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Mark Capron

May 16, 2013
11:29

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I'm the "Ideas and Engineering" person for the Hill Canyon Wastewater Treatment Plant in California. Yes, algae biodiesel or more simple, anaerobic digestion of the algae. The algae concentrate the nutrients (we are trying to remove). The biodiesel production followed by anaerobic digestion separates the carbon (energy) from the plant nutrients. If we had the space, we could keep increasing the algae production with the recycled nutrients. Feel free to slap concepts into your proposal.

Tom Mallard

May 17, 2013
12:39

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Right on, thanks Mark, will embellish on city-scale, reacting, there are choices & my vision is use it all appropriately, the top priority is to recycle the water to potable as what distinguishes it vs most uses of wastewater as feedstock, then also a focus for a solid home-rural scale type of system with miniaturized large-scale components so there are the two. For cities anaerobic is best for effluent with toxins, antibiotics & all to reduce that waste to ash for city systems to have the least toxic waste to dispose of and not do the pressed cakes for fertilizer thus remove all that from the local food-chain & soils, to me long-term it's far better to digest it. Considered footprint, these units are 18" on a side footprint, stack 6-7 high with no external supports so at a plant one can build or use parking lots for them to reduce footprint as they are semi-portable and the bases are used to pipe everything to nested stacks at the end of a row, packing them in makes them more thermally efficient. It takes 4-units per person to handle ongoing volume [Phoenix ~3-gal/day/person] ... these are aerobic, part of that is the biology to allow the bacteria to battle it out to where the pathogens are consumed, bacteria are part of the harvest. Thanks again Mark.

2013wastemanagementjudges 2013wastemanagementjudges

Jul 10, 2013
11:25

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Thank you for your entry. This proposal speaks to some good ideas on developing cost-effective, distributed local & rural solutions to wastewater treatment. We found that this particular proposal lacked the focus and specifics needed to be selected as a finalist. You may also want to check some of the terms you use -- e.g. "biodiesel machine", is not a technically accurate term.

Tom Mallard

Jul 10, 2013
11:54

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As a tiny influence, it's encouraging to know you found the principles worthy, I don't have the resources to pursue this to the satisfaction of large-enterprise, high-visibility venues but appreciate being able to expose the ideas to this contest & hope someone with those resources picks up the ball and runs with it. Thanks again for the opportunity and helpful advice.