Water Treatment Expert Comments on Proposed Newtown WWTP

The following comments were made at the 22 January 2025 Newtown Board of Supervisors (BOS) Meeting. View the video of Mr. Post’s comments here: https://youtu.be/2oGCvoz9OhE. Graphics and links were added by John Mack as well as some edits. The final document was reviewed by Mr. Post.

Good evening. My name is Ray Post. I've been a resident of Bucks County now for 35 years. I spend much of my leisure time enjoying the county and state parks which make this community of ours really such a great place to live.

I'm often found kayaking in Lake Luxembourg as well as Galena, Nockamixon, and the Delaware River. I hike along the Neshaminy at Tyler, and I’m often with my granddaughter, walking around playing at Core Creek Park. So these are our community’s cherished shared resources that I ask you tonight to respect and also to protect.

Many of you may know that many if not most lakes and streams suffer a slow death by the accumulation of algae mats and weeds. This process, called eutrophication, is driven by nutrients that enter the water column as well as a little bit of silt.

Lake Luxembourg has for many, many years been considered by the environmental officials to be impaired with respect to having too much phosphorus as well as too much suspended solids. This problem has been addressed by literally a decades long program by the Bucks County Conservation District in conjunction with Princeton Hydro, one of the premier rehabilitation firms at least on the East Coast.

A couple years ago I attended a joint presentation of the County Conservation District and Princeton Hydro, and they outlined at least 30 projects to improve this impaired condition, and reduce the amount of phosphorus and nutrients entering the system. These included improved catch basins in many of our communities - probably Newtown as well – certainly in Middletown - as well as stream bank stabilization [read, e.g., “Can We Open the Clark Nature Center Trails?”], and vegetative buffers.

Of course, the biggie as you probably know, is that we partially drained Lake Luxembourg and we dredged out the northern part of that lake - the so-called conservation pond - and we replanted that with special vegetation designed to trap suspended solids and silt coming in there as well as to metabolize and eliminate much of the phosphorus and nitrogen that was entering that lake at the northern end. [LINK: https://rebrand.ly/LakeLuxRehab]

As a result of all of those decades of effort - and there's more effort continuing - and what's been estimated as being approximately $2 million worth of taxpayer money – mostly through grants - the results of that effort, which is still ongoing, has been to reduce the amount of phosphorus entering that Lake by almost 2,000 pounds [per year], which is really significant.

What Will Be The Impact on Lake Luxembourg?

So now speaking to you as a professional engineer with 49 years of experience in water treatment - what exactly might we anticipate from a 2.5 million gallon [per day] wastewater treatment plant discharging its effluent almost directly into this lake that we've been working so hard to rehabilitate?

Let me tell you on the “back of an envelope” [estimate] what that looks like.

Let's take two and a half [2.5] million gallons [which is the estimated daily effluent volume of the proposed WWTP]. We know a gallon weighs a little more than 8 pounds. Two and a half [2.5] times 8 - that's 20 million pounds of water effluent per day and in entering that Lake. Say there's 350 days in a year. So, we're going to call [say] 20 times 350 [equals] 7,000 million pounds per year of effluent entering the lake. Simple enough?

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7,000 million – aka 7 BILLION – gallons of WWTP effluent per year will enter Lake Luxembourg
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Phosphorus

Most of us know, [it’s common knowledge], that wastewater sewage contains a lot of phosphorus and nitrogen. We use it [these chemicals] for fertilizer. These wastewater treatment plants do a really good job of removing most of that phosphorus and nitrogen but still quite a bit gets through.

How much might get through?

Well, there's a preliminary design document for the Wolcott plant, which has been used in discussion [as a model for the Newtown WWTP], and uses AquaNereda® [the technology used at that plant], which indicated that under their basic nutrient removal program, we would have one part per million of phosphorus in the effluent.

So, one part per million times 7,000 [million pounds of water] is 7,000 pounds per year of phosphorus that we can expect to enter that Lake Luxembourg.

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7,000 pounds of phosphorus from the Newtown WWTP is estimated to enter Lake Luxembourg per year based on the Wolcott plant nutrient removal numbers.
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Now we've already spent a couple of decades and a couple million bucks of taxpayer money, involving several organizations and professional groups to take out almost 2,000 lb [of phosphorus per year]. Now [with the proposed Newtown WWTP] that we're going to add 7,000 pounds [per year] we're going to erase all of that effort times three. That's not very good!

Now [we] checked recently with the Wolcott plant, and they're not actually meeting their 1 ppm. They're running about 1.3 [ppm]. So, it's a little higher. But let's keep the numbers simple and say one [ppm].

Now a sewage treatment plant with all the bells and whistles and everything on it (we'd be talking another digestor stage, two stages of methanol injection, alum addition - a lot of chemistry being added, and tertiary filtration) you should be able to get under one ppm. The design documents suggest maybe 0.3 [ppm] but that would be hard to do. But even if it was what they call the “limit of technology” that would still be 0.3 parts per million times 7,000 [million] pounds. You're still putting 2,000 pounds of phosphorus in there [Lake Luxembourg] per year. That's completely destroying everything that that we've been trying to accomplish.

But There's More: Nitrogen

We know that waste sewage contains nitrogen. We use it as a fertilizer. What might we expect nitrogen loadings to be? Well, you can check the preliminary design documents, and you'll see that they're exactly 10 times the phosphorus. So go ahead and do the numbers. 7,000 million pounds [of effluent] a year times 10 parts per million of nitrogen. That's 70,000 pounds per year of nitrogen that you're adding to the [lake].

Let me put that in context. You go to the fertilizer store and you buy a big 40 lb bag of fertilizer.

That's 20% nitrogen. 40 times 20% - that's 8 pounds of [nitrogen] in that bag. You're talking 70,000 lbs per year - that's 9,000 40-pound bags of [nitrogen] that you're going to be adding to that Lake. Do you think that might have some kind of environmental impact?

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9,000 40-lb bags of nitrogen added to the lake per year!

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These are real numbers!

Mr. Post goes on to use 3 parts per million of nitrogen in the effluent as the limit of the technology. Now it’s only 2,500 to 3,000 40-lb bags of nitrogen that you’re adding to the lake per year. That's [still] an awful lot!

There's a number of other pollutants that you would expect from sewage treatment plant effluent including trace amounts of pharmaceuticals, estrogenic compounds or gender benders, perfluorinated compounds [i.e., per-and polyfluorinated alkyl substances; PFAS; for more on that view video: "PFAS in Effluent of Newtown WWTP Will End Up in Lake Luxembourg"] that are not easily removed, and microplastics - and [supervisor] Elen [Snyder], you’ve done a lot to reduce plastics with the plastics ordinance - and many more that we don’t know of.

The Biggie: Bacteria

But let's skip to the biggie. Okay, when you're talking about sewage, the first things to come to mind are fecal coliforms [bacteria in feces]. This is pretty dirty and nothing that you want to be touching. The sewage treatment plants do a pretty decent job of removing that.

The United States Environmental Protection [Agency] would like you to get down to 126 colony-forming units per 100 ml in recreational water. Although the states have some flexibility as to how they want to interpret that in other classes of water. For instance, the design document for the AquaNereda® facility at Wolcott in the summer months: instead of 126 [coli-forming units per 100 ml] they're a little over 400 in their design document. In the wintertime it’s almost 4,000. But not boring you with numbers, I think they could do better if they used more than just ultraviolet light sterilization [to remove bacteria].

But just cut to the point: Here we're talking about fecal coliforms - we're going to have it in the sewage effluent from that plant no matter what.

[The lake] is a recreational facility that's used by a lot of people, and during the summer months nearly 100% of the flow going into that lake is going to be effluent from this treatment plant, and a lot of that will go out the spillway on the back end and down in the Neshaminy Creek. So just think of the aesthetics here. Would you like to be paddle boarding or kayaking in sewage treatment plant effluent? C’mon - you don't want that for our community.

Plea to Newtown Supervisors

So, this is my plea to you. I understand that potentially there might be some savings in terms of the sewer bill. There might also be a significant increase depending on whose numbers you believe. But the one thing you can count on is that our environment and our cherished resources and quality of life will take a big hit if this sewage treatment plant is ever built.

So, I thank you very much for your time. I’ve tried to be concise as possible, and I thank you all very sincerely for all you do for this community. Thank you.