Igloo-shaped Poo-Gloos eat sewage, clean water
requirements.
Lynn Forsberg, public works director for Elko County, Nevada, recently started using Poo-Gloos in a county sewage treatment lagoon system in Jackpot, Nevada, after a successful pilot test. “Our alternative was to go with a full-blown [mechanical] treatment plant that would cost about four times as much and be much more labor intensive,” he says.
How Poo-Gloos work
Poo-Gloos use a thriving bacterial biofilm to consume pollutants. Two dozen or more igloo-shaped Poo-Gloos are installed on the bottom of the lagoon, fully submerged and arrayed in rows. Each Poo-Gloo consists of a set of four progressively smaller, plastic domes nested within each other like Russian nesting dolls and filled with plastic packing to provide a large surface area for bacterial growth.
Rings of bubble-release tubes sit at the base of every Poo-Gloo and bubble air up through the cavities between domes. The air exits a hole in the top of each dome. As air moves through the dome, it draws water from the bottom of the lagoon up through the dome and out the top.
Each Poo-Gloo occupies 28 square feet of space on the bottom of a lagoon while creating 2,800 square feet of surface area for bacterial growth. The combination of large surface area, aeration, constant mixing and a dark environment that limits algae make Poo-Gloos capable of consuming pollutants at rates comparable with mechanical plants.
The Study: How much poo can a Poo-Gloo remove?
Johnson spent time in the wastewater industry before obtaining his master’s and doctoral degrees in civil and environmental engineering. In 2002 he set about developing a product that could be used to retrofit wastewater lagoons easily and inexpensively. After seven years, with the help of fellow professors, graduate students and a lot of laboratory tests, Johnson was ready for his first field test.
Johnson built a pilot unit using a large construction dumpster welded shut so it was water-tight. The container held seven Poo-Gloos. Johnson enlisted the help of Salt Lake’s Central Valley Water Reclamation Facility to test it. The researchers ran multiple tests using untreated wastewater from the plant to determine the extent to which commonly regulated pollutants could be removed from the wastewater before discharge back to the treatment facility.
The study aimed to determine optimal operating conditions for Poo-Gloos and evaluate their performance at different water temperatures, levels of aeration, and sewage volumes and concentrations. The study found the devices consistently achieved high levels of treatment that
