Some people say wastewater treatment plants might not be doing a good job taking out pollutants like household chemicals and pharmaceuticals.
(Photo courtesy of the US EPA)
A new study is looking at just
how well wastewater treatment
plants remove household chemicals
and pharmaceuticals from water.
Samara Freemark reports
on why some researchers are worried
that the plants aren’t doing a good
enough job:
Transcript
A new study is looking at just
how well wastewater treatment
plants remove household chemicals
and pharmaceuticals from water.
Samara Freemark reports
on why some researchers are worried
that the plants aren’t doing a good
enough job:
Most wastewater treatment plants clean water with a mix of chemicals and bacteria. But that process is decades-old. And it was designed mostly to deal with industrial pollutants.
Some people say treatment plants might not be doing a good job taking out other pollutants like household chemicals and pharmaceuticals. In fact, the treatment process can actually cause many of these pollutants to mutate – for example, some detergents break down into compounds that cause reproductive problems.
Anthony Hay is studying the issue at Cornell University.
“Hopefully they’re degraded into something non-toxic, but in some cases microbial degradation of some pollutants can actually make things worse. We need to understand what those changed products do, how they behave, and what risks they might pose.”
That’s what Hay hopes his study will help clarify.
A one day snapshot of wastewater from 96 cities and towns in Oregon shows that meth was found in many samples - not just larger urban areas (Photo courtesy of the journal Addiction)
A new report tracks illegal drug use by looking at wastewater. Rebecca Williams has more:
Transcript
A new report tracks illegal drug use by looking at wastewater. Rebecca Williams has more:
A lot of studies have found prescription drugs people take end up in wastewater, and now researchers are also tracking illegal drugs that way.
Caleb Banta-Green is the lead author of the report in the journal Addiction.
He studied a one day snapshot of wastewater from 96 cities and towns in Oregon.
He says cocaine and ecstasy were much more likely to be used in larger urban areas. But they found meth everywhere, even after a crackdown to make it harder to get the ingredients to make it.
“That sort of appetite or interest for methamphetamine has been built up in those rural areas and it looks like that use is continuing and it’s also being found in urban areas.”
He says it’s not clear if trace amounts of these drugs might eventually end up in drinking water. But previous studies indicate other kinds of legal drugs can be detected in sources of drinking water.
A new study out of Baylor University finds our pharmaceuticals are getting into fish and other aquatic life (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)
There’s something fishy with pharmaceuticals. Lester Graham reports researchers find the drugs we take end up in some fish:
Transcript
There’s something fishy with pharmaceuticals. Lester Graham reports researchers find the drugs we take end up in some fish:
If you’re a fish living anywhere near a wastewater treatment plant, you’re swimming in drugs.
A new study out of Baylor University finds our pharmaceuticals are getting into fish and other aquatic life.
Bryan Brooks is one of the researchers.
“In many cases we really don’t know the full potential effects of these kind of drugs on aquatic life.”
This is just the latest research that shows the stuff we take passes through us, and ends up in the water.
There’s not a lot you can do about that, but Brooks says at least don’t flush unused medications down the toilet.
“Perhaps the most appropriate way to dispose of unused medications is directly to landfill when it’s properly packaged.”
The FDA says, mix the drugs with something nasty like kitty litter or old coffee grounds so kids won’t be interested. Then put it all in a sealed bag or can with a lid so it doesn’t leak out of a garbage bag.
Roger Ruan directs the Center for BioRefining at the University of Minnesota. He's experimenting with algae that grow quickly in the nutrients in wastewater. He says the oil-rich algae are a potential source of biodiesel. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)
Robert Polta is research director at the wastewater treatment plant for St. Paul, Minnesota. He's working with researchers from the University of Minnesota to design an integrated system in which wastewater feeds algae, which is turned into biodiesel.
(Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)
This experimental hydrothermal converter enables researchers at the University of Minnesota to convert algae oil into biofuel without having to separate it from water.
(Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)
When people talk about bio-fuels,
they usually mean ethanol from corn or diesel
fuel from soybeans. But there are lots of
possibilities. One of them is algae. Algae
contains a lot of oil. The US Department of
Energy experimented with algae for nearly
twenty years after the oil crisis of the 1970s.
But with fuel prices so high, scientists around
the world are looking at algae again. Stephanie
Hemphill reports one researcher thinks
he’s figured out how to grow lots of algae, fast:
Transcript
When people talk about bio-fuels,
they usually mean ethanol from corn or diesel
fuel from soybeans. But there are lots of
possibilities. One of them is algae. Algae
contains a lot of oil. The US Department of
Energy experimented with algae for nearly
twenty years after the oil crisis of the 1970s.
But with fuel prices so high, scientists around
the world are looking at algae again. Stephanie
Hemphill reports one researcher thinks
he’s figured out how to grow lots of algae, fast:
Roger Ruan has been trying for years to figure out how to turn algae into diesel,
economically. He’s the director of the Center for BioRefining at the University of
Minnesota.
Ruan says there’s no question it can be done; some people are already producing algae
oil. They’re growing it in open ponds. It’s used for pharmaceuticals, food supplements,
and cosmetics.
“Right now, based on an open pond system, per acre per year, you can easily get 5,000
gallons of oil, and soybean would probably give you 50. That’s 100 times difference.”
So algae can be far more efficient at producing diesel fuel than soybeans. But how do
you grow enough algae to make a dent in the nation’s energy demand?
Ruan is turning to an unlikely partner: the local sewage treatment plant.
“Wastewater has lot of nutrients: phosphorus, nitrogen, are all available in wastewater,
and actually you spend lot of money to remove these from wastewater, so if we can kill
two birds with one stone, that would be the best, and that’s what we’re hoping to do.”
(sound of treatment plant)
St. Paul, Minnesota’s sewage treatment plant sits on the bank of the Mississippi River.
The basement of the building where the solids are separated from the liquids is a
brightly lit space. It’s filled with big steel pipes and valves and tanks.
Off to one side, Ruan’s team is setting up a rack of aquariums – the future home of juicy
green algae. When everything is ready, some of the partially-treated waste will be
diverted into the tanks, where it will feed the algae.
The waste is still full of stuff that’s bad for the river, but good for algae.
“It’s got a fair amount of phosphorus, and some ammonia nitrogen that the algae are
going to need.”
Bob Polta is manager of research and development at the treatment plant.
It’s easy to see why he likes this idea: every day the facility has to remove 4 tons of
phosphorus and more than 16 tons of nitrogen from the waste stream.
The algae experiment, if it works, will allow them to do some of that removal in a more
cost-effective way. And this could be the answer to Roger Ruan’s problem of trying to
create enough algae to make enough oil to compete with petroleum diesel.
Polta says there’s a big potential, both for cleaning wastewater and for producing
energy in the same place.
“All the wastewater treatment ponds in the small communities around the state are
essentially using algae to treat wastewater; it’s just that they’re not being harvested. It’s
just that we’re getting two goals together here, and two research groups, one is essentially taking algae and
harvesting the oil and making biodiesel, and the other is using algae as a treatment
scheme, and to see if we can make this thing really fit.”
Polta expects by the end of the year he’ll know more about whether this is a practical
idea.
Roger Ruan says within six-to-ten years someone, somewhere, will be producing diesel
from algae on a commercial scale.
For The Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.
George Washington's dentures. (Photo courtesy of the National Institute of Dental and Craniofacial Research)
Dental offices are producing higher levels than
expected of a toxic form of mercury. Rebecca Williams
reports on the findings of a new study:
Transcript
Dental offices are producing higher levels than
expected of a toxic form of mercury. Rebecca Williams
reports on the findings of a new study:
When dentists remove fillings, most of the mercury in the fillings is
trapped in a filter in the spit drains. But some of it does get through.
Mercury in its simplest form is not as toxic as what’s called methyl
mercury. That forms when mercury is exposed to certain bacteria. Methyl
mercury is very toxic even in small amounts.
Researchers at the University of Illinois say they found much higher levels
of methyl mercury in wastewater from dental offices than they expected. In
fact – they say they were the highest levels of methyl mercury ever reported
in an environmental water sample. And that toxic mercury is eventually
released into the environment.
The findings were published online in the journal Environmental Science and
Technology.
To put this all in perspective – the authors say the amount of mercury
coming from dental offices is really, really tiny compared to mercury coming
from coal-fired power plants.
Millions of gallons of wastewater is produced by cleaning operations at the Welch's. Some of the sugar in the wastewater is being used to make electricity. (Photo by Lisa Ann Pinkerton)
Tiny single-celled organisms could become the giants of
energy production in the near future. Scientists are
using bacteria to convert waste into hydrogen energy.
Lisa Ann Pinkerton recently watched a vat of microbes
turning wastewater into electricity:
Transcript
Tiny single-celled organisms could become the giants of
energy production in the near future. Scientists are
using bacteria to convert waste into hydrogen energy.
Lisa Ann Pinkerton recently watched a vat of microbes
turning wastewater into electricity:
More than 17 million gallons of grape juice is sitting in what amounts to be a huge
refrigerator. It’s Welch’s grape juice ready to be bottled. About the size of a
gymnasium, the cooler’s covered with tile and the juice is stored in big
stainless steel tanks.
Paul Zorzie is the plant manager. He says they have to regularly clean the
tanks. And first they rinse them with water to clean out the remaining juice:
“Juice would be anywhere from 10 to 20 percent
sugar, so what goes down the drain might be .3.”
Since there’s still a little bit of grape juice and sugar in that wastewater, it can
still be used. Behind the plant, the faint smell of grape juice wafts from a
bubbling tank of wastewater. It looks kinda like a purple jacuzzi. In a nearby
shed, Gannon University Professor Rick Diz has built a pilot system to covert
the sugar in that grape juice wastewater into electricity. With the help of the
Ohio biotechnology firm NanoLogix, he’s coaxing millions of microorganisms
to consume the sugar and produce hydrogen:
“The sort of bacteria that produce hydrogen and
actually other bio fuels of one sort or another just
love sugar. Just like for people, sugar is the easiest
thing to digest for many organisms.”
Diz says if you keep introducing food that sugar from the watered-down grape
juice, the microbe population will double every 24-48 minutes. He’s trying to
keep the conditions just right to encourage hydrogen-producing microbes to
grow, while at the same time discouraging methane producing ones. They feed
on hydrogen, and it can be a careful balancing act.
When the microbes produce enough gas, the pressure trips a switch and the
hydrogen is pumped into a slender, high-pressure holding tank:
“And so far we’re been quite successful. We are in fact
producing hydrogen gas, we have used that gas to run an
engine that generated electricity for us on just a
demonstration purpose.”
You can imagine, there are all sorts of industries that create waste sugar
water, from fruit juices, and sodas to candy makers. So there’s lots of
potential to generate hydrogen and then electricity from residual sugar in
wastewater.
But, Diz says the Welch’s system is the only one in the US to successfully do
this outside a laboratory setting. The Welch’s plant in Erie, Pennsylvania
spends about one-and-a-half million dollars a year for electricity and
wastewater treatment each. It hopes a large-scale project that Diz will build
this spring can put a dent in those bills:
“Welch’s is certainly one of the first companies that we’ve hear of who’s expressed
interest in producing hydrogen from microorganisms.”
That’s Patrick Serfass at the National Hydrogen Association. He says
developing renewable ways to generate hydrogen is ideal for a greener energy
sector. But the methods have to be economically worth it:
“The trick is to make the leap from the laboratory to real world applications, and using the hydrogen to either produce
electricity or meet some other energy need.”
Serfass says if Welch’s makes good on it’s plans to built a large demonstration
bio reactor it’ll be a major step for renewable hydrogen and an example to the
rest of the nation’s over 200 beverage makers and bottlers.
For the Environment Report, I’m Lisa Ann Pinkerton.
Hog manure being injected into the ground and tilled under. The manure fertilizes the crops, but if too much is applied it can foul up waterways. (Photo by Mark Brush)
Transcript
(sound of giant fans)
About a thousand cows are in this building, eating, lolling around, and waiting for the next round of milking.
There’s a sharp smell of manure hanging in the air. Big fans are blowing to keep the cows cool, and to keep the air circulated.
Stephan Vander Hoff runs this dairy along with his siblings. He says these big farms are good for consumers:
“We’ve got something here and we’ve been able to do it in such a way that we’re still producing at the same cost that we were fifteen years ago. It costs more now for a gallon of gas than a gallon of milk. And so, that’s something to be proud of.”
Vander Hoff’s dairy produces enough milk to fill seven tanker trucks everyday. They also produce a lot of waste. The cows in this building are penned in by metal gates. They can’t go outside. So the manure and urine that would normally pile up is washed away by water.
Tens of thousands of gallons of wastewater are sent to big lagoons outside. Eventually, the liquefied manure is spread onto nearby farm fields. It’s a challenge for these farmers to deal with these large pools of liquid manure. The farther they have to haul it, the more expensive it is for them. Almost all of them put the manure onto farm fields.
It’s good for the crops if it’s done right, but if too much manure is put on the land, it can wash into streams and creeks. In fact, this dairy has been cited by the state of Michigan for letting their manure get into nearby waterways.
(sound of roadway)
Lynn Henning keeps a close eye on Vander Hoff’s dairy.
(car door opening and closing)
She steps from her car with a digital camera, and a device that measures water quality.
(sound of crickets and walking through the brush)
She weaves her way down to the edge of this creek.
“This is the area where we got E. coli at 7.5 million.”
High E. coli levels mean the water might be polluted with dangerous pathogens. Lynn Henning is testing the creek today because she saw farmers spreading liquid manure on the fields yesterday. Henning is a farmer turned environmental activist. She works for the Sierra Club and drives all over the state taking water samples and pictures near big livestock farms.
Henning says she got involved because more of these large animal farms expanded into her community. She says when the farmers spread the liquid manure, it can make life in the country pretty difficult:
“The odor is horrendous when they’re applying –we have fly infestations–we have hydrogen sulfide in the air that nobody knows is there because you can’t always smell it. We have to live in fear that every glass of water that we drink is going to be contaminated at some point.”
Water contamination from manure is a big concern. The liquid manure can contain nasty pathogens and bacteria.
Joan Rose is a microbiologist at Michigan State University.
“If animal wastes are not treated properly and we have large concentrations of animal waste going onto land and then via rainfall or other runoff events entering into our water – there can be outbreaks associated with this practice.”
Rose tested water in this area and found high levels of cryptosporidium that likely came from cattle. Cryptosporidium is the same bug that killed people in Milwaukee back in 1993. Rose says livestock farmers need to think more about keeping these pathogens out of the water. But she says they don’t get much support from the state and researchers on how best to do that.
For now, the farmers have to come up with their own solutions.
(sound of treatment plant)
Three years ago, the state of Michigan sued Stephen Vander Hoff’s dairy for multiple waste violations. The Vander Hoff’s settled the case with the state and agreed to build a one million dollar treatment system. But Vander Hoff isn’t convinced that his dairy was at fault, and thinks that people’s concerns over his dairy are overblown:
“If we had an issue or had done something wrong the first people that want to correct it is us. We live in this area. So why would we do anything to harm it?”
Vander Hoff is upbeat about the new treatment system. He says it will save the dairy money in the long run.
The Sierra Club’s Lynn Henning says she’s skeptical of the new treatment plant. She’ll continue to take water samples and put pressure on these farms to handle their manure better. In the end, she doesn’t think these big farms have a place in agriculture. She’d rather see farms go back to the old style of dairying, where the cows are allowed to graze, and the number of animals isn’t so concentrated.
But farm researchers say because consumers demand cheap prices, these large farms are here to stay and there will be more of them. Because of this, the experts say we can expect more conflicts in rural America.
Colin Horwitz is a researcher at Carnegie Mellon. He's working on a chemical that will break down pollution released by pulp and paper mills.
(Photo by Reid Frazier)
Green chemistry looks a lot like the kind of chemistry most of us learned in high school. This is an experiment on a pollution-eating catalyst being conducted by a grad student at Carnegie Mellon’s Green Oxidation Lab.
(Photo by Reid Frazier)
Modern chemistry is everywhere – the paint on our walls, the ink on the morning newspaper, and the plastics in our computers.
Problem is – the chemicals are also in our air, water, and food. Reid Frazier visited a chemist who is trying to re-think how chemicals are made:
Transcript
Modern chemistry is everywhere: the paint on our walls, the ink on the
morning newspaper, and the plastics in our computers. Problem is – the
chemicals are also in our air, water, and food. The Environment
Report’s Reid Frazier visited a chemist who is trying to re-think how
chemicals are made:
This room looks and sounds like a chemical lab anywhere in the world.
Trays full of vials sit atop machines with blinking lights. Notebooks
filled with hand-written numbers sit next to computer screens. But this
isn’t a typical chemistry lab.
Evan Beach is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University in
Pittsburgh. He works at the Institute for Green Oxidation Chemistry, or
Green Ox. Beach is analyzing wastewater from a pulp and paper mill:
“We try and work with as close to the real pollution as we can. We
actually have the paper mill ship the stuff to us.”
Beach is working on a chemical that he hopes will clean up the
wastewater before it hits rivers and streams.
The Green Ox lab is run by Terry Collins. His career as a green chemist
started as a college student in his native New Zealand. He worked
during summers at a plant that made refrigerators. One summer, he
discovered that workers using a cleaning agent were all getting sick.
“Just in lunch with them I’d hear about their headaches and their blood
noses and I realized, my goodness, they’re using an awful lot of these
organic solvents, and if there’s any benzene there, these are signature
benzene intoxication conditions, early stage.”
Collins calculated the workers were getting slowly poisoned by benzene,
a chemical that’s known to cause cancer. He told company officials
about it and they promised to replace it.
“So I went a way, nine months later, I felt an obligation I went back
and checked they had made no change so I went and I got every paper I
could and I took it and dropped it on the chief chemist and I can still
remember his jaw hitting the floor when I opened the door and gave it
to him, I then tried to get the institute of chemistry to help and they
told me not to even bother going to the health department, that they
wouldn’t help, and they were probably right, and I just felt immensely
frustrated by the situation.”
After this experience, Collins decided to focus his research on
reducing the harm caused by modern chemicals. He started designing a
chemical catalyst in the 1980s. When combined with hydrogen peroxide,
the catalyst eats through long chains of harmful chemicals. It could
potentially clean up the paper, textile, and plastics industries. It
could also curb pollution found in almost every home in America: The
water coming out of your tap.
“If you have a glass of water in most American cities you get some
Prozac and you get many other things as well that come from the
pharmaceutical industry.”
The drugs can be found in trace amounts in tapwater. Their effect on
human health is still unknown. But these drugs are being flushed into
the environment and they don’t break down easily. Once they enter
rivers and streams, these chemicals can last for decades. Scientists
believe they might be affecting fertility in some animals. Collins and
his colleagues believe the catalyst they’re developing could break down
these drugs once they hit the environment.
Some believe all chemists should take a more holistic look at the
compounds they make. Sasha Ryabov is a physical chemist who works in
Collins’ lab. He worked as a traditional chemist at Moscow State
University in his native Russia. Ryabov converted to green chemistry
when he came to Green Ox. Since he’s made the switch, he thinks that
all chemists should consider themselves green:
“It’s not the future field… It’s a natural part that cannot be
separated. The green chemistry we are thinking should be part of
chemistry as a whole.”
While academics like Collins are forging new grounds in their field,
some big companies have started to follow suit by using more
environmentally-friendly products. One hitch is that the federal
government provides little funding for research in the field. A bill
before congress could boost funding for green chemistry. Regardless of
funding, Collins says all chemists must do their part to address some
of the problems their discipline has helped create:
“If you’re a chemist, and you have this information, it’s a burden to
carry. But we have to deal with it, we have no choice; we have to look
after the children of future generations.”
For the sake of those future generations, Collins hopes more chemists
see the value of taking the long view when they’re in the laboratory.
The Army is beginning the final phase to destroy a deadly chemical
weapon that’s been stored in Newport, Indiana since the 1960s. The
Army says the chemical weapon “VX” has been neutralized. Now the army
is shipping wastewater from the neutralization process to an
incinerator in Texas. Jim Meadows reports that some critics say the
wastewater is not safe for transport:
Transcript
The Army is beginning the final phase to destroy a deadly chemical
weapon that’s been stored in Newport, Indiana since the 1960s. The
Army says the chemical weapon “VX” has been neutralized. Now the army
is shipping wastewater from the neutralization process to an
incinerator in Texas. Jim Meadows reports that some critics say the
wastewater is not safe for transport:
Mitch Williams is with the Chemical Weapons Working Group. He says
civilian workers at the Newport, Indiana facility say VX and a by-
product, Experimental Agent 2192, have been re-forming in the
wastewater.
Williams says an accident during transport or incineration could poison
people. Army Colonel Jesse Barber oversees the VX destruction
process. He says the wastewater is free of VX and its by-products:
“I know number one, we don’t have detectable agent and number two, we don’t have
detectable EA 2192. Before I take it out of the reactor, I ensure we make our clearance criteria.”
The Army plans to have all the VX destroyed by next year. The Chemical
Weapons Working Group is going to court to try to stop the process.
Phragmites, or "common reed," is being used to treat wastewater in Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. (Photo by Adam Allington.)
"Sludge," or wastewater, being delivered to the phragmites in Tivoli, New York. (Photo by Adam Allington.)
After the phragmites consume the liquid in wastewater, the remaining matter is a rich, fertile compost. (Photo by Adam Allington.)
Dan Fleuriel is director of wastewater treatment for Shelburne Falls. (Photo by Adam Allington.)
Nature is often full of practical solutions to real-world problems. Take the case of sewage and wastewater treatment: for decades engineers have used mechanical means to process wastewater before disposing of the end product in landfills. It turns out that phragmites, a robust wetland reed, can do the job just as quickly and for a fraction of the cost. Adam Allington has more:
Transcript
Nature is often full of practical solutions to real-world problems. Take the case of sewage and wastewater treatment: for decades engineers have used mechanical means to process wastewater before disposing of the end product in landfills. It turns out that phragmites, a robust wetland reed, can do the job just as quickly and for a fraction of the cost. Adam Allington has more:
Brandee Nelson is wearing knee-high rubber boots. She’s wading out into a tiny patch of reeds gently swaying in the wind. They’re planted in a goopy substance that appears to be mud, but is actually…
“Sludge. We’re standing ankle deep in sludge. Sludge is the leftover solids from the conventional sewage treatment process. Things that are very organic in nature, but thin enough that you can’t really scoop it out with your hand. It’s not the consistency of yogurt, it’s more like a thin milkshake.”
That thin milkshake used to be the solid stuff that you flush down the drain. Brandee is an environmental engineer working for the village of Tivoli, New York. Today she is monitoring the growth of two recently planted reed beds. The reeds are an invasive wetland species called “phragmites,” or “common reed”. In most places these reeds are a problem because they crowd-out native plants, but here they’re doing a job.
“The whole reason to have the reed beds is really to get the largest volume reduction of your waste product. Because the sludge tends to have so much water in it, and phragmites sucks up an enormous amount of water. This bed, we’re standing in it now, this bed will be totally dry in one day.”
Even though Tivoli is relatively small at about 1000 residents, the village still produces 100,000 gallons of waste water every day. That waste water translates into a whole lot of sludge, which Tivoli then has to haul to landfills.
“We’ll probably be saving about $45,000 on hauling fees.”
Tom Cordier is deputy mayor for the village of Tivoli.
“At one point we had drying beds, and it took about a week for them to dry, and then we would come in with our backhoe and take out the dried material. But every time we got ready to do that, it would rain and we would have to start the whole process over again, and then in the wintertime it was always freezing, and finally we got to the point where we had to have it trucked away.”
Before they planted the reeds, Tivoli had to remove their liquid sludge once a month. When the reeds are fully grown, the village won’t need to haul anything away for over 10 years. But if reed bed technology is so efficient, why isn’t everyone using it?
The answer has a lot to do with the predictability of mechanics, versus the variables of biology.
“One of the issues with the reed beds is it’s a biological process. Engineers like to typically do things that are mechanical, things that fit into formulas.”
Dan Fleuriel is director of the wastewater treatment for the town of Shelburne Falls, Massachusetts. Shelburne Falls began experimenting with reed bed technology back in the early 1990’s. Unlike the short 3 foot reeds in Tivoli, the mature reeds in Shelburne Falls tower some 6 feet over us as we walk through them.
“We’ve been applying to these reed beds since 1993. It’s been very good for us because we’ve gone from a very time consuming process of de-watering sludge to something that we pretty much leave hands-off that we can rely on.”
Functionality and reliability: they’re fundamental to any civil engineering project. But Brandee Nelson notes that Tivoli’s reed beds also make sense from an environmental perspective.
“This waste product, 150,000 gallons of it, used to go to a landfill somewhere else and it wasn’t our problem any more. Now what we’re able to do is manage that waste product here on site in a relatively small footprint using a natural technology, a very low-energy technology, and in the end we’ll end up with a product that we can use for village landscaping projects.”
Tivoli’s reed beds are expected to reach full maturity by next summer. Success of the project is being followed closely by neighboring towns, who are also considering a switch to reed bed treatment plants.
Some people say wastewater treatment plants might not be doing a good job taking out pollutants like household chemicals and pharmaceuticals. (Photo courtesy of the US EPA)
