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Pasteurization Technology Group Wastewater System

Re-drink all the wastewater

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Pasteurization Technology Group Wastewater System PTG

Most communities in the U.S. treat their wastewater just enough to legally dump it, but not reuse it. Pasteurization Technology Group has developed an inexpensive treatment system that yields water clean enough to be returned to aquifers. Instead of using chlorine, the system pasteurizes wastewater by heating it to 180ºF. The warmth comes from the waste heat of a nearby electricity generator running on either natural gas or biogas produced by an associated sewage digester. A PTG water plant opening next year in California expects to make a $160,000 annual profit by selling its extra biogas-generated electricity. Even if the turbine is fueled with natural gas, the pasteurization is energy-efficient enough to be about half the cost of chlorine treatment.

5 Comments

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Robert1234

11/24/11 at 6:39 pm

Robert1234 This is indeed cool! Everyone wins, apparently.

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isitcoldinhere

12/16/11 at 9:05 pm

Awesome technology but I'm not taking the first sip.

Science always asks "can we," but doesn't seem to ask "should we."

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prime2011

12/17/11 at 9:13 pm

Yes we should.

THe world is in need a mass recycling and environmental cleaning techs. Unless we start back peddling the waste we have caused on resources and the environment, future generations are going to be run-rats fighting each other over the dirty items found in waste field dumps. (some countries already have this situation, but is more out of economical issues then resource availability)

This clean water treatment system is a great idea, now if only we can figure something out for capturing that waste liquids from farming lands?

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Robot

12/18/11 at 9:47 am

This is a great idea to exploit the exhaust energy of electrical energy production to clean water by cooking it. Will this also remove hazardous chemicals from the water, heavy metals too?

Seems like a promising good technology. I am all for clean water and making electricity cheaper!

I do want to be careful of what water we put back in our aquifers, too!

.............................
Science sees no further than what it can sense.
Religion sees beyond the senses.

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FelipePavan

12/18/11 at 5:02 pm

Robot,
This treatment system just kills some kind of microrganisms, but do not eliminate spores (that could emerge to a bacteria, for example).
I think that the problem of this system is the energy required to heat the water to the necessary temperature. They found a very good solution in transfering heat from the generator, but its just for low flow rates of wastewater.
The composition of the wastewater is very important factor too. There are a lot of organic matter to be consumed by microrganisms and be broken into simple compounds. Residential wastewater is very different from industrial wastewater in their composition. Generally, wastewater system's follow's basicly a certain steps to be treated, like decantation, flotation, filtration, etc. All this process involve aerobic and anaerobic microrganisms. Therefore, a simple pasteurization system could not treat this organic matter content.
About heavy metals, there are many kind of technics to remove them from the wastewater, such as the use of tannins and specifics fat acids. But, the pasteurization is not one of them.
As you said, it's a promissing technology, but it will depends on the kind of wastewater to be treated.