ATTLEBORO -- When Texas Instruments announced that it planned to sell its 260-acre corporate campus off Pleasant Street, one of biggest question marks was what to do with the company's multi-million-dollar industrial waste treatment plant.

The plant, designed to treat up to a million gallons a day of contaminated water from industrial processes, became a virtual orphan after TI sent almost all of its manufacturing operations overseas.

Only Engineered Materials Solutions, a small TI spin-off, and some vestigial TI manu facturing lines still require its services.

But now a new company, New Stream LLC, sees potential in the plant and plans to use it to treat off-site industrial processing waste, as well as serve customers within the former TI site.

The investment promises to keep alive an industrial treatment facility that could serve as a drawing card for other manufacturers . It could also preserve a source of revenue for the city, which receives fees for water discharged into the municipal sewer system.

New Stream President Sam Butterfield said the company began operating the plant as a contractor almost a year ago and became the plant's independent operator last December.

New Stream has already closed a deal to purchase the plant's equipment and plans to complete the purchase of the plant itself by the end of next month, Butterfield said.

Butterfield is a partner in the new business, along with John Theriault, a former TI employee and vice president of operations for the firm, marketing director Jessie Hanlon and Al Tucci, majority stockholder in Cyn Environmental Co.

Butterfield also operates Butterfield Environmental Corp. of Plymouth, an environmental consulting and service firm.

New Stream employs 10 people, most of them holdovers from TI.

The sale of the plant is one of two deals announced recently involving the former TI property, currently owned by Preferred Real Estate Investments.

BOC Group has leased the CSX spur rail yard building for 10 years, according to an article in Commercial Property News.

A representative for Preferred could not be reached Monday.

Under federal permits, the former TI treatment plant can treat up to 1 million gallons a day, with as much as 250,000 gallons being discharged into the city sewer system for eventual treatment by the city's advanced water treatment plant. Water was also sent to Cooper's Pond under a federal surface discharge permit, Butterfield said.

The company does not expect to discharge water to the pond in the future.

Currently, treatment flow is at a trickle compared with previous amounts. Butterfield and New Stream hope to supplement the flow by treating non-hazardous industrial wastes brought in by rail and truck.

Non-hazardous wastes are loosely defined as those that are non-toxic and non-radioactive, he said.

Customers of the new plant are likely to be food processors and manufacturers who currently have to truck their liquid waste to out-of-state plants, Butterfield said. With energy costs escalating, he said, it's likely that local plants will look kindly on a solution that requires less hauling.

Truck shipments of untreated water have already commenced. Butterfield said the company hopes to add rail shipments in the future.

No septic wastes will be treated at the former TI facility, he said.

The purchase price of the plant was not disclosed.