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CASE STUDY:
Speedway Travel Center - Glendale, Kentucky

NCS Nibbler Wastewater Treatment System
Eliminates Package Plant Headaches and Lowers Operating Costs

Background

Speedway SuperAmerica has operated a gas station and Starvin Marvin convenience store in Glendale, Kentucky for several years. With high traffic volumes along interstate 65, connecting Nashville with Louisville, expanding to a full scale Travel Center catering to truck drivers became an important business priority. In addition to adding showers, laundry and other trucker amenities, expansion plans included a new Hardee's Restaurant. Sewer service was not available. Horror stories about past problems with onsite wastewater treatment and disposal systems were cause for concern. Can anyone really look forward to operating a package treatment plant or wastewater lagoon at their truck stop?

One particularly painful experience within the Speedway organization was the wastewater treatment plant installed at their Ocala Travel Center – a site nearly identical in size and facility design to the Travel Center planned for Glendale. The package plant installed at Ocala proved to be a major headache and expense from the day it started up. Perhaps most frustrating was that no one accepted responsibility for the problem - not the engineer, not the equipment supplier, not the installer, not the operator. A lot of fingers were pointed but no one could be held accountable.

Faced with daily pump, haul, and high operating cost, Speedway asked NCS to install a Nibbler high strength wastewater treatment system at Ocala to ease the burden on the package treatment plant. The NCS Nibbler system proved to be both cost effective and trouble free – only requiring operator attention every 90 days. The Ocala Speedway Nibbler system has now been operating since June 1997 and has consistently and reliably performed well beyond design expectations:
Influent Effluent % Reduction

Through NCS Nibbler pretreatment, pump and haul was eliminated and a problem treatment plant became much more functional and cost effective.

Glendale Requirements

Anxious to avoid a repeat of the Ocala package plant problems, Speedway SuperAmerica contracted with NCS to design, obtain permits, install and manage the complete wastewater treatment system at Glendale from building plumbing stub-out to final discharge. With no land available at Glendale for subsurface disposal, a permit for direct discharge to a nearby stream would be required. Obtaining a KPDES permit meant meeting strict BOD5, TSS, Ammonia and Fecal Coliform discharge limits.

Wastewater from truck stops and travel centers can be challenging. On-site restaurants generate high organic loading, particularly fats, oils and grease. The pH from a grease tank is very low (acidic), which can cause shock loading and operating problems for package treatment plants. Elevated levels of ammonia (about double that for typical residential waste) are generated by high facility toilet and urinal use. Showers are cleaned after every use, which results in high volumes of cleaners (toxic to any biological treatment process) being flushed down the drain. Wastewater flows can vary dramatically throughout the day and during the week. It’s amazing what we have seen flushed down the drain.

Given their history, Speedway SuperAmerica’s requirements of NCS were very clear:

• Provide a complete turnkey solution with clear accountability for performance results including performance warranty. (Design-Build-Manage)
• Manage the KPDES permit process
• Minimize ongoing operating costs and provide high treatment reliability
• Limit the need for skilled treatment plant operators
• Provide a design safety factor to accommodate future growth

The NCS Glendale Solution

To satisfy the treatment parameters required to obtain a KPDES discharge permit and to meet the needs of Speedway SuperAmerica, NCS designed a combination Nibbler/Recirculating Gravel Filter (RGF) with UV disinfection prior to final discharge. Total design capacity is 15,000 gallons per day.

Hardees’ greywater is first pretreated by a 20 pod Nibbler system similar to the Speedway site in Ocala, Florida.
Treated greywater is then commingled with blackwater into 30,000 gallons of flow equalization tank capacity which absorbs variations in daily and weekly flows. It also buffers the Nibbler/RGF from shock loading due to variations in pH and cleaning chemicals used for showers and laundry. The Nibbler/RGF is time dosed – providing 48 equal doses per day or one dose every 30 minutes. The RGF unit occupies 5,000 square feet of surface area filled with three feet of pea gravel sized media contained in a vinyl liner.

The NCS Nibbler/RGF treatment system started up in August 2000 and has consistently met KPDES discharge standards. Startup went smoothly with only minor mechanical adjustments to the UV unit needed. An NCS operator is required to be at the site just one day per month to do inspection, preventive maintenance and take samples. This compares to one operator visit per day for most treatment plants.