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New York Sewage Treatment Plant Receives Top Honors from EPA; Village Of Sherman Wins Accolades for Well Run Wastewater Treatment Plant

Release Date: 10/20/2000
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(#00196) New York, New York – The Village of Sherman wastewater treatment plant was awarded a National Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Excellence Award this week by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at a ceremony in Anaheim, California. The award is given to wastewater treatment facilities across the nation that are well run and maintained. The Sherman plant won first place in its category -- "small-sized advanced treatment plants." The plant was the only national winner in New York. The plant was honored for successfully handling difficulties in achieving compliance with effluent limits in the summer months. In order to meet these standards, the plant uses two separate aeration tanks, one to treat the wastewater and the other to provide additional room for more sludge to be digested by microbes. The plant also has an excellent public education program. One of the plant’s most popular public education projects allows school kids to take samples from the stream into which the plant discharges. By seeing how clean the effluent can be, the kids learn about the importance of properly treating wastewater. The EPA has awarded National Operations and Maintenance (O&M) Excellence Awards to wastewater treatment plants since 1986. Each year, the national awards are presented at the Water Environment Federation’s national conference. There are more than 16,000 publicly owned and 60,000 industrially owned wastewater treatment plants in the United States. This EPA awards program recognizes select wastewater treatment plants or programs that have achieved excellent compliance results and have demonstrated an outstanding technological achievement, method, or device in their waste treatment and pollution abatement programs.