CITY OF LAURELVILLE

During 2000, the City of Laurelville determined that improvements were necessary and began active efforts to improve facility performance to benefit the environment and position the City for compliance with state and federal regulations and also the more aggressive standards of treatment that were expected for 2002 and thereafter.

Laurelville also determined that if it could improve performance to the actual capabilities of their land area and infrastructure, the community may have an opportunity to treat municipal waste from an adjoining community and thus also lower overall per capita costs for Laurelville residents.

RATIONALE FOR AMTS UPGRADE:

Laurelville was impressed with the performance history of ADS and the predicted capability of AMTS to provide solid year round performance, even with cold climate conditions, and to substantially reduce the high cost associated with periodic sludge disposal. Briefly, AMTS provides the quality treatment of mechanical plants in lagoons at significant savings in capital and operating costs. The AMTS process combines ADS’s proprietary diffusion aeration products, engineered surface area (“AquaMats® ”) and bioaugmentation (“Bacta-Pur®”) technologies to form a very stable, and low-maintenance integrated system for natural microbial treatment of municipal wastewater. Operational costs are typically very low. Because of the efficiency of AMTS, sludge handling is typically not necessary for up to 10 years or longer.

Laurelville considered a number of different proposals and selected the AMTS from ADS because it offered the most impressive performance at low capital and O & M costs, all supported by a 5-year performance guarantee.

DESCRIPTION OF AMTS UPGRADE:

The basic goal of the AMTS for Laurelville was to convert and upgrade the existing facilities to a high performance lagoon system so that discharge requirements were consistently achieved with a comfortable margin. This included replacement of the diffusion aeration system for both primary lagoons. The existing 10 HP blowers were found acceptable and were retained to operate with one running and one standby in normal operations.

Above ground header pipe and high efficiency diffusion aeration tubing were laid across the width of all primary and second lagoons at a maximum of 10 foot centers. Baffles were in each primary and secondary lagoons. The primary lagoons were also equipped with Bacta-Pur® BactivatorsTM to continuously supply a metered and activated quantity of XLG, a Bacta-Pur® sludge digesting product.

AMTS COSTS---CAPITAL, OPERATING AND MAINTENANCE:

Capital costs incurred by Laurelville for the AMTS upgrade were approximately $120,000 in equipment and installation related services for ADS and local site related cost of $60,000, for a total upgrade capital cost of $180,000. This corresponds with an average annual per capita cost over a 10 year period of less than $25 year or 7 cents/person/day.

Operating and Maintenance costs for AMTS have compared favorably with estimates. Of particular note, is that the upgrade did not increase the brake horsepower and system CFM requirements, which have essentially remained unchanged at Laurelville since the system commenced initial operations in 1980. Average electrical costs per capita are approximately $4.06/per person/year or about 1 cent/person/day. Chlorination costs have been avoided entirely since completion of the upgrade because sampled Fecal coliform levels have been consistently in the single digits without chlorination as compared with discharge permit levels of over 200.

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