Nutrients removed from municipal wastewater in Oregon are helping to restore the salmon fishery in British Columbia. It’s a novel arrangement built around stringent phosphorus and ammonia removal requirements at the Durham Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility near Portland, innovative technology from Canadian nutrient recovery company Ostara, and the need to counteract overfishing in the coastal waters along Vancouver Island.
Rob Baur, senior operations analyst at Clean Water Services (CWS), the public water resource management utility that operates the Durham facility, explains: “We remove phosphorus biologically because we have strict effluent limits, including the first total maximum daily load (TMDL) for phosphorus
