Erosion Control May 2012 : Page 31
Bjornulf White, executive vice president of corporate strategy and business develop-ment for AbTech Industries. In deploying the technology for municipalities, AbTech and Waste Management assess the cities’ needs, then conduct a full design and consultation to provide a set of solutions. “Regulations are always changing,” White points out. “Testing protocol are always updated. This is something that we’re finding is very useful to cities.” The Waste Management/AbTech team also offers continued inspection and maintenance services. “It’s a full solution set that the cities can obtain through one master contract with Waste Management,” says White. “They have a private entity that’s essentially going to make sure that efficiencies are driven into the process.” SmartSponge was originally invented to deal with oil spills, but evolved to be deployed for stormwater management as well. “It removes contaminants from flow-ing water without impeding the flow of water and then permanently locks those contaminants into its molecular struc-ture,” White explains. “Once it’s trapped and incorporated the contaminants into its structure, it’s still not classified as a hazardous material because those con-taminants can never leach out of that ma-Top: KriStar rice straw wattles on a Caltrans project Center: ACF Environmental’s Grate Pyramid Bottom: ERTEC’s GR8 Guard terial under any amount of pressure. It’s not just a sponge or a filter that’s mechani-cally trapping contaminants, but it’s actu-ally attracting them and locking them up.” The technology does not require any electricity or moving parts. “You just en-gineer a setting that allows you to take advantage of either gravity or the force of the water, and then the water gets cleaned as it flows through,” White says. SmartSponge Plus is includes an an-timicrobial agent that has been perma-nently bound to the SmartSponge core filter material. “It was approved by the EPA in 2010 for reduction of fecal coliform in stormwater, wastewater—both munici-pal and industrial—and other industrial water treatment,” White says. He explains that as the water column containing pathogens flows through the material, the bacteria are rendered inacti-vated because they can no longer pose any hazard or replicate. “It does this by ruptur-ing their cell wall as they pass through,” he adds. “Because the antimicrobial agent is permanently bound to the material itself, you don’t worry about any downstream toxicity, which is one of the big break-throughs this technology has created.” Traditionally, there have always been downstream concerns, White points out. “You might use chlorine or some other type of material that can kill the patho-gens, but now you have another problem to deal with,” he says. “This allows you to deploy the technology in a decentralized way without electricity or moving parts.” A popular deployment of the ACF ENVIRONMENTAL MUD HEN ENVIRONMENTAL SmartSponge technology will now be de-ployed to provide stormwater services. The initial rollout of the program is in pilot markets in California, eastern Canada, Florida, Georgia, and other parts of the Southeast, including the Carolinas. The stormwater services will broaden what Waste Management already pro-vides in terms of solid waste collection, transfer, recycling, and disposal to in-clude being the exclusive waste and en-vironmental services company distribu-tor of SmartSponge in North America. SmartSponge is a spongelike material with polymers to filter, absorb, and solidify petroleum hydrocarbons and other pollut-ants from stormwater runoff. “This represents the first time a Fortune 500 company has moved into the stormwater space in this capacity,” notes KCI ENVIRONMENTAL MAY 2012 EROSION CONTROL 31
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