By DOUG GRAVES

Ohio Correspondent

WOOSTER, Ohio — Located about 35 miles southwest of Akron is the quaint, quiet city of Wooster, which of late has garnered a lot of unwanted attention.

While there are many lagoons across Wayne County, a lagoon being planned by quasar energy group (under the name Buckeye Biogas) and a local farmer has drawn a great deal of scrutiny the past few weeks. This 10 million-gallon storage lagoon is different because it will contain processed municipal, human and animal waste. The biggest concern appears to be over biosolids, or processed sewage sludge.

The location of this storage pond is causing a big stink among residents in Canaan Township, as the renewable energy and organics management firm plans to lease property from the farm of Jason Wiles at 8600 E. Pleasant Home Road and build a clay-lined pond to store the anaerobically digested biosolids, known as effluent.

The biosolids will come from multiple facilities permitted by the National Pollutant Discharge Elimination System. One is the quasar facility at the Ohio Agriculture Research and Development Center (OARDC) south of Wooster.

Residents in the area began calling county officials, the Ohio EPA and quasar. They organized a group called Canaan Residents Against the Poop Pond, or CRAPP.

According to quasar, the lagoon will contain less than 20 percent biosolids, which are first processed at wastewater treatment plants, and then inside the company’s anaerobic digester in Wooster. Brock Yoder, one of the organizers leading opposition to quasar’s efforts, lives less than a mile from the site. He and his neighbors have identified four main concerns.

“We are worried about the potential smell, the effect on water quality, the effect on property values and increased truck traffic,” he said. “The roads that will be used cannot hold up to all the trucks coming in and out at all times of the day. There will be increased possible health risks, and there will be an impact on the environment if something were to occur and be spilled or leaked.”

Yoder and his group are also concerned about quasar’s track record in the area. “They had an odor problem when they tried to run the city’s wastewater treatment plant, and in Lorain County they had concerns about storage lagoons in their area and were successful to stop quasar.”

Wayne County has no jurisdiction in the matter, according to Commissioner Sue Smail. It only has jurisdiction over the roads, some of which may not be capable of withstanding a lot of truck traffic.

quasar Environmental Specialist Cassie Eblin estimates an average of 3-4 trucks a day, compared to the rumors of 50-60 per day. The number may increase during the land application process when the effluent is transported to the farm for use as a fertilizer.

“For the past seven or eight years, I’ve gotten their product and it’s been applied to the permitted fields,” Wiles said.

There are approximately 19,000 acres in Wayne County permitted by the Ohio EPA to apply the effluent product. Digester effluent is rich in nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, key ingredients found in fertilizers. It is one of the byproducts of anaerobic digestion, a natural process wherein microorganisms break down organic material in the absence of oxygen.

Another byproduct is methane gas, which is used as a sustainable renewable energy source and can be converted to electricity, heat, natural gas or motor vehicle fuel.

Solid and liquid organic waste material, or feedstocks, are delivered via truck by waste haulers. Typical digester feedstocks include sewage sludge or biosolids, food waste, manure, energy crops and ethanol production byproducts.

quasar plans to build the 10-foot-deep storage pond in a densely wooded area with a 50-foot tree buffer around the pond so it won’t be visible from the road. The clay lining has a minimum thickness of 12 inches to prevent permeability and the Ohio EPA requires that the pond cannot impact the waters of the state.

The trees will also act as a buffer to possible odors emanating from the pond, as will the crust that develops over the top of the pond. The machine that takes the effluent back out of the pond is built to pull the material from underneath the crust, keeping the barrier in place.