Microbes or chemicals – how do you treat your wastewater? As facilities age and raw wastewater characteristics change, operators are faced with decisions on how to meet their permitting requirements. Often, this results in the use of chemicals to treat wastewater. This presentation will give operators the tools to examine their own systems and the process changes they can make to optimize treatment, maintain permit compliance, and reduce energy and chemical costs in a plant.

The first half of the presentation will cover the fundamentals of how ratios of nutrients drive biological treatment and how to optimize microbial activity. The remaining time will highlight case studies that successfully moved “from the jug to the bug” treatment.