Between 1917 and 1985, this site hosted a ceramic manufacturing company that painted china plateware. Over nearly 70 years of operation, wastewater contaminated from the manufacturing processes was discharged into an unlined lagoon that drained into a wetland and floodplain next to a creek. Accordingly, wastewater contaminants like lead, zinc, arsenic, manganese, volatile organic compounds (VOCs) including trichloroethene (TCE), and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbon (PAH) compounds impacted the 200-acre floodplain, and the site was added to the EPA Superfund program.

Clear Water Services was contracted to deploy a water treatment system designed to remove the known contaminants from any groundwater, surface water, and stormwater collected during the soil remediation processes. The system design process began with a water characterization and treatability study to test a variety of water treatment technologies designed for removing the specific contaminants. The results from this study indicated that the contaminants had a high tendency to coprecipitate with the soil sediment through chemical clarification and any residual contamination was removed using a blended media bed of organically modified zeolite & diatomaceous earth.

Using data gathered from the treatability study, Clear Water designed a three-phase system approach. The designed system was unmanned, with remote monitoring and data logging capabilities. It was able to remove the water contaminants at continual flow conditions around 250gpm while the soil remediation contractors excavated, treated, and disposed of the impacted soil. The system treated over 20,000,000 gallons without needing to recharge the treatment vessels with new media. The approach efficiently reduced the target contaminants and continually discharged water without exceeding permit requirements.