Our Responsibility

Water in Tampa Wholesale Nursery’s reservoir comes primarily from its daily allotment of groundwater, as well as collected rainwater and irrigation runoff. But 80,000 gallons of water a day comes from an unusual source.

One of the largest seafood packaging companies in the United States, Tampa Bay Fisheries, is just a mile from the nursery. The plant produces about 1.7 million pounds of seafood a week and uses approximately 200,000 gallons of water daily. While it has its own wastewater treatment plant and spray fields, its growth made it necessary for the company to seek additional ways of disposing of excess water. The company considered expanding its existing spray fields, but the land it would require made it impracticable. Instead, Tampa Bay Fisheries began exploring a partnership with Tampa Wholesale Nursery.

With us being a large user of water, it was only good business sense to reuse this water,” said Robert Paterson, president and chief executive officer of Tampa Bay Fisheries. “That’s when we began to talk with Tampa Wholesale Nursery about processing our water to the state where they could then reuse it on their ornamental plant nursery and, at the same time, make it not necessary for them to pump that amount of water out of the ground.”

With assistance from the Southwest Florida Water Management District, the fisheries upgraded its waste treatment facility. The Environmental Protection Commission of Hillsborough County, the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services, the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, and the University of Florida’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences all contributed greatly to the success of the plan.

As the water leaves the seafood processing plant it goes through a screening process before going into Tampa Bay Fisheries’ wastewater treatment plant. From there it flows into a treatment pond where it is held until it is pumped through a mile-long pipeline into Tampa Wholesale Nursery’s two-acre reservoir. Since implementing the new process, the amount of water Tampa Wholesale Nurseries draws from the aquifer has decreased by 40 percent.

The benefit has been that there are approximately 80,000 gallons of water a day that we are not pumping out of the aquifer, which has been very beneficial for the environment,” said Steve Davis, vice president and general manager of Tampa Wholesale Nursery.