While most of Vermont’s public wastewater is treated in large municipal facilities, new state funding is set to help some businesses with particularly potent wastewater to treat it at the source.
Producers of alcohol, syrup and cheese are among the eight businesses chosen by the Department of Environmental Conservation to receive the grants, ranging from less than $24,000 to $850,000. Gov. Phil Scott announced the funding, which comes from the American Rescue Plan Act, on Tuesday.
“Investing in municipal wastewater infrastructure has many benefits, including economic development opportunities, increasing housing capacity and more,” he said in a press release about the program.
State officials considered applicants from business owners who wanted to install or upgrade treatment systems for “high-strength or toxic wastewater” that is regularly discharged to a municipal wastewater treatment facility.
The projects are designed to avoid overwhelming municipal wastewater treatment plants. They also are meant to mitigate other strains, such as wastewater that is acidic, which could cause a system’s pipes to corrode.
The department plans to funnel a total of $3.3 million through municipalities to alcohol producers including Burlington Beer Company, Stowe Cider, WhistlePig Whiskey and Freak Folk Bier; restaurant supply company Edlund Company; syrup producer Runamok Maple; kombucha producer Ellipsis; and AgriMark, the owner of Cabot Creamery.
Each proposed system is likely to look different, said Amy Polaczyk, wastewater program manager for the Department of Environmental Conservation.
Some of the smaller grants will help businesses reduce the amount of wastewater going down the drain in the first place.
Others, such as Burlington Beer Company, which received the largest grant, are working to reduce pollutants using an entire treatment system, Polaczyk said. The project is designed to reduce biochemical oxygen demand — the amount of oxygen that’s needed for organic substances in the water to break down. In beer, she said, the demand is high.
“So when you put it into a wastewater system, it’s going to demand a lot of oxygen, and so does sewage that you’ve flushed down the toilet,” she said. “So what those systems at the breweries are meant to do is to not overwhelm the wastewater treatment facility with a lot of organic material.”
The same is true for milk, she said. Middlebury-based AgriMark is working to upgrade its system to reduce the amount of milk that goes down the drain, and to be more consistent with its discharge, which would help Middlebury’s treatment facility, according to Polaczyk. She noted that the contracts for the projects have not been finalized yet and are subject to change.
The grants mark the second round of funding for these types of wastewater projects, Polaczyk said. Almost all of the projects from the first round of funding, which was distributed in 2022, are operating now on the ground, she said.