vegetable garden but prefer healthy cow manure like we did in the old days. I have no idea if this thought is substantiated but it was a thought that over came me.

[XLFD]

There are some concerns with fertilizers developed from wastewater products, for the reasons you mention and the amount of PFAS present, but one hopes that the tests are comprehensive enough to catch those that show up and the business is ethical enough to landfill some of their potential profits when a load fails those tests.

In town, I have a little plot of land I plow up, about enough to grow ten tomato plants comfortably, and I have found that I can get gigantic tomato plants and a fairly good yield of tomatoes with a gallon bucket of ashes from the hunting cabin's fireplace applied at the beginning of the year and a watering of the garden regularly throughout the year with a 5 gallon bucket containing a couple quarts of my own urine and diluted to the top with water.  Incredible results with healthy and hearty plants and tomatoes when compared to what I got when I just regularly used a commercial liquid chemical fertilizer exclusively.  They don't give phosphorus the letter pee on the periodical table without reason.