Optimize your Wastewater: Know Your Surcharges

If your plant discharges industrial wastewater under a municipal pretreatment permit, you're already familiar with the many costs of wastewater management. Connection fees, usage fees, water and sewer charges all add up. Another cost that can become significant is wastewater surcharges.

A wastewater surcharge is an additional fee charged by municipalities when industrial wastewater exceeds allowable concentrations of contaminants such as TSS, BOD, COD, or oil and grease. These are not fines. They are intended to offset the municipality's cost of treating high-strength wastewater before discharge.

For many facilities, those fees can become a significant operating expense.

We recently worked with a food manufacturing plant that was paying approximately $50,000 annually in wastewater surcharges for TSS (total suspended solids) and BOD (biochemical oxygen demand). They had minimal wastewater treatment and were only removing insoluble fats.

This should be easy... or so we thought!

Nothing is ever that easy… It wasn’t time to order equipment and chemistry yet!

Our first step was a detailed survey and understanding of the water flows of the plant and production needs. Then we moved on to bench scale jar testing and wastewater treatability testing to model out several programs to determine their impact on reducing TSS and BOD.

Once we had treatment options in hand and significant improvements shown, we could model out the impact on their surcharge costs. Most surcharges are based on pounds of contaminants above a threshold. For example, the customer paid per pound of TSS above 250mg/L.

Our testing showed that TSS could be lowered below their threshold and BOD cut to within the threshold as well. With minimal chemistry and a properly designed dissolved air flotation (DAF) system, the facility could significantly reduce TSS, lower BOD, and bring wastewater surcharges under control.

Great! That doesn’t mean they saved $50,000 yet. We had to consider the cost of the chemistry, cost to dispose of the sludge, labor, and utilities as well. This is where the system optimization came in. We had three programs that worked well to treat the wastewater. The best performing program would have cost over $75,000 in chemical and sludge hauling! I can’t imagine they would be willing to increase their spend by $25,000! Another program had a much lower cost but had a small amount of BOD present. However, it was the lowest cost overall. This program ended up saving nearly $20,000 once the costs were added.

Reducing wastewater surcharges isn't simply about removing more contaminants. It's about understanding the total cost of treatment and optimizing the system accordingly.

Before investing in new treatment equipment or increasing chemical usage, evaluate how treatment changes will impact operating costs, sludge disposal, utilities, labor, and municipal surcharge fees. Bench-scale jar testing and wastewater treatability testing make it possible to model treatment performance, calculate potential savings, and identify the most cost-effective approach.

The goal isn't just to eliminate surcharges. It's to optimize your wastewater treatment program, reduce total operating costs, and ensure any investment delivers measurable long-term value.