What is wastewater? Wastewater happens to be called sewage is it is the waste that is released by the locals. It is mostly water, 99.94 with little solid material. When it comes to your sewage, it will take five does to break it down and it has many diseases and germs contained inside it. Sewage is waste and the waste includes things like E Coli, which can seriously harm or make one sick. It also has things like minerals, metals, and nutrients. It includes things like ammonia and phosphorus.
There is usually a process that will remove all the waste from the water before it flows back into a body of water. When it comes to cleaning wastewater, the goal to the process is to reduce or remove some matter, nutrients, diseases, and parasites or pollutants. There are laws that control the process, because you can only release a certain amount of pollutants into a body of water before you are considered to be contaminating.
When it comes to treating your sewage, you will find that there is a preliminary and primary treatment. When it comes to the preliminary treatment stage, it will make sure that it takes out, separates, or grinds large particles. This is done so that you can protect the pumping equipment or other equipment used in the treatment process. The debris that is separated or screened out ends up being buried in a landfill.
During the primary treatment, it will take out the solids and greases. It will be placed in a holding tank for hours. Then when all the particles are settled to the bottom and the grease is floating, the bottom waste is sucked out and the top is skimmed into sludge tanks. Then once the water is clarified, it goes to the next stage. If your plant doesn't do this, then they must do a secondary treatment.
Secondary treatment is the process of when microorganisms are added to the wastewater so that the organic matter is absorbed. You may find that the plant uses a fixed film, suspended film, or lagoon systems. Fixed film systems take out things like rocks, sand, and plastic.
Suspended film systems are where the sludge is taken out of the wastewater and sent to a sludge treatment plant. Lagoon systems take full advantage of natural drying, where the water is placed in a large holding tank and allowed to evaporate its water content. At the end of this stage you should only have, the sludge particles left since all the water would have been evaporated.
