The Evansville Water and Sewer utility wanted to end the service of accepting residential septic system waste, and fat, oil and grease (FOG) from restaurants at the end of the year.
But that service is extended until July, in hopes that private companies can have their own dump station, away from the wastewater treatment plant. One waste hauler already has a facility that will be online soon.
EWSU Executive Director Vic Kelson said someone has to take the waste — or risk environmental impacts.
“It's liable to end up on a farm field or in a ditch, or somebody pouring it into a creek, or something like that — which is terrible for water quality and and it's a threat to public health. It's a threat to the environments. It's threat to the fish. It's a threat to the people who might go down the creek on a boat, you know, all those things. So it has to go somewhere, and it should be treated wherever it goes.”
As the largest treatment facility around, it falls on EWSU to treat septic and restaurant waste, but it costs about $1 million annually to do it, Kelson said.
This is after collecting annual fees of $90,000 for septic and $15,000 for FOG. Because the EWSU subsidizes the program, it’s not financially sustainable.
Aside from the costs to process, the EWSU is also concerned about the security of the wastewater facility — septic and grease hailers have to drive past the security gate into the facility to drop off the waste.
Also, accepting septic waste can upset the balance of chemicals used for treating sewage. “The septic waste is a lot like domestic sewage — It's just stronger,” Kelson said. “It has higher concentrations of ammonia.”
Accepting grease and septic means maintaining an anaerobic digester facility. Because there’s a lot of trash in the septic waste, the digester needs to be cleaned frequently, which uses staffing hours.
So, Kelson said ideally they cease accepting these by-products at the wastewater plant due to security and other risks.
“It has long term implications for water quality and our own treatment process. The best thing for us to be able to do is have a way to receive it farther away from the plant, or not receive it at all.”
Kelson said they accept 3 million gallons of septic waste annually, compared to the 20 million gallons of wastewater they treat daily.
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