Sewer Doer: keeping good money from going down the drain.

In a day and age where citizens are concerned about government waste, Washington County’s government has figured out a way to turn waste into profit.

Through a partnership with British Columbia-based Ostara, the county’s sewage treatment agency, Clean Water Services, has developed a way to extract by-product nutrients from the sewage and turn it into high-quality fertilizer. They’ve been successfully producing the slow-release fertilizer under the name Crystal Green at the CWS advanced wastewater treatment facility in Durham since June 2009.

Marketed under the name Crystal Green, the fertilizer owes much of its content to human waste. About 80 percent of the phosphorus and ammonia in sewage is urine, said CWS Senior Operations Analyst Rod Baur.

Clean Water Services serves about 527,000 residents in the county’s urban areas, treating about 64 million gallons a day of wastewater.

Read the full article online at OregonLive.com