Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant

Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Plant, located in Washington, D.C., is the largest advanced wastewater treatment plant in the world. The facility is operated by the District of Columbia Water and Sewer Authority (DC Water). The plant opened in 1938 as a primary treatment facility, and advanced treatment capacity was added in the 1970s and 1980s. The effluent that leaves Blue Plains is discharged to the Potomac River and meets some of the most stringent permit limits in the United States.

The plant has a treatment capacity of 370 million gallons per day (mgd) or 1.4 Gl per day, with a peak capacity (partial treatment during large storms) of 1.076 billion gallons per day (4.07 Gl/day). The plant occupies 150 acres (0.61 km²) in the southwest quadrant of Washington, D.C. and discharges to the Potomac River. It serves over 2 million customers in Washington, large portions of adjacent Prince George's County and Montgomery County in Maryland, and portions of Fairfax County and Loudoun County in Virginia.

Historically, wastewater treatment plants have contributed nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen to the waterways in which they discharge. These nutrients deplete oxygen and cause algal blooms in rivers and coastal waters, a process that is detrimental to fish and other aquatic life.

Since the mid-1980s, Blue Plains has reduced phosphorus to the limit of technology, primarily in support of water quality goals of the Potomac River, but also for the restoration of the Chesapeake Bay. The Chesapeake Bay Agreement, reached in 1987, was a first step in reducing nitrogen discharge to waterways that are tributary to the Chesapeake Bay. Under the agreement, the Bay states and the District of Columbia government committed to voluntarily reduce nitrogen loads by 40 percent from their 1985 levels. Blue Plains was the first plant in the region to achieve that goal. Furthermore, in every year since the full-scale implementation of the biological nitrogen removal (BNR) process was completed in 2000, Blue Plains has every year successfully achieved and exceeded that goal of a 40 percent reduction. In Fiscal Year 2009, the BNR process at Blue Plains reduced the nitrogen load by more than 58 percent.

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