WEFTEC 2026 · New Orleans
AlgaFilm Technologies is exhibiting. I am there all three floor days to argue about whether an algae process fits your site.
A small town on a lagoon gets handed an ammonia limit it cannot meet. The lagoon is not broken. It was built for a different permit, decades ago, and it does what it was designed to do.
The town has a few hundred households and no capital budget, and the standard answer is a mechanical plant it will never afford to run. That gap is where most of the lagoon stock in North America sits right now.
Every square is one SRF-funded project that names a lagoon, across Texas and 38 other states. The seven in amber are every project that mentions ammonia, nitrogen or nutrients at all. Thirty more propose to eliminate the discharge instead, by land application, irrigation, percolation or evaporation.
Source: State Revolving Fund project records, 39 states, classified by what the project proposes to build.
A town that leaves its NPDES permit does not have an ammonia limit to meet. For that town the compliance question is closed, and closed cheaply.
That is a rational answer, and it is chosen more often than treatment is. Worth knowing before assuming a nutrient limit produces a treatment project.
Two thirds of them, 396, sit in the 0.05 to 0.5 MGD band. That is the size where the capital base runs out first.
Shaded states are the four with the most lagoon facilities naming ammonia or nitrogen. Counts below.
Source: EPA ECHO effluent exceedance field, vintage September 2021. Treat as leads and re-verify against the current permit. Counts shown for the top four states only.
The public field lies in one direction. EPA's exceedance field carries false negatives. We found a Wyoming lagoon whose state funding record describes ammonia compliance problems in plain language while the federal field lists only E. coli.
Ground-discharge and seasonal-release lagoons never enter the federal register, because the deposit trigger only applies to discharge into fish-frequented water. Provincial registries confirm it province by province: Saskatchewan lists 567 where the federal set sees 5, Alberta 382 against 9, Ontario 149 against 19.
Sources: Statistics Canada 2020 count; WSER (SOR/2012-139) 2017 dataset; provincial registries verified by download, August 2026.
This is stoichiometry, not a model output, and for a soft-water lagoon it often decides retrofittability before any engineering starts.
The Algae Forest process, as AlgaFilm publishes it
The process integrates into treatment infrastructure a town already has. AlgaFilm states it removes and recovers nutrients while reducing capital and operating costs by up to 80%, that it is inherently net-zero, and that the biomass is upcycled into fertilizer, feed and energy feedstocks rather than landfilled.
Read the nitrogen and phosphorus lines again. They come out as product, not as sludge to haul.
Most nutrient removal is a destruction process. You spend energy converting ammonia to nitrogen gas and send it to the sky, then spend again to bury what settles. Recovery inverts the ledger. Whether it pencils depends entirely on the site, and that is the argument I came to have.
What I am not doing this week is selling anything to anyone who does not have the problem. Tell me the site and the limit and I will tell you honestly whether an algae process is worth your time. Sometimes the answer is no, and that answer is free too.