Waste Water Treatment

Waste Water Treatment best practices

Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM)

Design of water management systems have many like best practices to help create a system design which can handle environmental changes and liabilities to make the system more resilient. 

• Do not confine your design based on retrofitting constraints

• Always make your processes redundant and diverse allowing options for the best method deployed to handle environmental changes as well as just a backup system in case of failure of your alternate method 

Learn more about Integrated Water Resource Management

Types of Digestors

• Anerobic Digestors - enclosure of digestion which captures the methane as the flocculant is broken down by bacteria. The facility usually uses the methane to generate power for the Waste water treatment process powering pumps, conveyors, centrifuges to lessen the overall cost of the process lessening the overhead of electricity.

Power generation / usage laws for waste water treatment anerobic digestors: In Pennsylvania their is a law which prevents excess power generated in the Anerobic digestion process from being sold back to the grid.

More dangerous atmosphere to work in: Safety liability for employees where the frequent clogging of pipes in waste water treatment process which requires frequent maintenance to unclog becomes a dangerous environment with boiling flocculant making very hot pipes and valves and the enclosed methane makes an employee ill while working inside the enclosed areas.   

• Aerobic Digestors - open to air pools of flocculant which take 3 days to develop bacteria to help break down the flocculant, then the process has a secondary pool which further breaks down the human excrement

This is the older lower cost method but is reliable and can also act as a redundant method used as an alternate or backup while the Anerobic Digestors cool to repair or maintain.

Waste Water Treatment Process

I did not notice how this was done at this facility.

7. PH treatment - the resulting dry cake is then mixed with Limein a mixed hopper to provide a neutral 7 PH fertilizer

8. soils / fertilizer Removal from site and use - the fertilizer from human waste is then conveyed to dump trucks which bring the fertilizer to farms which use the fertilizer on secondary crops (fertilizer which helps grow feed for livestock/  it is not directly used to fertilize crops we eat in the US.)