WEFTEC 2026: A Clear Need for Better Phosphate Polishing

Existing wastewater treatment systems can remove most phosphorus. The harder problem is reliably removing the last fraction needed to meet increasingly tight discharge limits.

Last week, Rayna Newkirk and I attended WEFTEC and spent time talking with engineers, equipment suppliers, treatment plant operators and technology companies about phosphorus removal.

One opportunity kept coming up: phosphate polishing.

Many wastewater treatment plants already have effective biological, chemical or physical treatment systems. The challenge isn't necessarily replacing those systems. It's what happens after them.

A plant may remove 90% or more of its incoming phosphorus and still struggle to consistently meet a low effluent phosphorus limit.

That is where we see a strong fit for Coral Innovations' Coralyte Nutrients media.

Add Polishing Instead of Rebuilding the Plant

One of the most important takeaways from WEFTEC was how easily a phosphate capture step could potentially be added to treatment systems that already exist.

Coralyte isn't intended to replace biological phosphorus removal, clarifiers, DAF systems or other proven treatment processes.

Instead, it can act as a final polishing step, capturing dissolved phosphate that remains after the primary treatment process.

A typical treatment train could look something like:

Biological Treatment → Clarification or DAF → Coralyte Phosphate Polishing → Discharge or Reuse

This approach becomes particularly attractive when a facility is performing well but faces a tighter permit limit.

Instead of modifying the entire biological process or dramatically increasing chemical feed, a relatively small polishing system can target the remaining dissolved phosphorus.

Applications We Saw at WEFTEC

Several applications stood out during our discussions.

Existing municipal wastewater plants.Plants facing lower phosphorus discharge limits could add Coralyte polishing downstream of their existing treatment process.

New wastewater treatment systems.Design engineers can incorporate phosphate polishing from the beginning, allowing the upstream biological system to do what it does efficiently while Coralyte handles the final phosphorus reduction.

DAF systems.DAF can remove suspended solids and particulate phosphorus very effectively. Dissolved orthophosphate is more difficult. Coralyte can provide a complementary treatment step following DAF.

Membrane and reuse systems.Phosphate polishing ahead of reuse or advanced treatment can reduce residual nutrient concentrations without relying entirely on additional chemicals or increasingly complex membrane treatment.

Industrial wastewater.Food processing, agricultural processing and other phosphorus-containing industrial wastewaters may benefit from a compact polishing step where conventional treatment leaves residual dissolved phosphate.

Why Regeneration Matters

Phosphorus adsorption isn't new.

What changes the economics is the ability to regenerate the media and recover the phosphorus.

Coralyte Nutrients uses a lightweight sponge-based media engineered to capture dissolved phosphate. Once loaded, the media can be regenerated rather than simply removed and discarded.

That creates a very different operating model from single-use adsorbents.

The objective becomes:

Capture → Regenerate → Recover → Reuse

Instead of converting phosphorus into additional treatment sludge, the process creates an opportunity to recover a concentrated phosphorus stream that can potentially be reused as a nutrient or fertilizer feedstock.

This turns phosphorus treatment from strictly a disposal problem into a potential resource-recovery process.

Targeting the Hardest Part of the Treatment Curve

Phosphorus removal becomes progressively more difficult as concentrations fall.

Getting from several milligrams per liter down to hundreds of micrograms per liter is one challenge.

Getting from hundreds of micrograms into very low concentrations is another.

Coralyte is particularly interesting in this final portion of the treatment curve because the media can provide short contact times while selectively capturing dissolved phosphate.

Testing of the underlying media technology has demonstrated phosphate reduction from approximately 500 ppb to below 6 ppb in less than four minutes of contact time under tested conditions.

That opens the possibility of compact polishing systems rather than large additional treatment basins.

A Simple Addition to Complex Treatment Plants

Perhaps the biggest lesson from WEFTEC wasn't that wastewater treatment needs another complicated technology.

It was almost the opposite.

Treatment plants already contain plenty of complexity.

What operators and engineers need are technologies that can solve a specific problem without creating another one.

Our focus at Coral Innovations is increasingly clear:

Use existing treatment infrastructure to do the heavy lifting, then use regenerative Coralyte media to capture the difficult contaminants that remain.

For phosphorus, that means a compact polishing step capable of helping existing and new wastewater systems reach lower discharge concentrations while minimizing chemicals, operator attention and additional sludge production.

Based on the conversations Rayna and I had at WEFTEC, we believe phosphate polishing and phosphorus recovery will become an increasingly important part of advanced wastewater treatment.

Coral Innovations is actively looking for municipal, industrial and engineering partners interested in evaluating Coralyte Nutrients as a phosphate polishing step in existing or planned wastewater treatment systems.