Construction Underway at California’s Sterling Resource Center

Anaergia Inc. and its sister company Fibracast Ltd. announced they have been added to the team selected for the construction of the Sterling Natural Resource Center (SNRC) in California’s East Valley Water District.

SNRC, being built in Highland, Calif., will be a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment facility. It will recover clean water, energy and nutrients from wastewater and provide the community with a place for, and opportunities for, education, entertainment, plus other events.

The facility will initially convert up to 8 million gallons per day of wastewater and up to 130,000 gallons per day of imported organic waste streams into 3 megawatts of renewable power for the facility, clean water for replenishing the natural groundwater aquifer and the potential for fertilizer to improve soil quality. By replenishing the Bunker Hill Basin with clean treated water, the region will be able to store hundreds of millions of gallons of water for dry years.

“Fibracast and Anaergia are bringing us transformative solutions,” said John Mura, general manager/CEO of the East Valley Water District, in a statement. “Utilizing their systems, SNRC will have many benefits for our community in addition to the benefits to the environment from converting waste, recovering water, generating renewable energy and even creating opportunities for producing fertilizer.”

SNRC will recover value from the waste streams by utilizing a series of technologically advanced solutions. These include Fibracast’s FibrePlate membranes and Anaergia’s Omnivore Anaerobic Digestion system.

FibrePlate hybrid-membrane technology offers several unique benefits to facility owners and operators. This technology product combines the advantages of hollow-fibre and flat sheet membrane systems, including high packing density, small footprint, backwash capability, low trans-membrane pressure and the ease of operation through advanced automation.

Anaergia’s Omnivore digester system triples digester throughput with one-tenth the energy use of conventional digesters, providing efficient high solids digestion. Anaergia is delivering a turnkey system solution, which includes the equipment for organic waste reception, the Omnivore digester, renewable energy generation and digestate management with ammonia recovery. This facility is being constructed by Balfour Beatty with detailed engineering services provided by Arcadis.

“Fibracast is gratified to be a partner in developing SNRC and to be working together with a world-class team delivering a state-of-the-art water reuse plant that will be an asset to the community,” said Diana Benedek, CEO of Fibracast, in a statement. “Fibracast is pleased to be serving the East Valley Water District and its beautiful vision, by providing them with our best in class membrane of the future.”

“The Anaergia group of companies is extremely proud to support the development of SNRC with both our anaerobic digestion technology and also with our water reuse technologies,” said Andrew Benedek, CEO of Anaergia, in a statement. “We are very happy to be working with the East Valley Water District to create a resource recovery community asset that will embody both social and resource sustainability. When complete, SNRC will demonstrate a replicable model for municipal wastewater plants that meet organics recycling needs, achieve energy resiliency and provide advanced job opportunities for the local community.”