Manufacturer Adds New Product

A New England manufacturer of several different health and beauty products introduced a new product line and was soon notified that they were in violation of their existing sewer discharge permit. The process associated with manufacturing the new product was generating wastewater that added several new contaminants to the stream.

The company considered a complete overhaul of their existing treatment system in order to treat the wastewater generated from the new process. To do everything required to meet permit limits, the capital costs would have been $540,000. O&M costs for the system were estimated at $125,000 per year, not including sewer discharge fees. The cost to haul one truckload of wastewater per week to NewStream is $104,000 per year. In this case, the cost-benefit is clearly in favor of trucking, especially since the success of the new product line was not yet known and the company was hesitant to make the long-term investment in waste treatment equipment.