July, 2003 – Atlantech^® Awarded Large Wastwater Treatment Contract

The Atlantech® group of companies was recently awarded the contract to supply Stolt Sea Farm with a state of the art wastewater treatment system for their salmon processing facility located in St. George, New Brunswick, Canada. Stolt Sea Farm is certainly showing leadership to their local community and salmon processing industry by taking this proactive role to seek out and install the best technology available to treat their processing plant's effluent which the Provincial and Federal government are expected to introduce in the near future.

The technology to treat Stolt Sea Farm's effluent will be supplied by Atlantech® Companies of Prince Edward Island (Atlantech Engineering and Wright Systems). With operations in both the East Coast of Canada and Pto. Montt, Chile - Atlantech® Companies has specilaized in providing water recirculation and wasterwater treatment technology to the land-based aquaculture industry and fish/food processing industries for the past 15 years. Atlantech will provide Stolt Sea Farms with a turnkey installation by carrying out the Project Design, project Management, System Supply and the System Start-Up.

For Stolt, the selection process for seeking a suitable technology provider began last year when Atlantech was chosen by the New Brunswick Salmon Growers Association over six other North American based wastewater treatment technology providers to carry out Pilot Scale Trials for all of the major salmon processing companies located in the St. George Industrial Park. By carrying out actual "Pilot System Trials" using each customers process plant wastewater, Atlantech was able to verify the performance of it's treatment system and demonstarte that Atlantech's Vertical Plate Pack Dissolved Air Flotation technology consistently reduced fats/oils by 70-85%, and BOD / TSS by 85-95% from salmon processing plant effluent combined with harvest bloodwater. The system is scheduled to be installed during September and operational by October 2003.

Doug Wright is President of Atlantech® Companies. He says that the Stolt deal is a sign that even during tough times in the industry that companies will spend money to deal with environmental concerns.

He also says his company is active in Chile, one of the fastest growing aquaculture countries in the world.

"We've been looking at the marketplace down there for the past four or five years. Chile has become the number one producing salmon country in the world. They have a perfect place to grow salmon, good labor rates but they do have some environmental issues and through the Canada-Chile Free Trade Agreement they are going to have to upgrade their environmental regulations to the same level that we have here in North America. So that is our interest in that marketplace.

Over the last year we made a commitment to invest in Chile. It is a fairly substantial investment for a company our size. We put an office in there, we have an operational manager and we are beginning to see some results.

We looked at Canada's West coast but for us our main competition is out there and they do a good job, it is a limited market, so why not go to Chile, it is 22 hours away by plane and eveyone speaks Spanish but there is no mistaking the simple fact that they are the number one producer in the world. The initial spark for us was the fact we have a 12-month operation in Eatern Canada that needs 12 months of revenue and if we are going to be successful and continue to grow our company must export."

This article was shown in Fish Farming.