Editor’s Comments: A New Option for Stormwater Services

It seems fitting that in this issue, which focuses on how various NPDES Phase II permitees are meeting the requirements of their permits, we also share an announcement that might change the way many of them play the game.

On April 20, Waste Management Inc. and AbTech Industries Inc. announced a new agreement to provide stormwater services to municipalities in the US and Canada. Waste Management provides waste management services throughout North America, including collection, transfer, recycling, and disposal services. AbTech Industries is an environmental technologies firm; one of its products is SmartSponge, a sponge-like material with polymers to filter, absorb, and solidify petroleum hydrocarbons and other pollutants from stormwater runoff. Under the agreement, Waste Management will become the exclusive waste and environmental services company distributor of SmartSponge in North America.

I spoke with Glenn Rink, president and CEO of AbTech, and Gordon Brown, AbTech’s vice president of corporate development. My colleague John Trotti—the editor of Forester’s MSW Management magazine—spoke with Paul Pistono, Waste Management’s vice president of public sector solutions. The companies seem to have in mind a spectrum of services that cities can choose from, ranging from small services to fill a gap in their current operations—for example, street sweeping or maintenance of BMPs—all the way to comprehensive stormwater planning.

“We are working on a total stormwater quality management strategy that could comprise multiple services, from curbside collection to street sweeping to the installation and maintenance of stormwater systems and more,” says Pistono. “Because we are often entrenched and ‘omnipresent’ in the communities we serve, this is a natural evolution for us.”

Brown notes that, because regulations vary from state to state and city to city, even though many cities are operating under Phase II permits, “One of the key benefits that we can bring is a consistency in how to respond to those challenges so that each individual municipality doesn’t have to recreate it. It allows them to respond efficiently and much more quickly than if they had to go out and create these responses from scratch.”

Rink emphasizes that services will be tailored to the needs of each municipality. “We’re looking to offer a custom solution that is available based on a city’s exact needs. It could be health, tourism; it could be a variety of issues.”

Pistono agrees: “There is no ‘fits one, fits all’ solution for the municipalities we service.” He says that although the initial pilot program is with municipalities only, services might eventually be offered to private customers as well—for example, a homeowners association with stormwater facilities on its property.

An interesting aspect of the technology involved is its disposal. SmartSponge, once used—perhaps installed in a drainage filter through which stormwater runoff flows—is a solid “brick” that possesses some energy value. Although it can be disposed of in a landfill as ordinary municipal solid waste, it can also be burned to create energy in a waste-to-energy facility. As Brown explains, “The material has a tremendous porosity; it flows high volumes of water and collects the hydrocarbons and turns them into a solid, so that they cannot be washed off or squeezed back out. Depending on how much sediment and other components are in it, about 320 pounds of SmartSponge can create a megawatt of power.

“Few people have thought about harvesting hydrocarbons out of stormwater to be able to use it as fuel, whether in waste-to-energy facilities, cement kilns, asphalt plants, or those types of areas. You’re actually harvesting energy out of stormwater and using it as a fuel.”

The services will be offered first in parts of Florida, North and South Carolina, and eastern Canada. How quickly they move to other areas, Pistono says, depends somewhat on the receptivity of the municipalities that make use of the services first, but he expects that states bordering the ocean will be likely candidates in the near future.