Across Clatsop County, local agencies and businesses are creating new partnerships to reimagine the future of waste management.

One industry’s trash, they say, could become another one’s treasure.

For the past several months, the Port of Astoria, the state agency Business Oregon, local industrial leaders and other community partners have been working to explore the concept of industrial symbiosis — a process where industries collaborate to find new, beneficial uses for byproducts.

“This whole concept of industrial symbiosis is to minimize waste,” said Matt McGrath, the Port’s deputy director. “And in minimizing waste, you’re not only going to have positive environmental outcomes, but you’re going to have positive economic outcomes.”

Last June, the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure — an Olympia, Washington-based nonprofit — invited Oregon officials, regulators and industry stakeholders to learn about industrial symbiosis on a tour of Denmark, a country that’s been a global leader in the movement. Participants met with Danish engineers and learned about the ways companies are repurposing waste, from industrial parks using excess heat energy to warm people’s homes to a dairy company using excess whey to create protein powder.

Since then, local leaders have been eager to keep the conversation going. In January, the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure hosted a multiday industrial symbiosis event in Clatsop County in partnership with the Port, Business Oregon and Pacific Seafood and Boardman Foods, including a lunch-and-learn and facility tours with the engineers they’d met in Denmark. The following month, local partners met again at an event hosted by Kevin Leahy of Clatsop Economic Development Resources to begin laying out a blueprint for industrial symbiosis in Clatsop County.

At the same time, lawmakers in Salem have introduced an industrial symbiosis bill that would create a road map for similar partnerships across the state. (See the related story)

Waste management challenges

Local partnerships, though still in their infancy, could help alleviate mounting waste management concerns — especially for seafood processors in the county.

In late 2020, the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality updated requirements for its wastewater permits for seafood processing plants, known as 900-J permits. Seafood processors quickly raised concerns, arguing that the requirements were impossible to comply with. Ever since, they’ve been working with DEQ to try to develop reasonable individual permits, said Lori Steele, executive director of the West Coast Seafood Processors Association.

Steele said the new regulations place a heavy burden on local seafood processors, including requirements to remove metals from the water to a level lower than tap water.

“We’re in a situation right now where we need to think outside the box to try to find some solutions,” Steele said. “You know, just doing the same thing we’ve done in the past isn’t going to work, and we need to look at things that are going to create efficiency on both sides, for the industry and for DEQ.”

If seafood processors start to close their doors in Oregon, Steele said, the region could face far-reaching impacts.

Pacific Seafood, a major seafood processor based in Warrenton, has faced similar challenges.

In some ways, the company is already implementing elements of industrial symbiosis, said Amy Wentworth, director of environmental health and safety and facilities maintenance. The Pacific BioProducts facility in Warrenton, for example, takes unusable products — like heads, tails and bones — from the company’s main processing plants and uses them to create valuable commodities like fish meal.

But the process has its limitations. After the company has boiled down its leftovers, it’s left with a slightly viscous liquid made up of fish juices and soluble proteins called stickwater.

Stickwater doesn’t have the same types of high-value uses as other materials, and disposal options are scant.

The facility doesn’t have underground pipes to send the stickwater through, and because it’s a liquid, it can’t be sent to a landfill, either, Wentworth said. Transporting the substance offsite could take up to 10 tanker trucks a day, and without a dock, barging it is not only impractical but potentially dangerous. As Pacific Seafood works through an appeal on its current permit, it’s still allowed to discharge stickwater into the Columbia River — but if that were to change, Wentworth said it would leave the company with few alternatives.

Innovative solutions

Wentworth was one of several industry leaders to travel to Denmark last summer. She said the industrial symbiosis examples she observed there were inspiring — and could serve as a model for solutions in Oregon.

“We want to find ways to keep our business going, find solutions for stickwater that are environmentally friendly, and if we can build partnerships and work regionally and locally to have economic growth and create more jobs, then that’s just a win all around,” she said.

A Port-operated byproduct recovery center could be one piece of the puzzle.

Over the past year, the Port has been working with Aqua-Terra Consultants on a treatability study for a proposed facility at Pier 2 that would allow multiple seafood processors to treat their wastewater in one place. The byproduct recovery center would use an innovative technology developed by Alan Ismond, a chemical engineer with Aqua-Terra Consultants, that takes usable byproducts from the water without producing toxic materials created by chemical treatments used in many processing plants.

Steele, of the West Coast Seafood Processors Association, said she sees the byproduct recovery center as a promising solution, and a potential economic driver for the Port. Although Pacific Seafood could face challenges in transporting its wastewater to Pier 2, Wentworth said the proposed facility is still a top contender as it looks for new waste disposal options.

The treatability and a separate feasibility study are now in their final stages. From there, the Port will move onto a second phase focused on scoping. McGrath said wastewater byproducts could be used to make fertilizer, pet food or a number of other products. The goal, he added, is to streamline the process with DEQ and reduce costs for all parties.

“We really want to talk with DEQ and help them to understand that what we’re looking at doing is highly innovative and very different from what has been done before, so we need to all be able to come to the table to discuss these things with a very open mind so we can get through the permitting challenges,” McGrath said.

The agency has said it supports local conversations around industrial symbiosis.

“DEQ is supportive of the discussions happening in Clatsop County about industrial symbiosis and reducing and repurposing waste streams,” Jeniffer Wigal, the agency’s water quality administrator, said in a statement to The Astorian. “DEQ’s role is to ensure human health and the environment continue to be protected as new processes and technologies are developed and implemented. Collaboration and understanding are important in this work. The mutual understanding we’ve developed with the seafood processors and other industrial users over the past few years has been beneficial to us all.”

Industrial symbiosis projects like the byproduct recovery center could also benefit other industrial stakeholders, like breweries.

A few years ago, the city of Astoria adopted a pretreatment ordinance in response to capacity concerns at its wastewater treatment plant and issued industrial discharge permits for the breweries, requiring them to treat wastewater to a certain level before sending it down the drain. Those new regulations forced major breweries like Fort George Brewery and Buoy Beer co. to adapt quickly, investing in new and expensive technology to remove leftover yeast and hops from their water.

Like Pacific Seafood, Fort George already has its foot in the door on industrial symbiosis — each year, the company sends around 2 million pounds of spent grain to farms to be used as a feed supplement for cows, said Fort George President Chris Nemlowill.

But disposing of wastewater comes with a significant price tag. Nemlowill said the company trucks out around 2,000 gallons of water every day, which he estimates costs around $200,000 annually. Nemlowill said he’d love to be able to use existing pipe infrastructure for disposal. He said he sees the byproduct recovery center at Pier 2 as one solution.

“It’s kind of a breath of fresh air to work with somebody that wants to push forward a development like this, to help the businesses in our community,” Nemlowill said.

Breweries represent a drop in the bucket compared to seafood processors, which produce more than a million gallons of wastewater a day. To Nemlowill, that makes it all the more important to collaborate.

“We definitely want to work together to try to figure out some solutions, because I think it’s really important for us to have our seafood processors in our community create a lot of jobs,” he said. “We want local fishermen to have places to take stuff, so we really want to all work together to try to find some solutions for these problems.”

Next steps

At this point, local leaders are still in the early stages of building industrial symbiosis partnerships. An initial step will be resource mapping, a process where industries sit down and determine who’s interested in collaborating and what their waste management challenges are.

“That’s one of the big goals that we have right now, is to just see where the resources are,” Wentworth said. “We want to know who has what, and the next step would be, what can we do with that?”

McGrath said the Port will take a lead on assisting with the resource mapping process.

Industrial symbiosis also requires a high level of collaboration and social trust.

Michael Held, Business Oregon’s regional services manager, said the agency has been supporting the Center for Sustainable Infrastructure’s work and convening and facilitating conversations at the local and regional levels to help build that trust. To him, industrial symbiosis aligns with a longstanding tradition of collaborative decision-making in Oregon.

“I think it’s very Oregon-like to spend time and energy understanding the nexus between business and environment and finding solutions that support both bottom lines for businesses, but also that support environmental outcomes that protect our air, water and everything else,” Held said. “And so industrial symbiosis might be a new term, but this has been part of Oregon ethos for decades.”

Held said Business Oregon is committed to continuing to support local and regional conversations.

“We like to align where there’s a lot of energy and collaboration happening, and the fact that there are a lot of stakeholders at the table and the regional tables seem to be growing, I think it’s a good sign that this will be around for a while,” Held said.

Oregon lawmakers in the 2025 legislative session are pushing to provide resources for industrial symbiosis at the state level.

House Bill 3246, whose chief sponsors include Reps. Ken Helm, Tom Andersen, Paul Evans and Bobby Levy, would direct Business Oregon, the state’s business development agency, to create a road map for promoting industrial symbiosis activities in the state.

“What I wanted to be able to do was to say, ‘Hey, we don’t have to stand up a whole new program, a whole new agency. Let’s just start with figuring out what a framework could be to support these, you know, local, organically initiated projects around the state,’” said Helm, who took part in last summer’s trip to Denmark with Democratic and Republican colleagues to learn more about examples of industrial symbiosis.

Every community in Oregon will be different, but Helm said he sees significant opportunities for collaboration to take off in areas with ports — even in rural communities. Wastewater streams, he added, seem to be a backbone for industrial symbiosis partnerships.

“From a political point of view, this can be nonpartisan,” Helm said. “And I’ll tell you, you know, within a couple of days of being on this trip, nobody was worrying about party affiliation or political ramifications of what was being suggested. Everyone was thinking about, how can I take this home? How can I get some of the good stuff that the Danes have? And so I sort of expect that that spirit will continue as we start moving this bill through the building.”