Just as the waters of the Great Sacandaga Lake draw tourists to the area, the abundant water resources of Fulton County attract manufacturers. Water abounds in Gloversville, which has four reservoirs providing 710,000,000 gallons of storage capacity.

The county processes wastewater, including whey, from local manufacturers, at the GloversvilleJohnstown Joint Wastewater Treatment Facility (GJJWTF), which has a designed capacity of 13.8 million gallons per day of residential and industrial wastewater. In addition, high-strength whey from the local dairy industry is piped to an anaerobic digester which generates methane gas. This renewable methane gas fuels a combined heat and power system. GJJWTF’s state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant is the first and only wastewater treatment plant in the United States that produces 100 percent of its own electrical power needs and sells excess electrical power to the grid.

In 2019, the facility processed 387,636,401 gallons of wastewater from industrial sources. Since the dairy industry represented most of the industrial load, the GJJWTF designed and constructed a unique dairy wastewater processing unit to handle the dairy’s high-strength washwater, a combination of cleaning agents and dairy product residues. As a result of this future planning, GJJWTF operates at 50 percent of its designed load capacity for biological oxygen demand (BOD) and total suspended solids (TSS).