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CH2M Hill

2,246 bytes added, 23:04, 15 November 2011
SW: add Surti section, presentation slide image and "land application" section
===Involvement with BioCycle===
====Todd Williams==== [[Todd Williams]], CH2M Hill's "Global Technology Leader for Residuals Resource Recovery and Biosolids," spoke at the 2011 [[BioCycle]] "11th Annual Conference on Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling" in Madison, Wisconsin, on a panel entitled "Codigestion at Wastewater Treatment Plants," along with other sewage sludge industry representatives. [[BioCycle]] Magazine is a publication serving the interests of the sewage sludge industry.
Williams' segment was entitled, "Codigestion of Food Wastes and FOG with Municipal Wastewater Solids."<ref name="BioCycle2011">BioCycle, "11th Annual Conference on Renewable Energy from Organics Recycling" Program, October 31-November 2, 2011, on file with CMD (part, but not the biographies, is online [http://www.jgpress.com/biocycleenergy/bcrefor11.pdf here])</ref>
====Involvement with Toxic Sludge Greenwashers, the Water Environment Federation====
According to Williams' biography in the conference program, he is Chair of the [[Water Environment Federation]]'s (WEF) "Residuals and Biosolids Committee."<ref name="BioCycle2011"/> The WEF is the sewage sludge industry's main trade, lobby and public relations organization, with over 41,000 members and a multi-million-dollar budget that supports a 100-member staff. In a PR contest in June of 1991, WEF chose the euphemism "biosolids" in order to avoid the negative connotations associated with the word "sludge."
Negative connotations or not, however, sewage sludge can contain such [[Sludge contaminants|hazardous chemicals and pathogens]] as Dioxins and Furans, Flame Retardants, Metals, Organochlorine Pesticides, 1,2-Dibromo-3-Chloropropane (DBCP), Naphthalene, Triclosan, Nonylphenols, Phthalates, Nanosilver, and thousands more substances.<ref>[http://epa.gov/waterscience/biosolids TNSSS: EPA-822-R-08-016 and EPA-822-R-08-018]. Published by EPA, January 2009.</ref> Gasification, as discussed by CH2M Hill's Todd Williams at the 2011 conference-- using sludge to generate methanol or energy by anaerobic digestion-- reduces the volume of the sludge and reduces the pathogens, but does not remove other [[Sludge contaminants|contaminants]] such as Dioxins and Furans, Flame Retardants, Metals, Organochlorine Pesticides, 1,2-Dibromo-3-Chloropropane (DBCP), Naphthalene, Triclosan, Nonylphenols, Phthalates, Nanosilver, and thousands more substances.
 
====Jay Surti====
 
[[Jay Surti]], a CH2M Hill Project Engineer with an "in-depth knowledge of biosolids handling and processing systems," spoke at the same conference, on a panel entitled "Sustainable, Energy-Efficient Infrastructure." Surti's segment was entitled "Energy Recovery from Wastewater Solids Digestion -- A Life Cycle Analysis."<ref name="BioCycle2011"/><ref>Jay Surti, CH2M Hill, [http://www.jgpress.com/biocycleenergy/Tuesday/Surti_s.pdf Energy Recovery from Wastewater Solids Digestion -- A Life Cycle Analysis], BioCycle conference presentation, November 1, 2011, accessed November 15, 2011</ref>
 
Surti used the following slide of the "process flow" of a digester in Pinellas County during his presentation:
 
[[Image:Pinellas County Process Flow Screen Shot 2011-11-15 at 4.42.41 PM.png|frame|Screenshot 2011-11-15 from presentation available at jgpress.com, annotations by CMD in purple|center]]
 
Note that, after being "digested," the sludge still needs to be dried in order to become "[[Class A Biosolids]]." This requires further energy input in order to create a product that is often spread on agricultural land.
 
=====Disposing of Sludge by Spreading it on Agricultural Land=====
 
According to ''Sludge News'', "[t]he policy of disposing of sludge by spreading it on agricultural land - a policy given the benign term 'land application' - has its inception in the Ocean Dumping ban of 1987. Before 1992, when the law went into effect, the practice had been, after extracting the sludge from the wastewater, to load it on barges and dump it 12, and later 106 miles off shore into the ocean. But many people who cared about life in the ocean knew that, wherever it was dumped, the sludge was causing vast dead moon-scapes on the ocean floor. New EPA regulations for 'land application' were promulgated in 1993. With the aid of heating and pelletizing and some slippery name morphs along the way, EPA claimed sludge could be transmogrified into 'compost' ... . But the land “application” of sewage sludge ... will pollute the whole chain of life for which soil is the base." <ref>[http://www.sludgenews.org/about/ About Sewage Sludge], ''SludgeNews.com'', accessed June 18, 2010</ref>
==Principals==
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