Water Treatment Residual as a Bioretention Amendment for Phosphorus. II: Long-Term Column Studies
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VIEW THE ORIGINAL ARTICLEPublication: Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 138, Issue 3
Abstract
Bioretention is an EPA-designated best management practice developed to mitigate negative ecological effects from urban storm-water. However, while these facilities perform well for the removal of a multitude of pollutants, in many cases they are ineffective in treating excessive storm-water nutrients such as phosphorus (P) that may induce surface water eutrophication. This work builds on the results of a previous paper, which describe initial studies on the use of aluminum-based water treatment residual (WTR) as a bioretention soil media (BSM) amendment. A 5% WTR-, 3% triple-shredded hardwood bark mulch-amended loamy sand BSM was investigated in a large-scale (0.9 m) column to determine the media P adsorption performance under varying hydrologic and pollutant concentration conditions. Results indicate that the WTR-amended media adsorbed 88.5% of the applied P mass, relative to a non-WTR-amended control media for which effluent P mass increased by 71.2%. The amended media consistently produced total phosphorus effluent event mean concentrations and exhibited a maximum effluent concentration of only . Media oxalate ratio (OR) correlated well with the observed media P adsorption performance, providing additional support for the effectiveness of this metric in predicting media P adsorption capacity.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank the Maryland State Highway Administration for their financial support, under the guidance of Karuna Pujara, Karen Coffman, and Christie Minami. Also, thanks is owed to the Rockville Drinking Water Treatment Plant for their donation of the WTR and to the College Park Dept. of Public Works for supplying leaf and yard waste Smartleaf© compost.
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Information & Authors
Information
Published In
Journal of Environmental Engineering
Volume 138 • Issue 3 • March 2012
Pages: 328 - 336
Copyright
© 2012 American Society of Civil Engineers.
History
Received: Nov 3, 2010
Accepted: May 27, 2011
Published online: May 30, 2011
Published in print: Mar 1, 2012
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