LEWISTON — Water treatment officials didn’t have to change any policies to qualify for a national certification standard — they just had to get better at writing things down.
“We’ve always done everything we can to correct a problem, but we didn’t document things as well as we could,” said Mac Richardson, superintendent of the Lewiston-Auburn Water Pollution Control Authority. “That’s what we had to change.”
The authority received a certificate of achievement from the National Biosolids Partnership on Thursday after a two-year review process. The partnership is a group that promotes safe handling and treatment of the biosolids that result from sewage treatment.
To qualify, the Lewiston-Auburn authority had to adopt a management process that promotes public input, protects the environment and meets all government standards.
The local authority is one of 30 similar operations across the country to have received the certification. It’s the third group in Maine to receive the certification and the first municipal treatment plant in New England.
“The point of all this is ongoing review,” said James Cox of the Water Environment Federation. “Getting this certification is not the end, but really, the beginning. They need to work even harder to keep it.”
Richardson said the authority’s compost program is one thing that helped them meet certification requirements.
“We’ve always felt that it was very important to put nutrients back into the soil,” he said. The authority makes compost out of half of the biosolid waste it treats, and distributes about one-quarter of it to Maine farms.
“Before, it all just went into a hole someplace, or into a landfill,” Richardson said. “We started the composting program and the farming program to reduce our landfilling and to get those nutrients back into the soil and into the growth cycle.”
Richardson said the authority also tries to keep residents and neighbors informed of what they are doing.
“No member of the public thinks about the 364 days that everything goes right,” Richardson said. “Instead, they’ll focus on the 365th day, when the proverbial stuff hits the fan. That’s what people focus on, so that’s why we need to work as hard as we can to keep problems from happening.”
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- Mac Richardson, far right, superintendent of the Lewiston-Auburn Water Pollution Control Authority, conducts a tour of the facility on Lincoln Street during an open house Thursday. In the background is one of two covered clarifiers.
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