Design, Construction, and Start-up of a Biological Pretreatment Plant for a Large Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Facility

On September 21, 1998, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) promulgated a new Pharmaceutical Effluent Guideline (PEG) and a National Emissions Standard for Hazardous Air Pollutants (NESHAP) for the pharmaceutical manufacturing industries. As a result of PEG, Pharmacia Corporation, Augusta, GA planned and installed a new biological wastewater treatment plant to treat manufacturing process wastewater prior to discharge to the publicly owned treatment works.This paper addresses the design, construction, and startup of the new wastewater treatment plant. The technology chosen was a Kaldnes patented Moving Bed Biofilm Reactor (MBBR) system used to reduce volatile organic compounds and the chemical oxygen demand of the wastewater. The MBBR system was selected in lieu of a conventional activated sludge treatment plant, and has several operational and maintenance advantages over the activated sludge process. These advantages were discussed in a previous paper along with the process design criterion and requirements utilized for the consideration of this treatment process (Camp et al., 2001). The purpose of this paper is to addresses design features of the project, implementation of a fast-track construction schedule, and startup issues related to the new PEG wastewater treatment plant.