Award Winning ‘Cream Tea’ Chessell Pottery
The successful Chessell Pottery with its incredibly popular Café, and winners of the best Island Cream Tea award for the last 3 years, with no outgoing signs of giving up the no.1 spot, chose Bio-Bubble, an award winning waste water treatment process, to treat the waste from the café, pottery and the luxurious holiday accommodation.
Typical of a number of attractions, visitor numbers can peak and trough subject to the weather but unlike most islanders, owner Aiden Collins is generally pleased to see an inclement weather forecast as it is a sure sign he will need to increase staffing levels to cope with the rush. Island based consultant Michael Long had condemned the old Acorn treatment plant as not fit for purpose, this was mostly due to it being woefully undersized and partly due to the fact that these types of package plants rarely cope well with the stronger waste streams generated from a commercial enterprise. The waste from the Acorn plant was pumped to a drain field, however, the final effluent looked just like the influent so it was very clear something needed to happen urgently to meet compliance, in addition to this, the soak away had blocked as a consequence of so much dirty water going into it.
The Bio-Bubble Advanced Aeration process being a true Sequenced Batch Reactor (SBR) is well suited to processing strong and variable waste streams, visitor numbers can vary dramatically from one day to the next, and on a wet day, parents with keen budding young potters can flock to the attractions pushing up the numbers of toilet flushes. The system balances the peaks with the troughs and processes batches of waste each day of the week there is waste to treat; spreading the load in this way ensures each batch can be treated to the same high standard. By having another Bio-Bubble locally, which consistently achieves an extremely high standard after treating the waste from another nearby attraction; the busy Calbourn Mill and discharging the waste into the sensitive Caul Bourn, it was not hard to convince The Environment Agency that it would be ok to discharge further final effluent into a tributary of the Caul Bourne.
The Caul Bourn feeds into Newtown River an A.O.N.B and SSSI, additionally with its nature reserve status it is ideal that we make zero impact on the Environment. Faced with this kind of responsibility Aiden needed to be sure that the business made the correct choice, fortunately having been in the business for many years it was not hard for him to seek out references from end users. Being adjacent to a waterway can often mean installation complications and whilst this proved to be the case installing the plant under the visitor car park; it did not become an issue because of the experience of local Civil engineering contractor Graham Attrill.
