California has been in the news a lot over the past few years due to extreme droughts and dire water shortages, and much of the water that is available has high nitrate levels. This has meant that Californians have had to search for new and innovative methods to supply sufficient potable water.
Thanks to financial aid from the NIEHS Superfund Research Program (SRP), small business grant recipient Microvi Biotechnologies installed its advanced nitrate removal technology during a grand opening Jan. 25 at Sunny Slope Water Company.
Slope services 30,000 households in southern California, and the new system will provide more than 200 million gallons of treated water to its customers at approximately half the cost of other options and with virtually no secondary waste.
Ken Tcheng, general manager of Sunny Slope Water Company said, “We are proud to partner with Microvi. We found that Microvi’s Denitrovi technology not only provided the water quality regulators demand and our customers expect, but also solves the costly waste disposal problem of a conventional system.”
Like many water providers in the Los Angeles Basin, Sunny Slope needed to find a new, cost-effective method of treating high levels of nitrate in its groundwater, and the Denitrovi technology, which uses a biological process to convert nitrate in water into nitrogen gas, fits the bill.
Denitrovi’s system produces no sludge or other by-products and safely releases nitrogen gas into the atmosphere; this solves the costly problem of waste disposal that conventional systems are saddled with.
“It’s amazing to see a biological treatment system that doesn’t produce secondary waste,” said Shane Chapman, general manager of the Upper San Gabriel Valley Municipal Water District. “Waste streams have always been a huge environmental and cost issue in water treatment. This is a long-overdue course correction for the industry.”
As the groundwater in approximately 10% of California’s state area is contaminated with nitrate, Denitrovi’s biological treatment system is the perfect solution and one that has been welcomed by the water company and other key role-players, who are extremely impressed with the system.
“With a small footprint, virtually no waste stream, and extreme energy efficiency, Denitrovi offers significant cost and operational advantages over any existing technology for nitrate removal,” said Fatemeh Shirazi, Ph.D., Microvi chief executive officer and chief technology officer.
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