NYS Center for Clean Water Technology Receives Multiple Water Quality Awards from East Hampton and Southampton Towns

December 12, 2023 - The Center for Clean Water Technology (the “Center”) was recently announced as a recipient for new grant awards for four projects that demonstrate exciting new decentralized onsite wastewater treatment system (OWTS) technology.  The four projects will total over $683,234. The awards have come from the Community Preservation Fund Water Quality Improvement Programs in East Hampton and Southampton Towns.  They are aimed at reducing nitrogen and other nutrients from residential wastewater.  Over 26 million homes in the United States rely on 150-year-old septic system technology which does not remove dissolved pollutants like ammonium and nitrate.  Millions of septic systems are located where sewers are not feasible.  Pollutants from them are polluting surface and ground water bodies and, therefore, replacing them with new decentralized treatment systems will help improve water quality.  These projects will make important strides in addressing this problem as follows:

2023 Town of Southampton CPF WQIPP: Nitrogen Reducing Woodchip Biofilter Polishing Units in Commercial I/A OWTS’s – The Center has developed a denitrifying woodchip biofilter that is capable of being added to any commercial innovative and alternative (I/A) OWTS and reducing nitrate levels from these systems to < 3-4 mg-N/L, greatly improving the performance of leading commercial OWTS’s and better protecting Southampton’s most precious natural resource, its water.  This project will install denitrifying woodchip biofilter polishing units at eight locations, coupling the woodchip bio filters with several types of leading commercial I/A OWTS’s. The Center will be monitoring the systems and measuring their performance for several years.  

2023 Town of Southampton CPF WQIPP: Constructed Wetland Treatment System for St John’s Episcopal Church – The Center will be facilitating an award to St. John’s Episcopal Church to replace an old “large cesspool” system for their Church and Parish Hall with a new I/A OWTS.  Dozens of churches on the South Fork of Long Island installed Large Cesspool systems decades ago.  Those systems are no longer permitted and the churches are looking for a technology that will withstand wide swings in weekly flows and loads. The constructed wetland treatment system is an ideal fit for this need.  While wetland treatment systems involve the use of plants, CCWT has designed an innovative wetland treatment system that involves gravel bed recirculation and woodchip polishing to ensure year-round performance, irrespective of plant growing season.  The Center will be monitoring the system monthly for two years after installation to further basic research on OWTS’s and demonstrate the advantages of this type of system.

2023 Town of East Hampton Water Quality RFA:  Nitrogen Reducing Woodchip Biofilter Polishing Units in Commercial I/A OWTS‘s – Similar to the project in Southampton, the Center will install eight more denitrifying woodchip biofilter polishing units at eight locations in East Hampton, coupling the woodchip biofilters with several types of leading commercial I/A OWTS’s. 

2023 Town of East Hampton Water Quality RFA:  Automated Decentralized Wastewater Infrastructure Management – Recently, the Center developed the Stony Brook Nitrogen Sensor that autonomously measures nitrate and ammonium in OWTS’s and reports the data to a website. This project will install 12 Nitrogen Sensors in East Hampton on I/A OWTS. This is significant because as the US replaces antiquated septic systems with millions of OWTS’s, new ways to automate the monitoring, operation, and maintenance of these decentralized OWTSs will be needed.  The Stony Brook Nitrogen Sensor is the only sensor in the world that can measure both nitrification and denitrification, two of the most important and rate limiting process steps in the treatment of sanitary wastewater in residential OWTS’s.