Evoqua Names Georgia Aquarium Winner of Second Annual Water Sustainability Award

Georgia Aquarium, the largest aquarium in the Western Hemisphere, is committed to working on behalf of all marine life through education, preservation, exceptional animal care and research across the globe. With hundreds of exhibits and thousands of animals across seven major galleries, Georgia Aquarium must maintain life support system (LSS) processes that ensure the water is clean.

The LSS systems consist of a combination of sand filtration, protein skimming and ozone disinfection. On top of this, the LSS team at Georgia Aquarium has developed a process of denitrification using fiberglass-reinforced plastic vessels, custom-built by Evoqua’s Neptune Benson, that house beneficial bacteria.

This process reduces nitrates that form in the aquarium’s 6.3-million-gallon Ocean Voyager exhibit. A recent study showed that the types of bacteria in the denitrification vessels are nearly identical to those found in applicable natural marine settings.

“Preserving water—the world’s most valuable resource—is at the heart of everything we do at Evoqua,” said Ron Keating, Evoqua CEO. “Each year, we’re excited to honor an organization that prizes sustainability as much as we do. Georgia Aquarium’s extraordinary LSS processes have made it a water savings hero, and we’re proud to be part of its efforts to enrich life through smart water use.”

“We are honored to be selected by Evoqua for this significant award that recognizes the hard work and dedication that goes into sustaining Georgia Aquarium’s Life Support Systems daily,” said John Masson, Director of Life Support Systems at Georgia Aquarium.

The award will be presented to Georgia Aquarium at an event in April, timed around Earth Day. For the second year, Evoqua employees nominated companies from among its 38,000-customer base for their sustainability efforts to treat, re-use, and conserve water. Other companies shortlisted for the award included Johnson & Johnson and Phillips66.

Johnson & Johnson has a long history dating back to the early 1990s of conscientious energy use, water conservation, and utility minimization. Projects across the globe (from Cork, Ireland, to Malvern, Pennsylvania, U.S.), use recovery Reverse Osmosis (RO) to minimize water consumption and discharge to publicly owned treatment works.

WRB Refining, a joint venture between Phillips 66 and Cenovus Energy, recently completed a project at its Borger, Texas refinery that proved 400 gallons per minute (gpm) water savings. The project focused on water with high silica and salt content that was causing cooling tower inefficiency through scaling and fouling. The project repurposed existing Evoqua Water Technologies Reverse Osmosis (RO) equipment to help clean up the quality of the refinery cooling tower water.

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