PXVNEO Installs Lively Mural Promoting Progress
Phoenixville’s Wastewater Treatment Plant Shows Off New Brand
PHOENIXVILLE, PA – JULY 11, 2022 – Wasting no opportunity to involve the community in its
ongoing progress, the Borough of Phoenixville, Pennsylvania invited a group of students from a
local art camp to help install a lively new mural on the wall of the massive building that will
house PXVNEO.
PXVNEO is the first municipal treatment plant in North America to use the hydrothermal
carbonization (HTC) process to treat the community’s wastewater.
HTC uses heat and pressure to mimic the way that nature produces coal and other fossil fuels
while employing technology to speed up the process from 250 million years to a couple of
hours. In the new HTC system at PXVNEO, waste will enter and go through a reactor that
pressurizes and heats it—converting organic wastes into clean and valuable bioproducts.
FUTURE IMPLICATIONS
PXVNEO all started when SOMAX, a waste solutions company converting organic
waste into
green solutions based in Spring City, PA approached the Phoenixville Borough with a detailed
plan. Dan Spracklin, who named SOMAX after his children Sophie and Max, is deeply
committed to transforming the imperfect nature of waste treatment.
HTC will transform the Borough’s largest energy user into an eventual energy producer. More
than a wastewater treatment plant, PXVNEO is a resource recovery system. PXVNEO is the
result of a commitment from the Borough of Phoenixville to transition to 100% clean energy use
by 2035.
Because the process is so revolutionary, the Borough decided to name and brand the plant
hoping it will engage the citizenry to want to learn about the beneficial new process.
PROMISING POTENTIAL
PXVNEO is a next generation project with future implications.
Eventually students can learn about PXVNEO and the HTC process through collaborative
STEM learning opportunities. With designed excess capacity PXVNEO can accept the waste of
other communities to fund the system. PXVNEO can sell the valuable BioProducts to
government or industry, rather than pay for biosolids disposal.
There is virtually no limit to the potential benefits PXVNEO offers the Borough of Phoenixville.
“And PXVNEO is a solution that can be replicated by other municipalities,” says Jon Ewald,
Borough Council President. “So we want it to look just as impressively as it will perform.”
The name PXVNEO literally means Phoenixville New Energy Optimization and the modern
phoenix in the logo is comprised of many parts, signifying all of the categorical potential that
Hydrothermal Carbonization offers.
TAKING OFF
The PXVNEO brand took flight earlier this year and, with an informative website and ambitious
press effort got noticed by NPR and Treatment Plant Operator Magazine among other news
outlets.
“Still, there are a lot of people right in the Borough that don’t know that Phoenixville is
pioneering HTC technology,” says Borough Manager Jean Krack. “This project is really about
the future and what better way to underscore that than involving the next generation of citizens
in the process.”
Krack had the idea of inviting local art camp children to paint the PXVNEO brand on the front of
the building located at 17 Second Avenue.
Local nonprofit, Barnstone Art for Kids volunteered to helm the project, planning the painting
and organizing students to complete the impressive mural.
“We were excited to involve the kids in such a high-profile project as part of our summer
programming,” said Sean Halloran, Barnstone Arts for Kids’ Executive Directo
r. “It was a unique
opportunity and one that they’ll remember collaborating on.”
Indeed, the artists (or anyone) can travel past the evolving wastewater treatment plant to
eyeball the mural and everyone can learn more about Phoenixville’s amazing new utility at
www.pxvneo.com.
