February 2017 | Business View Magazine

180 181 Brantford, Ontario ander Graham Bell, invented the telephone at his father’s home, the Bell Homestead. In 1876, he conducted the first long-distance telephone call from Brantford to nearby Paris, Ontario. Selvi Kongara is Brantford’s Director of Envi- ronmental Services, responsible, among other things, for the City’s current Wastewater Treat- ment Optimization program. In Canada, every municipality is required to treat wastewater and remove all pollutants before the cleaned water can be recycled back to streams, rivers, lakes, and oceans. In 2011, the federal govern- ment dictated new guidelines for the control of certain pollutants, such as ammonia, in effluent discharge. “What is discharged has an impact on the environment and if ammonia levels are too high, it affects the ecosystem,” Kongara says. “So we were trying to prepare ourselves to further control ammonia in the discharge by improving and optimizing our wastewater operation to get the maximum out of our existing infrastructure and to remove ammonia to more stringent lev- els without major upgrades to the plant.” The City deferred some $27.5 million from its AT A GLANCE Brantford, Ontario WHAT: A city of 96,000 WHERE: Southern Ontario on the Grand River WEBSIT E: www. brantford.ca capital budget that it planned to use for a major plant upgrade in 2014, and instead, attempted to optimize plant operations and improve the training of its operators.“We found that, even with all the improvements,we were not able to get where we wanted to,” admits Kongara,“and that’s when we figured out that we were receiving discharge from industry that was affecting our plant op- erations.Wastewater plants are designed to treat domestic waste- water, but if they have higher levels of certain industrial chemicals, then they are not able to treat it effectively.” In fact, wastewater is treated by bacteria that break down and ingest the pollutants. If the bacteria are healthy, they work effectively. “Sometimes, the industrial process has certain chemicals at much higher concentration which are harmful to the bacteria, and they can’t do their job,” Kongara explains. So, the City had to make a choice: it could either add capacity to the treatment plant in order to effectively control the high-