After two years of renovation work, and an investment of more than $6 million, the once-vacant D.G. Yuengling & Son Inc. ice cream factory in Pottsville is now home to a bustling gift shop and a waste treatment facility for the brewery across the street.
“The new gift shop opened on Feb. 29. And the pretreatment plant went online March 8,” Joseph F. Spotts III, Yuengling’s environmental and safety manager, said while giving a tour of the building at 420 Mahantongo St. on Friday morning.
The finishing touches are being put in a Yuengling museum, which is next to the gift shop, Luchana Baddick, a Yuengling tour guide, said Friday. “There is going to be a grand opening, but we don’t have a date yet. We’re in the process of finishing our museum. We’re hoping that will be finished in a couple weeks. Right now, the gift shop here is open Monday through Friday, 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. On April 2, we’re going to open on Saturdays, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.,” Baddick said.
“About 250” representatives of the Eastern Pennsylvania Water Pollution Control Operators Association on Friday toured the new waste treatment facility, and had the opportunity to meet some of the system’s designers, Spotts said.
Systems Design Engineering Inc., Leesport, designed the pretreatment plant. Its plan, dated Dec. 2, 2014, was titled “Equipment Descriptions and Specifications for the Anaerobic Treatment Project at D.G. Yuengling & Son Brewery, Pottsville, PA.”
“We were the project engineering firm which worked on Yuengling’s Mill Creek facility back in 1999,” Gregory T. Unger, the owner of Systems Design Engineering and the project engineer, said.
Unger said it was a challenge trying to figure out how to fit such a facility into the narrow chambers of the old ice cream factory.
Yuengling built the ice cream factory in 1920 in response to Prohibition to make up for lost beer sales. It’s a 40,000-square-foot concrete, brick and steel structure. The ice cream factory closed in 1985.
“This building presented many challenges because it’s just not one big open box. Because there’s so many little rooms and all different levels and walls being 12 to 24 inches thick, masonry, it presented huge amounts of challenges. We utilized all of the spaces that were available to us here and we made everything fit,” Unger said.
Representatives of Veolia Water Technologies, Pennsauken, New Jersey, the manufacturer of the facility, were there as well, including Jack Kuhar, Veolia’s engineering manager of industrial projects, and Jill A. Jordan, Veolia’s senior process specialist of industrial projects.
“Jack was the lead design engineer for the treatment plant,” Michael J. Misstishin, Yuengling’s environmental coordinator, said.
Also there was the pretreatment plant’s operator, Rob Mestishen. “He worked at our Mill Creek facility,” Spotts said.
The treatment plant is at the back of the former ice cream factory, and it’s easy to spot since the operation involves tall tanks.
“The two taller tanks are the anaerobic digesters. They’re about 48 feet high and 12 feet in diameter. And the two smaller tanks are what we call the equalization tanks. They’re about 34 feet high and 12 feet in diameter,” Spotts said.
The system treats all wastewater from Yuengling’s Mahantongo Street operations before it’s put into the Greater Pottsville Area Sewer Authority’s sewer system, Spotts said.
“It’s 99.5 percent brewery waste. Because it’s not separated sanitary and brewery, there are a couple toilets connected to the system,” Spotts said.
“It’s a quarter-million gallon a day plant. Our maximum capacity here, our design parameter, is 250,000 gallons per day. But we don’t discharge that much. We discharge anywhere from 70,000 to 150,000. This week is when we started accepting 100 percent brewery wastewater. It’s primarily used for BOD/COD and TSS removal,” Misstishin said.
BOD stands for “Biological Oxygen Demand.” COD stands for “Chemical Oxygen Demand” and TSS stands for “Total Suspended Solids,” Misstishin said.
“The system is designed to remove about 3,000 pounds of BOD a day and about 750 pounds of TSS per day,” Spotts said.
“And it’s designed to remove about 5,500 pounds of COD a day from here. That’s the max design capacity of it. The system itself was designed by Veolia Water, a company from New Jersey. And they have treatment facilities all around the world,” Misstishin said.
The system’s components include two 24,000 gallon conditioning tanks, a 5,000 gallon rapid mix tank and two 42,500 gallon anaerobic digesters, Misstishin said.
Kuhar introduced the group to a “dissolve air flotation unit.”
“That’s the final process before we discharge the wastewater to the sewer authority’s system,” Misstishin said.
The system draws out granular sludge from the wastewater.
“It’s a high-rate granular sludge, about 1 to 2 millimeters in size,” Misstishin said.
“What’s the discharge limit to the city’s plant that you have to meet?” a person on the tour asked.
“We have two. Everything is based on surcharging. We’re allowed to discharge 300 milligrams per liter of BOD and 350 milligrams per liter of TSS. Pounds per day-wise we’re allowed, depending on the flow, is 2,252 pounds per day and 1,254 pounds of TSS. The design parameters are to be below 300 milligrams per liter BOD,” Misstishin said.
“It’s pretty impressive for its size, considering the small footprint that it takes up and the amount of flow that it takes,” said one of the people on the tour, Arthur W. Auchenbach, a partner in the firm Riordan Materials Corp., Reading, Berks County.
“Most of the people in attendance here are municipal wastewater treatment plant operators. So this is a unique tour because it gives us some idea of what happens on the industrial side. And it’s great to see a corporate entity like Yuengling working with Pottsville to develop this pretreatment facility. It’s really a win-win situation,” Auchenbach said.
Also there was Gene Zynel, the chief operator of the Greater Hazleton Joint Sewer Authority.
“We run a conventional activated sludge plant and there’s always trouble with industrial waste coming into our plant in high strength. So this kind of pretreatment plant, which reduces the strength of the material before it goes to a publicly owned treatment works is great. This is an industry doing the right thing,” Zynel said.