Algoma, Wisconsin — a sleepy town on the shores of Lake Michigan, about a half hour east of Green Bay — is known as one of the premier Midwest destinations for freshwater sports fishing.
In fact, at the peak of the summer fishing season, Algoma has so many sports fisherman cleaning their catches of king and coho salmon and lake trout that thousands of pounds of fish guts were overwhelming the towns’s waste treatment facility. The plant was designed to service a community of 6,000 people, but the waste during the fishing season was equal to a city of 30,000.
City workers often had to manually unclog the city’s sewer system, which was fed an estimated 120 tons of fish scrap.
And the town’s waste water treatment plant often became clogged with the fish guts, causing it to be shut down, diverting waste water directly into Lake Michigan.
US EPA Takes Action
It got so bad that the US Environmental Protection Agency had to step in, demanding that the town either replace its waste water treatment plant with a larger facility or come up with a new plan to handle all that waste.
Faced with either a massively expensive public works project or turning its back on its most popular tourist industry, the town found itself in a dilemma. That’s when Mayor Virginia Haske asked for help from Dramm Corp., based in nearby Manitowoc, a company that specializes in converting natural waste — such as fish guts — into organic fertilizer.
New Conveyor System Installed
With the company’s help, the town built a new marina fish cleaning station that uses a conveyor system to transport the fish guts into a cooler. The walk-in refrigerator helps keep the waste fresh until it can be transported via 1,000 pound capacity plastic bins to Dramm’s facility, where the material is dumped into an auger for processing and it can be made into environmentally fertilizer called Drammatic, which is used in organic, sustainable agriculture production.
The reusable bins are then rinsed, stacked and returned to the fish cleaning station where they can be refilled and reused. The system has now been in operation for eight years, diverting an estimated 500 tons of fish scrap from the town’s sewage system.
Algoma didn’t have to build a new waste water facility, Lake Michigan was saved from further contamination, and sport fishermen are still able to enjoy some of the finest freshwater lake fishing available anywhere.