Trial Separation In Worcester | CASTion takes the waste stream out of the stream
Wastewater is an ugly, smelly fact of life.
Think about the toilets in your house or your office building. Think about how many times they’re flushed every day.
Now think about New York City. All the toilets in New York City and the number of times they’re flushed every day.
The one hobgoblin in that process is the fact that the bacteria that break down all that waste naturally produce ammonia compounds identical to those found in fertilizers. The result is that large amounts of discharge can spur aggressive algae growth in the water bodies that receive the treated wastewater.
This is an especially big problem for New York, the discharge of which has choked the Chesapeake Bay with algae to the point where fish have a hard time living there.
Local Technology
Enter Worcester’s CASTion, a division of ThermoEnergy, which pioneered a system that separates ammonia from water, allowing the wastewater treatment process to discharge only very clean water and perhaps even sell the ammonia compounds for use in, you guessed it, fertilizer.
The CAST in CASTion is capitalized because it stands for Controlled Atmosphere Separation Technology.
That technology was developed about 20 years ago in Worcester by John Cellini, who saw the need for water purification technology as a means for resource recovery, according to Stephen Brown, an engineer and company vice president who’s been with CASTion almost from the beginning.
This was a bootstrap company. Angel investors, private placements, the company had to convince people to put money in its technology. The company was acquired by ThermoEnergy in 2007.
That technology holds water and separates stuff from it. Wastewater, for example, is heated and its pH adjusted so that ammonia can be separated. The company’s systems can also separate the sugar from the water that’s spilled at soft drink bottling plants and just about anything else water will hold in solution.
The company makes closed-loop systems which allow users to recycle or reuse everything that goes into the system. It also makes systems that purify drinking water, as it does for military bases in regions where clean drinking water isn’t abundant.
These systems are made in Worcester and look imposing. They’re about as tall as a single-story house and about 25 feet long. They look like a mass of heavy tanks and steel pipes with valves and gauges and buttons all over the place. They can run autonomously, controlled only by on-board computers.
So, back to New York and the only thing that smells worse than the bathrooms at old Yankee Stadium — its wastewater treatment facilities, which process literally billions of gallons of waste every day.
CASTion was recently awarded a contract worth nearly $30 million for 16 of its ammonia separation units for one of NYC’s many treatment facilities. The city had contracted with another firm, but that equipment failed.
Brown said the city fully expects CASTion to fail, too. But the equipment is tested and the brainpower of the company's 40 or so employees is unmatched by any manufacturer I’ve visited.
“We will do it,” Brown said.
And I believe him. Plus, it’s nice to see a modest manufacturer from Worcester helping to make NYC a cleaner place.
Got news for our Industrial Strength column? E-mail WBJ Managing Editor Matthew L. Brown at mbrown@wbjournal.com.
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