Golden Flake Snack Foods’ Onsite Wastewater Treatment Facility Eliminates Municipal Surcharges with New Membrane Bioreactor System - Jim McMahon

The membrane bioreactor (MBR) system, designed and built by ADI Systems Inc., treats up to 400,000 gallons per day of raw snack food wastewater using advanced membrane bioreactor technology for liquid-solid separation, reducing suspended solids and biochemical oxygen demand to less than 2 milligrams per liter, eliminating $100,000 per month in municipal wastewater surcharges, and releasing 250 gallons per minute of treated, filtered, oxygenated water into the local watercourse ecosystem.

Golden Flake Snack Foods (Golden Flake) located in Birmingham, Alabama was faced with a tough decision, either come up with a solution to stem the escalating municipal wastewater surcharges it was being assessed, or move its 300,000 square-foot snack food processing plant out of the county to stem the significantly rising costs. In 1998, the plant was paying $800 to $1,000 per month to Jefferson County in surcharges for decanting its 100,000 to 350,000 gallons of wastewater into the county’s municipal sewer system. By 2008 that figure had escalated to $100,000 per month in surcharges for the same daily discharged wastewater flow rate, with county projections that the rate would most likely raise to $250,000 per month within the next five years.

Given the fact that 68 percent of Golden Flake’s 250-plus work force lives within a 13-mile radius of the plant, the company preferred to keep it 80-year-old headquarters and main manufacturing facility in Birmingham, and find a solution to reduce or eliminate the surcharges. This meant, in essence, getting off of the county sewer system.

The Alabama Department of Environmental Management, which sets standards for wastewater regulations within the state, made it clear that if Golden Flake could reach prescribed TSS (total suspended solids), BOD (biochemical oxygen demand), NH3-N (ammonia-nitrogen) and DO (dissolved oxygen) concentrations, it could receive a discharge permit to convey treated effluent directly into a creek that runs along the perimeter of its property, and bypass the Jefferson County sewer system altogether.