Inland Bays Reclaimed Water Facility. Sussex County, Delaware.

There are several sustainable aspects of this project. First, treated municipal effluent is applied to the County’s row crop fields as irrigation water, instead of pumping groundwater out of the local aquifer. Second, the spraying of effluent helps maintain agricultural land preservation in a region where suburban development has been expanding for several decades. Finally, the nitrogen uptake that occurs when the row crops consume nitrogen in the effluent acts as a partial substitute for more traditionally engineered wastewater treatment methods. Our efforts focused on hydrogeologic studies for permitting of new spray fields, and engineering design of the Biolac system needed to initially treat and then distribute the effluent to the farm fields.