Clean Water Services and Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies open world’s largest municipal Nutrient Recovery Facility

        --  Environmental advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to deliver keynote
            at the Rock Creek Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility
        --  Oregon State Treasurer Ted Wheeler and Clean Water Services
            Chairman, Andy Duyck, will officially open Facility

HILLSBORO, OR and VANCOUVER, BC, May 8, 2012 /PRNewswire/ – A successful
public/private partnership in sustainable technology continues between
Clean Water Services and Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc.
with the unveiling of the world’s largest municipal Nutrient Recovery
Facility today, at the Rock Creek Advanced Wastewater Treatment
Facility in Hillsboro, OR.

Clean Water Services’ Rock Creek Nutrient Recovery Facility uses
Ostara’s Pearl(R) Nutrient Recovery Process to capture phosphorus and
nitrogen from wastewater and transform them into Crystal Green(R), an
environmentally-friendly, slow release fertilizer, which is sold
locally and throughout the country. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will join
Oregon State Treasurer Ted Wheeler and Clean Water Services Chairman
Andy Duyck for today’s 10:30 a.m. grand opening ceremony.

Ostara’s Pearl process benefits Clean Water Services and its ratepayers
by reducing operations and maintenance costs, increasing plant capacity
and providing revenue from the sale of the fertilizer. The combination
of cost savings and revenue are projected to pay off the $4.475 million
Rock Creek Nutrient Recovery Facility in six years. The recovery of
phosphorus and nitrogen from the wastewater stream also helps Clean
Water Services meet stringent nutrient limits (the Rock Creek Facility
must not exceed 0.1 mg/L of total phosphorus discharge) and further
protects the Tualatin Watershed. The project was also granted an Oregon
Department of Energy Business Energy Tax Credit (BETC) of $1.12 million
which helped fund the facility’s construction. The Rock Creek Nutrient
Recovery Facility requires one seventh the amount of energy to create
1,200 tons of Crystal Green as it takes to create an equal amount of
conventional fertilizer.

“Our partnership with Ostara is a natural progression of the work we do
at Clean Water Services. Wastewater is a valuable resource that we can
no longer afford to simply throw away,” says Bill Gaffi, General
Manager of Clean Water Services. “The cleaned water we produce at this
facility is enhanced by the Ostara system and eliminates pollutants,
providing life-giving flow to the Tualatin River. In addition, the
Ostara system saves our ratepayers money by reducing our electrical and
chemical usage, and through the shared revenue stream from the sale of
Crystal Green.”

Based on the successful operation of Ostara’s nutrient recovery
technology at Clean Water Services’ Durham Advanced Wastewater
Treatment Facility, installed in 2009, this second installation of the
Pearl technology at Rock Creek features two Pearl 2000 fluidized bed
reactors. Each reactor will provide four times the capacity of the
Pearl 500 reactors installed at Durham. The Pearl 2000 system at Rock
Creek will generate a combined capacity of 1,200 tons of Crystal Green
fertilizer every year, compared with an annual capacity of 500 tons for
the Durham facility. Clean Water Services is now the largest municipal
producer of Crystal Green in the world. Crystal Green produced at the
facility will be used in nurseries, lawn landscape, and turf
applications throughout the Willamette Valley and the state of Oregon,
as well as throughout North America.

“We are very excited to launch our new Pearl 2000 system with Clean
Water Services. They have been a great partner in reaching cost
effective and environmentally sound goals to recover nutrients for the
highest beneficial re-use,” says Phillip Abrary, President and CEO of
Ostara, “Wastewater is no longer waste, but a valuable resource.”

A common challenge for wastewater treatment facilities such as Rock
Creek is the over-accumulation of phosphorus in the system resulting in
the formation of struvite scale, a concrete-like mineral deposit which
congests processing equipment, adding significantly to operating and
maintenance costs and threatening plant reliability. Ostara’s Pearl
process helps Clean Water Services overcome these challenges at Rock
Creek with the recovery of up to 90 per cent of the phosphorus and 20
per cent of the nitrogen from the wastewater stream, which is
transformed through a chemical reaction in Ostara’s Pearl process into
an environmentally responsible source of phosphorus fertilizer.

“The amazing thing is that by helping wastewater treatment plants deal
more efficiently with their nutrient overload problems, Ostara is also
helping to address one of the earth’s most significant environmental
challenges – water pollution from the leaching and runoff of nutrients,
such as phosphorus, which causes excessive algae growth and depletes
waters of the oxygen necessary to support aquatic life,” says keynote
speaker Robert F. Kennedy Jr., environmental advocate and attorney, and
Ostara Board Member. “Ostara’s process takes these nutrients and turns
them into a high value, slow release fertilizer that not only helps to
preserve natural waterways by reducing runoff, but also makes good
business sense as it offers operational cost savings and becomes a
revenue source for the wastewater treatment plant implementing the
technology.”

One of the most valuable aspects of the Ostara process is the creation
of a high value phosphorus fertilizer from a renewable resource -
wastewater. It takes one seventh the amount of energy to create
Crystal Green as it takes to create an equal amount of conventional
fertilizer mined from finite phosphorus reserves.

“Phosphorus, a key building block to all life, is mined today in a
limited number of areas but used globally as an essential agricultural
input,” says Abrary. “We’re recovering phosphorus and other nutrients
and transforming them into a useful premium fertilizer while reducing
the carbon footprint in its manufacture and preventing runoff in its
use.”

About Clean Water Services

Clean Water Services is a water resources management utility for more
than 536,000 people in urban Washington County and small portions of
Multnomah County, Clackamas County, Lake Oswego, and Portland. Clean
Water Services operates four wastewater treatment facilities,
constructs and maintains drainage management and water quality
projects, and manages flow in the Tualatin River to improve water
quality and protect fish habitat. www.cleanwaterservices.org

About Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies Inc.

Ostara is a clean water company that provides phosphorus management
solutions to municipalities, industry and farmers. The company was
founded in 2005 when it licensed the nutrient recovery technology from
the University of British Columbia to develop and market the wastewater
treatment process and the revenue-generating fertilizer. The
proprietary technology, called Pearl((R)), recovers otherwise polluting nutrients, phosphorus and nitrogen, from
wastewater streams at treatment facilities, helping plants reduce costs
and meet nutrient discharge limits. The nutrients harvested from these
wastewaters are transformed into a fertilizer product marketed as
Crystal Green((R)), the most environmentally responsible source of phosphorus fertilizer. www.ostara.com

SOURCE Ostara Nutrient Recovery Technologies