Upgrade of Specialty Paper Manufacturing Wastewater Treatment Facility, 1998 Environmental Conference Proceedings

The Crown Vantage Corporation operates a specialty paper mill in Parchment, Michigan. The wastewater from the mill is treated in secondary biological treatment facility and is discharged into the Kalamazoo River. The Kalamazoo River is water quality limited and the mill has stringent effluent criteria, with the most stringent BOD criteria occurring in the summer.

The wastewater treatment facility was originally designed in 1975 and included primary clarification, aerated lagoons followed by final settling ponds. There is a primary clarifier followed by a two-stage aerated lagoon system. The first aerated basin is 4 MG and the second basin is 10 MG. There are two (2) 40 Hp aerators in basin 1 and two (2) 30 Hp aerations in basin 2. There were three (3) series of unlined settling ponds in parallel with a total volume of 6 MG.

In 1994 the mill initiated a program to upgrade its wastewater treatment facility to provide additional treatment capacity and close out the settling ponds. AWARE Environmental Inc. (AEI) who worked on the original design, worked with the mill in the process design and evaluation of the treatment alternatives and in the startup of the upgraded treatment facility. This paper reviews considerations which went into the treatment system design and the treatment plant startup program.

The mill has a flow of approximately 5 MGD with a raw waste of approximately 5,400 lbs BOD/day and 22,000 lbs TSS/day. Approximately 70 percent of the BOD and greater than 90 percent of the TSS is removed in the primary clarifier.