BioLargo Water

Recently, scientists from BioLargo Water were fortunate enough to enjoy a private tour at Gold Bar, Edmonton’s largest wastewater treatment plant. Gold Bar is owned and operated by EPCOR, Canada’s oldest municipally owned utility company, and is one of Canada’s largest Class IV wastewater treatment plants. This tour was an excellent opportunity for our junior scientists to learn, in-person, about the operation and challenges of a large wastewater treatment plant. The Gold Bar plant has a capacity of 310 million liters per day and serves a population of around 1 million people. Its treatment process consists of pre-treatment in grit tanks, sludge separation in primary clarifiers, breakdown of dissolved organics in a biological treatment process, and tertiary treatment using UV disinfection before discharge into the North Saskatchewan River. The whole process takes 18 hours! At BioLargo, we intend to offer our Advanced Oxidation System (AOS) as a tertiary treatment for wast...

Why do we treat water? While a big part of why people invest so much in water treatment is to remove contaminants like toxic organic chemicals and inorganic contaminants like salts and metals, often the most pressing threats in untreated water are pathogenic organisms. Pathogens are microscopic organisms that include bacteria such as E. coli and Salmonella and viruses such as norovirus, but can also be parasitic protozoa such as Giardia lamblia , the organism that causes "beaver fever". These organisms are often more difficult to kill, and can cause serious illness if ingested. Until recently, we at BioLargo Water focused much of our research on our Advanced Oxidation System's (AOS) ability to kill bacteria and viruses endemic to industrial livestock and agricultural wastewater treatment settings because of large market pull from those industries. Just recently, however, we started a research project to prove the AOS can kill protozoa like Giardia . Gi...