By Dave Dreisbach, Technology Development Specialist
In the early days of Southern Ionics, a substantial portion of our sales and growth revolved around supplying alum and liquid sodium aluminate to paper mills making newsprint or magazine grades of paper using TMP pulp from Southern Pine trees.
This represented an improved process compared to the use of alum and caustic that was commonplace before SII pioneered the broad use of alum and liquid sodium aluminate.
Between 10 and 20 years ago, these mills began to close as the market for newsprint and magazine grades of paper shrank with the growth of the internet, computers, and cell phone access to information on demand.
This left Southern Ionics with substantial capacity for aluminum-based products and a dying market for a portion of this capacity.
Fortunately, Southern Ionics had developed an improved version of sodium aluminate that was substantially more stable than the old version of this product available from SII and our competitors. This improved product was offered to papermaking customers as “Papermakers Sodium aluminate”. It was also marketed as PHOS-SORB® where it helps wastewater plants meet their effluent limits for phosphorus, and FLUOR-SORB® where it is used to help plants meet their effluent limits for fluoride.
Today’s wastewater treatment plants are amazing. They put out water that, in many ways, is cleaner than the water they discharge into.
Recent environmental regulations require the removal of nutrients like ammonia and phosphorus from wastewater to levels that have not been achieved in the past. One of the ways this has been done in the past was to add alum and caustic (sounds familiar? remember what they did in newsprint) to the wastewater to capture phosphorus, so algae blooms and fish kills do not happen in the downstream lakes and streams.
We ran our first trial in wastewater at Calhoun, GA. It was a simple trial to see if adding alum to that plant could help meet the new regulations expected for phosphorus in their effluent. It worked well, and the plant went on to buy alum from Southern Ionics for many years to help in meeting their new effluent phosphorus limits. During the trial, the plant was split into two parallel plants, one was run treating for phosphorus capture with alum and the other was left as a control (untreated). The trial was started slowly and conservatively with the feed rate increased slowly. After several weeks, the side of the plant that was treated with alum had much lower effluent phosphorus levels and easily met the limit the plant expected to be regulated to. At the end of the trial, the alum was turned off…. But it kept working for weeks. That finding was very important. It was not the alum per se that was important for capturing phosphorus, but the aluminum hydroxide that formed and recirculated in the process at a neutral pH that was critical for capturing phosphorus and insuring it did not reach the environment.
Alum is a soluble form of aluminum created by reacting aluminum hydroxide with sulfuric acid. When wastewater plants are treating to very low levels of effluent phosphorus, lots of alkali (caustic, lime, lime slurry, magnesium hydroxide slurry) is needed to neutralize this sulfuric acid. Fortunately, there is a better way to get the soluble aluminum to these systems and generate the aluminum hydroxide in the plant to catch the phosphorus. Southern Ionics’ PHOS-SORB® is a fully stable soluble alkaline aluminum solution. It has two times the aluminum of alum (which reduces freight and delivery costs) and provides wastewater treatment plants with alkalinity needed for them to effectively remove ammonia from the wastewater stream. In most of the situations, we can replace 2 chemicals (an acidic metal salt and an alkaline product to neutralize the acidity of that salt) with one chemical (PHOS-SORB®) while reducing the cost to treat, often by 30 to 60%). PHOS-SORB® can be so effective that in some cases, very expensive plant upgrades costing millions or tens of millions of dollars can be delayed or avoided.
With the recent hurricane Helene that devastated a swath in the Southeast, you may have seen articles about a small town known as Spruce Pine NC where the purest quartz on the planet is mined and purified for making computer chips used in cell phones and cloud applications, as well as LED lights, solar panels , and fiber optic cables. You may not know that Southern Ionics is a key player in that process. Southern Ionics’ Calhoun, TN plant is located close to the Spruce Pine region and produces alum and FLUOR-SORB® to ensure that the process used to make that high purity quartz using hydrofluoric acid does not adversely impact the environment. Aluminum hydroxide formed by mixing alum and FLUOR-SORB® adsorb the fluoride from the wastewater ensuring that the pristine streams and rivers of that area, at the head of many of the major rivers in that region, remain clean and useful for the environment and the people downstream.
So, the demise of newsprint and magazine grade paper production did not spell the end of Southern Ionics’ Calhoun, TN plant, but opened the path for that plant, and its effective manufacturing and delivery of the novel highly stable PHOS-SORB® and FLUOR-SORB®, to meet the worlds evolving needs.
We are also continuing the path of optimizing wastewater phosphorus capture. About 12 months ago, we had 20 successful references for our PHOS-SORB® approach. We have now completed our 40th successful trial and it is entirely possible that we will cross the 100 customers mark using our novel Papermakers Sodium aluminate, PHOS-SORB®, and FLUOR-SORB® made and shipped from our Calhoun, TN and West Point, MS operations.