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chfourenergysolutions · 6 months ago

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Types of Effluent Treatment Plants: Choosing the Right One for Your Industry

Effluent treatment plants (ETPs) play a crucial role in managing wastewater and industrial effluents. These plants are designed to treat wastewater before it is discharged into natural water bodies or reused in industrial processes, ensuring compliance with environmental regulations and reducing pollution. With different industries generating different types of effluents, selecting the right type of effluent treatment plant is vital for achieving optimal treatment efficiency and cost-effectiveness. In this article, we will explore the various types of effluent treatment plants and provide guidance on how to choose the right one for your industry.

1. Primary Treatment Plants

Primary treatment plants are designed to remove large solids, oils, and grease from the wastewater. This treatment stage typically involves physical processes such as screening, sedimentation, and flotation. The goal is to separate larger particles and floating materials from the water before further treatment stages.

Key Features:

Removes suspended solids, oils, and grease

Involves basic physical processes like sedimentation and flotation

Suitable for industries with low pollution loads and non-toxic effluents

Best for:

Food processing

Paper and pulp industries

Textile industries (for effluents with minimal chemical contamination)

While primary treatment is often the first stage in a multi-stage treatment system, it is rarely sufficient for complete effluent treatment in industries with more complex wastewater.

2. Secondary Treatment Plants

Secondary treatment plants are designed to remove dissolved and colloidal organic matter that primary treatment may not address. This stage primarily involves biological processes where microorganisms break down organic pollutants. Secondary treatment systems include activated sludge systems, aerated lagoons, and trickling filters.

Key Features:

Biological treatment process using microorganisms

Removes biodegradable organic matter

Often includes aeration or biological filters

Best for:

Municipal wastewater treatment

Chemical manufacturing

Pharmaceutical industries

Secondary treatment plants are suitable for industries where organic pollutants are the main concern, and where a higher level of treatment is needed after primary processes.

3. Tertiary Treatment Plants

Tertiary treatment plants provide the final stage of effluent treatment, focusing on removing remaining contaminants that were not eliminated during primary and secondary treatments. Tertiary treatment often involves advanced filtration, chemical treatment, and disinfection methods like UV radiation, ozone treatment, or activated carbon filtration.

Key Features:

Advanced filtration and chemical treatment

Removes fine particles, heavy metals, nutrients, and pathogens

Suitable for industries with stringent discharge standards

Best for:

Textile and dye industries (due to high chemical content)

Metal finishing industries (to remove heavy metals)

Pharmaceutical and healthcare industries (for disinfecting and removing toxins)

Tertiary treatment is often required when industries discharge effluents into sensitive ecosystems or when effluent reuse is intended. It ensures that water quality meets the highest environmental standards.

4. Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) Plants

Zero Liquid Discharge (ZLD) plants are designed to treat wastewater in such a way that no liquid waste is discharged. The goal is to recover and reuse as much water as possible, leaving behind only solid waste. ZLD plants typically include a combination of primary, secondary, and tertiary treatment processes, followed by evaporation or membrane filtration to concentrate the remaining waste into solids.

Key Features:

Ensures no liquid effluent is discharged

Focuses on water recovery and reuse

Involves advanced technologies like reverse osmosis and evaporation

Best for:

Power plants and refineries (where large volumes of wastewater are generated)

Textile industries (with high water usage and effluent discharge)

Chemical and pharmaceutical industries (to reduce environmental impact)

ZLD systems are ideal for industries with high water consumption or those operating in regions with limited water resources, where water recovery and reuse are essential.

5. Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) Systems

Membrane Bioreactor (MBR) systems combine biological treatment with membrane filtration, offering an efficient and compact solution for wastewater treatment. The MBR system uses biological processes to treat the wastewater, followed by a membrane filtration system to separate solids from the treated water. This method is particularly useful for industries that need high-quality effluent treatment with minimal space requirements.

Key Features:

Combines biological treatment with membrane filtration

High-efficiency separation of solids and treated water

Compact and modular design

Best for:

Municipal and industrial wastewater treatment

Food and beverage industries (with complex wastewater)

Oil and gas industries (for treating produced water)

MBR systems are ideal for industries that require high-quality effluent with minimal footprint, and they offer excellent results in removing suspended solids, organic matter, and pathogens.

6. Electrocoagulation Systems

Electrocoagulation is an electrochemical process that uses electrical currents to destabilize and aggregate contaminants in wastewater, making it easier to remove them. The process involves the use of electrodes to generate coagulants in situ, which help to separate heavy metals, oils, and suspended solids from the water.

Key Features:

Electrochemical process for coagulating and removing contaminants

Effective for removing heavy metals, oils, and other pollutants

Can be used as a primary or secondary treatment step

Best for:

Metal processing and electroplating industries

Textile and dye industries

Oil and gas industries

Electrocoagulation is an effective solution for industries dealing with highly contaminated wastewater that contains heavy metals or oils, and it can often be integrated with other treatment systems.

7. Chemical Treatment Plants

Chemical treatment plants use chemicals to treat effluents by neutralizing harmful substances, precipitating contaminants, or oxidizing organic matter. Common chemical treatments include coagulation, flocculation, and neutralization. These plants are particularly useful for industries that produce highly acidic or alkaline effluents or those containing toxic chemicals.

Key Features:

Uses chemicals to neutralize or precipitate contaminants

Effective for treating highly acidic or alkaline effluents

Often combined with other treatment methods for enhanced efficiency

Best for:

Chemical manufacturing

Paper and pulp industries (for removing lignin and other contaminants)

Pharmaceuticals and petrochemical industries

Chemical treatment plants are ideal for industries that generate effluents with a high concentration of chemicals, requiring precise control and neutralization of contaminants.

How to Choose the Right Effluent Treatment Plant for Your Industry

Selecting the right type of effluent treatment plant depends on several factors, including the nature and volume of wastewater, the level of treatment required, and environmental regulations. Here are some key considerations:

Effluent Characteristics: Understand the composition of your effluent, including the types of contaminants (organic, inorganic, toxic, etc.), pH levels, and temperature. This will help determine whether primary, secondary, tertiary, or specialized treatments are necessary.

Regulatory Requirements: Ensure that the selected treatment system complies with local environmental regulations regarding wastewater discharge and reuse. Some industries may need to meet stringent discharge standards, requiring advanced treatment technologies.

Water Reuse Potential: If water reuse is a priority for your industry, a ZLD or MBR system might be the best choice. These systems allow for maximum water recovery and minimize environmental impact.

Cost and Space Considerations: Consider the operational costs, space availability, and maintenance requirements of the treatment plant. For industries with limited space, compact systems like MBR may be more suitable.

Scalability and Flexibility: Choose a treatment plant that can scale with your industry’s growth and adapt to changing effluent volumes and characteristics.

Conclusion

Effluent treatment plants are essential for industries aiming to reduce environmental impact and comply with regulatory standards. Understanding the various types of treatment plants—ranging from primary and secondary to advanced solutions like ZLD and MBR—will help you choose the most appropriate system for your industry. By selecting the right treatment technology, you can optimize effluent management, reduce pollution, and contribute to sustainable water use and environmental protection.

#effluent treatment plant #industrial effluent treatment plant

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dutchiedirtmoving · 8 months ago

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A Multifaceted Solution for Construction Needs

When preparing for your dream home construction, it is essential to dig the building pad to build a strong structure. This process often involves moving tons of soil from one place to another using big machines. Therefore, you must select one of the leading concrete contractors Lethbridge that meets all the construction needs before you begin constructing your house, office building, or commercial shop. You can look for the following services before starting the construction of your house. Land preparation Land preparation involves digging the base for the construction of houses, small facilities, and even tall buildings. It often involves heavy machines to clear the debris, trees, plants, and other obstacles from the construction zone. Thus, the company you have selected must have a good line of excavation and earth moving equipment ready to use. Once the designated zone is cleared of obstacles, it is levelled using soil dumped by trucks. Sand and gravel Crushed gravel near me serves as a base for construction; the huge interstices in constructing foundations are filled using sand. Therefore, sand and gravel contractors are required to furnish you with their different quantities where necessary. Lagoon construction In the absence of public wastewater treatment services, it becomes mandatory to construct and establish a private effluent treatment lagoon. Relevant government authorities must recognize the treatment lagoon within dwelling units. Choose a site with effective water retention capability for the lagoon construction. The site is dug using excavation machinery for the formation of lagoons of particular depths and shapes. A liner is placed to ensure no water leakage from the lagoon. Pipeline placements The pipelines placed in a building or house carry water in and out of the facility. It is critical to place the pipelines effectively to ensure that your house does not require plumbing within a few years of the building's construction. Thus, we need a contractor to place the pipelines in your office building, house, or facility. About Dutchie Dirt Moving Ltd.: Dutchie Dirt Moving Ltd. established in 2001, has been serving the County of Lethbridge with all kinds of earth moving services, crushed gravel for driveway , houses or buildings, and even cement needs. The company provides a certified and experienced professional team to deliver these services. Dutchie Dirt Moving Ltd. is your go-to choice if you want high-quality construction services and materials. To get help from concrete contractors, visit https://dutchiedirtmoving.com/ Original Source: https://bit.ly/407lLUo

#concrete contractors Lethbridge #Crushed gravel near me #crushed gravel for driveway

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geomembranes · 2 years ago

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What is a geosynthetic clay liner used for?

Geosynthetic Clay Liner (GCL) is a specialized engineered material used in various civil and environmental engineering applications for its excellent hydraulic barrier properties and soil stabilization capabilities. Here are some of the primary uses of geosynthetic clay liners:

1. **Landfill Liners:** GCLs are commonly used as part of the liner system in landfills. They serve as a barrier to prevent leachate (a liquid that forms as waste breaks down) from contaminating the surrounding soil and groundwater. GCLs help protect the environment by keeping harmful substances contained within the landfill.

2. **Wastewater Treatment:** GCLs can be used in wastewater treatment facilities to line lagoons and containment basins. They prevent the leakage of wastewater and treated effluents into the ground, ensuring that pollutants are properly managed and not released into the environment.

3. **Mining Applications:** GCLs are used as a liner for tailings ponds and containment areas in mining operations. They help control water seepage and protect against the release of potentially harmful materials into the environment.

4. **Pond and Canal Linings:** GCLs can line ponds, canals, and reservoirs to prevent seepage and control water levels. This is particularly useful in agricultural and irrigation applications where water conservation is important.

5. **Secondary Containment:** GCLs are used in industrial settings as a secondary containment barrier around storage tanks and areas where hazardous materials are handled. They provide an additional layer of protection against spills and leaks.

6. **Road and Railway Construction:** GCLs are sometimes used as part of the road and railway construction subgrade to improve soil stability and reduce water infiltration. They can help prevent the deformation of road surfaces and maintain structural integrity.

7. **Erosion Control:** In erosion-prone areas, GCLs can stabilize slopes and prevent soil erosion. They are often employed with vegetation to create effective erosion control systems.

8. **Residential and Commercial Construction:** GCLs are used in foundation waterproofing and basement wall applications to prevent water penetration and protect structures from moisture damage.

Overall, geosynthetic clay liners are versatile materials that offer reliable and cost-effective solutions for managing water and contaminants in various engineering and environmental projects. Their use contributes to environmental protection and the sustainability of infrastructure development.

Earth Shield Environmental Co., Ltd.

WhatsApp: +86 189 6341 6260

Tel: +86-531-76652566/+86-531-76652399

E-mail: [email protected]

Web: www.earthshields.com

#geosynthetic clay liner

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roadswim-collective · 8 years ago

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Three Times He Lied To Me Lie 1.

I was twenty three when I met him. I was back at home, living with my mother, after three years in halls of residence. Here's a list of the places you'd be most likely to see me during the year I was twenty three:

on a train

in a library

at a railway station

in a corridor

at my tutor's office

in my bedroom.

I had literally no social life, unless you count going to the shop for tobacco. My best friend was my I, Claudius box set. On Friday nights when my mother was out with the girls from darts, I'd drink Prosecco in the bath. Sometimes I'd do that on Saturday nights too.

I did go other places sometimes. If the weather was nice you might see me in a castle. Caerphilly was my favourite. Or I might be at a Roman site like Caerleon. And now and again you might see me out of breath at the top of a hill somewhere looking at the remains of an Iron Age fort. I was always alone on these excursions. I'd end the day pretty much as I'd started it, lying in my bed, in my old bedroom, probably watching Gladiator.

I was halfway through a master's in history with archaeology, a two-year course, and I was completely broke. Amazingly I'd got a First in my degree, and my tutor recommended me for post-grad. It was all a bit overwhelming. I was the first in my family to go to uni, you see. Well, my father was accepted at some art college back in the day but he didn't finish the course, he dropped out. Other than that, though, I was the first to go on to higher education. It was quite a big deal at the time. Nerve-wracking. I more or less expected to crash and burn.

Everyone else seemed so confident, so talky, and loud. So English, I was about to say. But that's not fair. I just hadn't met many people like that back then, middle class people. A lot of them hardly bothered going to lectures and they were always incredibly insulting about the tutors. They were always on the piss too. Now me, for the first two years I just kept my head down and my mouth shut. I worked as hard as I possibly could, hoping to keep up. I read literally everything. When a lecturer praised my work, I'd carry that around with me for days like a little glow of fire to ward off the doubts.

Not that I was some kind of nun. My main indulgences were:

thin little roll ups in liquorice papers smoked on the library steps, about one every half hour

a bottle of vodka in my bottom drawer for winding down at the end of a long essay

the occasional lump of cheap hash to see me through the holidays

a boy from Norfolk with nice dark eyes, though that was more trouble than it was worth.

By the final year, though, I knew I was heading for at least a 2:1, possibly even a First. There didn't seem so many of the loud talky ones around by then. There were a lot of drop outs. On the one hand that made it hard, because the spotlight began to shine on me a bit more. I couldn't just hide in the back of the seminars anymore, I was invited to contribute. On the other hand, those little glows of praise from my lecturers had grown into a proper fire, burning day and night. And I started to see them as human, my tutors, not as untouchable gods or whatever but as people who were obsessed by the past, by trying to dig it up and see it as it was, just like me. It was hard to believe I'd made it to the end of the three years. And now they were encouraging me to take it further, to do an MA.

I mean, it was way beyond what I'd expected. That last year was just wonderful, I loved it.

The day I graduated, my mother cried and my brother puked. We were all in the union bar, toasting each other. I can drink my brother under the table, and I did that day. Uncle Lloyd was there too, wearing a blue suit that I won't forget too soon, putting away the cheap beer and chatting a bit too much to girls. My father hadn't turned up. He'd promised he would, but that's my father. I can't believe I really expected him to be there. Maybe I didn't, I can't quite remember now.

So anyway, yes. That was, nice, to be doing so well. And now I got to spend the next couple of years digging around in sub-Roman Britain, a time I'd been mildly obsessed with since I heard the stories of Saint David and Saint Dyfrig in RE at school. I always saw it as this mysterious realm full of saints and kings and warlords and clashing cosmologies, and all of it hidden in layers and layers of myth and dirt. It was like digging up a real life epic, it was kind of a dream come true for me.

On the other hand, after three years as a student I was completely broke, massively in debt, and I hadn't made any friends. And now I was back at home, with my mother, in my old bedroom, commuting to Cardiff from Aberdare, an hour each way on the train, to do my studying. I was making a tiny bit of money working part-time in college libraries at different campuses all over the place, Merthyr, Treforest, all over. I read my Mary Beard books over lunch, and on station platforms in all weathers I listened to podcasts.

My mind was usually far off in the mist, tracing trade routes of lost empires, digging through dead cities, reading old epitaphs. I was starting to feel a bit sort of nothing about everything, or everything modern, everyday life, here and now. I'd even stopped watching reality TV. The only things I watched now were documentaries. Well, and Derren Brown, I loved his stuff.

Everyone I'd known, my uni friends, had all sort of evaporated. The same thing had happened when I left school, or whenever I changed jobs. It was happening again now. Helen and Julie, Rupinder, Jay, Alex and Steve, Danny, my sort of ex, they'd almost faded out, just a year after we all graduated and I promised to stay in touch. None of my friendships were ever strong enough to survive the transition, everyone just floated away. I couldn't say why.

I was happy enough though, don't get me wrong, I enjoyed my own company. To be honest, I couldn't really imagine looking round a historical site with someone else. Having to talk to them, listen to them, instead of just looking at the stuff. Or standing on an iron age site, a hill fort, looking down into the valley, no sound, only the wind whispering and the birds calling – and just because someone else is there you've got to ruin it all with small talk. I tried to see it in more positive terms but I failed to convince myself. I just couldn't imagine it. Very often, I paid for the audio guide tour, with the headphones.

Anyway, there was this librarian I was sort of obsessed with. His name was Will and he was twenty nine. He worked at the humanities library at Cardiff Uni. I did some shifts there, he was sort of my line manager, one of them anyway. He was slim and tall with thick hair and he talked a lot. The women all loved him. He was funny though not quite as funny as he thought. Well, they never are, are they? But he wore tight jeans and brown boots and they suited him, oh my god they suited him. His eyes were green and twinkly, his grin was cheeky. I didn't think he fancied me but I knew for sure that he knew I fancied him.

I sometimes got flustered when we were chatting in a corridor. I was full of pent-up lust. There were moments when literally all I wanted out of life was for Will to turn up at my door late one night and fuck me senseless. Preferably a Friday night, when my mother was out with the darts girls and I was all wet and alluring from my Prosecco bath.

Anyway it was no good, he had a girlfriend. Cerys. They lived together. No kids though. So there was always the chance they'd split up. I tried to gauge the likelihood. It seemed a pretty stormy relationship. He made lots of bad jokes about him and Cerys rowing all the time, her insane jealousy.

He turned up to work one day with his wrist in a splint. When we asked him about it, he said this: "A woman in a bar came up to ask where the toilets were, and the missus didn't like it so she broke my wrist, just as a friendly warning." It turned out later he was joking and he'd actually fallen over drunk. Everyone laughed. But the next day when we were getting cans from the machine Will confided to me that the reason he'd fallen was because Cerys pushed him over some bins on the way back from the pub. "We shouldn't drink together, me and her," he told me. "Only one of us should be drunk at a time. Or it goes bad."

So it all seemed quite volatile. Sometimes he looked miserable. There were phone calls from Cerys that sent him scuttling outside, scowling. He made lots of jokes about how unreasonable she was, how she flew into a rage, shouted and screamed. In dark moments I imagined that what he was leaving out from all these stories for the sake of decency was all the amazing, passionate, hot sex they were having when they weren't rowing. She probably shouted and screamed all the way through that too. Lucky bitch. I didn't have enough experience to make that assumption, really, but it crept up on me sometimes as a slightly depressing certainty.

All this drama seemed very distant from my own life. It was like watching I, Claudius, all that passion, the lust and the violence, Brian Blessed. And there was me, alone in my teenage bed at night, my hand wandering down, trying to visualise the exact lift and curvature of beautiful Will's tight bum. I was wondering if it was finally time I invested in a vibrator.

So then they did split up, Will and Cerys. It wasn't the first time but she'd gone back to Llanelli or Ammanford or wherever she was from, and apparently she'd never done that before. Will seemed pretty upset and he got a lot of sympathy at work, which he obviously enjoyed. I'd say the percentage male/female split at the humanities library was about 30/70 to the girls. Some of the men seemed a bit uncomfortable with this, with being out-numbered, but others blatantly loved being surrounded by women. Will was one of those.

He started going out for drinks after work. We'd all go, a big pack of us. Yes, me too. This sort of party gang developed. Friday nights mostly and usually around Cathays, in the Woodville or the Pen and Wig. There was boozing and there was bad behaviour. I got caught up in it a bit. I'm not really into that kind of thing, in general. I'm useless at small talk, it's just embarrassing, so I drink too much to compensate, and I talk a load of crap, wear myself out, and have to spend the next fortnight in bed. But it's funny how a change in just one colleague's relationship status can act as a catalyst on the pent up frustrations of the whole office.

And of course I always had to catch the last train back home. That was at ten to eleven so I was leaving early, baling out while the night was still young. They were all staying out, Will and everyone, they were going on somewhere else. And I'd be on the train, half-cut but not quite pissed, with all the sweaty bellowing valley boys, nodding-waking-dribbling all the way back to cold dark Aberdare.

There was nothing left for me at home really. The girls who'd stayed there were on their second or third kids. We had nothing in common now. All the boys were messing about with the same old things as before, cars and sports and booze, just with jowls now and already balding. Thinking about it, I don't suppose I had much in common with anyone in the first place.

So I started staying the night now and again with my new friend Abby who was doing a PhD and lived in Roath. Not every weekend, just if it was going to be a big night, someone's birthday or whatever excuse came up. I was quite good at drinking, still am, and I'd always be among the last standing. It was me who had to get Abby into a taxi and find her door key and let us in and, more than once, hold her hair back while she was sick. And when it came down to the last handful at the very end, Will was always there too. Will and me, Abby, Hannah, Chris, a few others. There until the bitter end. None of us had anything much to go home to really.

So one Friday night we ended up in this over-priced cocktail bar on City Road, six or seven of us I think, probably about 1am. Abby and I happened to be sitting opposite Will, the three of us leaning in close over a tiny glossy circle of table to be heard above the music. He was on great form that night, Will. He listened to the latest installment of Abby's catastrophic love life with great interest and had a lot to say about it all. He told Abby that none of it was her fault and she deserved much better. He said, "Look at me, after all this Cerys stuff – I'm bruised, sure, I'm bruised to holy fuck, but I'm not bleeding." I'd almost say he was cosying up her to her but I didn't get that feeling, it read more like a supportive friend thing. Also, I noticed that he was addressing quite a few of his comments on love and heartbreak and so on directly at me. As in, right into my eyes. So of course I began to feel ridiculously excited and kept insisting on more drinks all round.

When men try and chat you up, it's almost always boring, and forced, and makes you cringe. I mean, I suppose I'm partly to blame because I'm just no good at small talk. And chatting up is usually just a subset of small talk, really. You're not usually talking about anything in particular, there's nothing to cling on to, and it's all crappy, you're just wafting these threadbare festoons at each other in desperation. So I tend to just sort of clam up and that's the effect most blokes' efforts have on me, their intended target. Not Will. He was good.

Abby was talking to Hannah so now Will and I were just looking at each other over our tiny table. He grinned and beckoned me to lean in closer, so I did, and he said, "I'd like to try something out on you, if you don't mind." So I raised my eyebrows at him and said Um, okay..? To which Will did a mischievous little chuckle and told me it was a kind of personality test, and I said A test? O-kaaaay... "Don't be worried though", he said, "it's not serious, it's just a bit of buggering about, of no diagnostic value," so I said, Well that's a relief and he chuckled again.

And he was wearing this really nice aftershave and I could see the hairs on his chest poking over the top of his shirt. Plus I was half-cut. Plus it had been a bloody long while since I'd even been near a bloke. So you can imagine, can't you?

Will's idea turned out to be quite good. Basically, you've heard that thing – if you could have as your superpower either being able to fly or being able to make yourself invisible, which would you choose? Those crappy questions you get on Facebook that are meant to reveal some essential truth about your personality based on a seemingly throwaway choice you make. Well, Will said he hated it because it was an obvious fix, a swizz, the superpowers thing, because all the traits associated with flying were really good ones – success, confidence, flying high, reaching for the sky, freedom, the great beyond. And then you had invisibility, said Will, which was the choice of creeps. Think of the kinds of things being invisible would allow you, would invite you to do. It's nothing very noble, is it, Will said. It's sneaking around, it's hiding, not being upfront and honest. It's peeping toms, he said, it's sneaks and spies and saboteurs, it's eavesdroppers and shoplifters and pickpockets. Invisibility appeals to the voyeur, to the nosey parker and the perv. So it wasn't really much of a choice, he said, in fact it was a complete fix and he'd thought of his own, much better alternative.

I was laughing at all this, by the way, and reaching across to maul his arm from time to time. This was a good deal better than your average chat up, I was thinking, and even if it wasn't a chat up I was having fun with a silly man on a Friday night and and he was making me laugh so just go with it, just enjoy yourself for god's sake.

"Okay," says Will, "here's the thing. Some old fella down the road from you, mad professor type, he's built a time machine. It's in his garden shed and he's invited you to have a go."

"So this old man is trying to get me to go into his garden shed with him?" I say. "I don't think I believe he's got a time machine in there, to be honest. I think he might have other reasons."

"Fair point," says Will. "Make it your grandfather then. Someone you trust."

"How about my grandmother?"

Will says, "What's the matter, you don't trust your grandfather?"

"Very funny," I say. "Well, yes I did trust my grandfather and he did make things in his shed, but he's not alive now so..."

"Oh shit. Sorry," he says. "I haven't got any grandparents left, as of last month. Ah well, life's a shit, your grandmother it is then. Okay, so you go into the shed, there's the time machine, and your lovely old Nana is inviting you to be the first to have a go on it."

"First?"

"Yup. First ever trip, the maiden voyage. And she wants it to be you, her favourite grand-daughter."

"Her only grand-daughter, " I tell him. "So, I'm like a sort of guinea pig? My Nan wants me as a guinea pig?"

"Yeah, I suppose so," Will says. "But in a very loving way."

I did one of my stupid big honking snorting laughs all over him at this point. By now, fed up with shouting over the music, Will had come round the table and we were pretty much squeezed together. He seemed to enjoy it, this muffled explosion of me. We were laughing at my laugh. I called it my walrus call, he said it was a great, unashamed, life-affirming laugh, he said it was one of the great laughs. What a bloody charmer, eh? I was seriously starting to wonder if I'd be spending the night at Will's instead of holding Abby's hair as she puked. I was starting to feel pretty damn good about myself, doing all the sexy banter, all the flirty-flirty stuff. I'm a bit slow on the uptake sometimes, I don't always read the signals. This, though, with Will, this Friday night, I felt bloody fantastic about everything.

"Alright, forget about your Nan and the shed and everything," Will said. "You've just got hold of this time machine somehow, okay? But you can only use it once, I mean for one return trip. There and back, then that's it. So the question is – where would you choose to go, the future or the past?" Then he frowned. "Actually this might not work so well on you because you're an archaeology student, not a normal person."

Anyway, to speed things up a bit, that question of Will's led to a conversation between us that went on until we all got chucked out of the place at about two and then continued in the taxi heading for Abby's house. I told Will I'd choose to visit the past, of course, either to sub-Roman Britain to see what it was really like, or all the way back to the start, before agriculture, to when we were still nomads. We talked about that for a while, the distant past, then Will said if he had the one-trip time machine he'd definitely choose the future, no question at all. At least two thousand years, he said, either that or a few million, because he wanted to see how it all panned out.

So then we talked about that for a while, the far future. It was all quite slurry and rambly and drunken, of course, but it just kept going, and we got on to what all this might for our respective personalities, and about the state of the world in general, whether things were getting better or worse, whether there was any hope for the human race and all that.

And then, suddenly it seemed, we were outside Abby's house and she was getting out of the taxi, stumbling on her doorstep, trying to find her key, fiddling it into the lock, waving goodnight, and falling into her hallway, while I was staying in the taxi with Will, who was in the middle of saying that there never was a golden age, it was just a fantasy, there was never a time when everything was in harmony and everyone was happy, but that there could possibly be one at some point to come if we didn't blow ourselves up or make ourselves extinct through climate change, and also there was Paul the spotty Australian IT boy who was fast asleep and snoring and had to be shoved really hard to wake him and get him out at his place in Riverside while we went on to Will's flat, quite a nice one in Llandaf North.

And then, suddenly it seemed, it was a year a later and we were on holiday in Rome. It was my first ever visit and it was amazing, overwhelming, beautiful, and Will and I were celebrating the anniversary of that night when we got together, and we were walking around having what was basically a continuation of the same conversation that we'd started then, in that over-priced cocktail bar in Roath.

It was an odd match really, Will and I. We were different in lots and lots and lots of ways. We hardly agreed on anything. And at first, I think we were both kind of fascinated by how different we were, despite having quite a lot in common. Here are some of the things we had in common:

smallish working class valleys hometowns, Aberdare and Glynneath

stopped feeling that we fit in to our respective hometowns at around the same age, 14

each had an older brother who got married and moved away, his to England, mine to Monmouthshire, which amounts to the same thing

divorced parents, both our dads had left home, both of us were under 10 at the time, and neither of us really saw much of our fathers

both went to Welsh school but hadn't really kept up the language since

first in our family to get a degree, Will having achieved a 2:2 in psychology

we'd both been members of the Green Party at some point, although neither of us was now

similarly miserable teenage years, greasy depressions spent in cocoons of totemic books, music, films, art, clothes, comedy, metaphysics, magic, comics, etc, evolving into a dense and intricate personal para-reality to which the everyday world of bus stops and dog shit was merely a laughable and mundane annexe.

It felt as though we'd started off in roughly the same place but had headed in different directions. We kept coming back to the past/future thing, it was like some structuring principle we used in thinking about our differences. Here are some of differences we noticed:

Favourite films - me: Agora, with Rachel Weisz as Hypatia, Elizabeth, with Cate Blanchett, Mel Gibson's Mayan epic Apocalypto, and yes Gladiator. Will liked Bladerunner, Alien, Star Wars, the first Matrix, The Fifth Element, and Guardians of the Galaxy

Books/authors – On holidays from my study reading I liked Sarah Waters and Hilary Mantel. One of my favourites was Alan Garner, ever since I read The Owl Service when I was thirteen. As a kid I read and loved all of Tolkien to the point where it affected my dreams and I saw epic battles on my walk to school, raging in the morning clouds that cling to the scarp of Maerdy mountain. Will had never read any Tolkien but had an impressive number of multi-part space operas under his belt, his favourite being Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. He could quote huge chunks of Douglas Adams and he also loved William Gibson...or was it William Burroughs? One or the other anyway. He mostly read non-fiction now, a lot of pop science, Freakonomics, Malcolm Gladwell, Dawkins.

Music – I listened to Fairport Convention and Nina Simone. Will listened to German minimal techno

The state of the world today – we both agreed that everything was in a right mess, massive poverty, total exploitation, greed, capitalism, eco collapse, extinction event imminent, all caused by us. Not just Will and me. Humans. Where we differed was where we looked for possible solutions. It was the time machine again – he went forward, I went back. Will felt there was no way to fix all the things wrong with the world by going back, it was too late. Humans had caused damage to the world by being too clever – fossil fuels, international tourism etc – but it was only humans therefore who could fix it all, by being even more clever. He looked to a post-market utopia in which we've abolished scarcity, outgrown the lizard brain, conquered evil and greed with intelligence, and built a new world based on a new understanding. We'd first heal our planet with our incredible new machines, and then we'd move out beyond Earth in creative, peaceful waves, slowly evolving into children of the stars. I exaggerate, but only a bit. And me, I still do the same now, I dig back to older societies and pre-modern ways of life, tribal ways and folk narratives, non-profit motives, sustainability, to structures of feeling abandoned on the road to modernity, old medicines for our modern sickness. Will was never very open to any of this stuff. His closing flourish was always something about whatever the old days might have had going for them, it was basically a kind of blissful ignorance, hardly to be envied, and besides, no-one – not even you! - would genuinely want to live in any era of human history before reliable anaesthetics were invented.

As I say, we hardly agreed on anything. But in the early days that was part of what made it fun. We used to debate things a lot in the early days, it was what we did. And whatever we were talking about, at some level you could sense that same old past/present thing, his time machine thing. It really seemed to me he'd hit on something essential about his approach to life and mine, and the differences between them.

So we were in a cafe opposite the Colosseum having coffee, sat right in the bay window, watching the street life. I tried to order two double espressos but I messed up my pronunciation and the waiter brought us singles. Will beckoned the guy back over, and the waiter smiled and said, in English, "You want milk?" Will gave him half a grin, shook his head, and said, "Nessun latte – doppio – prego," and they both laughed, the waiter nodding and whisking off our tray. Then Will turned back to me and grinned his bloody adorable grin. I was thinking we might have this coffee then maybe pop back to the hotel room for an hour or so.

"Milk indeed," he said. "He must have taken us for a couple of weak ass English milk weeds."

I laughed.

"You know what you should do, Will? You should be a writer. You should write something."

"Ha, what?" he said. "I don't think so. I haven't got anything to say."

"You've always got something to say, you idiot."

"Well, yeah, but it's all bullshit really, when you come down to it."

"Well, yeah, but that needn't matter. Look at some of the crap that that sells."

"Mmm, Da Vinci Code, Fifty Shades, Jeremy Clarkson, fair point," he said. "But, no, no, I really don't think there's anything in my particular brand of bullshit that would sell."

"I don't know," I said. "What about your time machine? I'd say you could definitely make something out of that. It's good. It gets you thinking."

"Do you reckon?"

"I do, yes, I think you could make that into something, a story, something funny and clever," I said, "like you."

And he leaned across the table and kissed me. A big kiss, right there in the bay window, with everyone going by. When I opened my eyes again he was smiling at me, his eyes were so warm, he was so handsome, and golden autumnal Rome was glowing away behind him. I felt so good, so happy, more than happy. It was all so much more than I'd expected. I whispered a suggestion to him and, after our espressos, we popped back to the hotel for an hour.

Will often said he'd like to write but he never did. And the thing is, he already had a story about that time machine, an actual story with a beginning, a middle, and a funny but very bleak punchline. I couldn't see why he didn't write it up. Can we just skip just for a minute back to that first night I spent with Will, at his flat in Llandaf North? So it's stupid o'clock in the morning, we're both at the point where you drink yourselves sober, and we're out on his brown bolted balcony. I'm squinting at

glimpses of the Millennium Stadium and the BT building through the trees. A mile and half away, the city centre. The rain is falling but the air is warm and smells sweet. We're still not quite sure if we're going to do it. Will had a text from his ex earlier – at three in the morning! - and it sort of made the atmosphere between us a bit weird. So now we're on the balcony, talking. I remember telling him that all his Bladerunners and his Aliens and his cyberpunk whatever, all these futures he was into were all horrible. Mostly these were all dystopias. It was satire. The future in most of these things he loved was some crazy exaggerated version of today's world, with all our problems pushed to the limit. I remember him grinning as I pressed the point. Well, he said, realistically, and whatever I'd prefer, it's probably more likely we'll fuck it all up and ruin the world. Realistically speaking, he said. That's funny, I told him, you love the future but you don't even believe in it really. Your best guess is it's going to be even worse than today.

And then he told me this story. There's this couple, he said, and she's like you, she loves the past. And he loves the future. And one day this time machine really does turn up, but you can only take one ride each in it. Just one return trip because human minds can only deal with the experience once in a lifetime, any more and you burn out your brain. So she goes first, heads into the past, and comes back a few seconds later in a state of deep depression and disillusionment. Then he has a go, into the future, and comes back a few seconds, depressed and disillusioned. They conclude from their experiences that the present is as good as it gets and enter into a suicide pact. As for living, they say, our spambots can do that for us. But then he remembers that he's already visited both their graves in the far future and the dates on their headstones made it clear they were going to live for several more decades so they don't bother and just split up. She later married a quantity surveyor and bought a big house near Chepstow, and he drank himself to death.

So it was a funny little story with a bleak punchline. I kept telling him to write it up but he never did. I couldn't understand because he kept saying he wanted to write. I mean, I thought it would be a good little exercise to get him started. After all, he had the whole thing there, he just had to write it up. But he didn't write it. He didn't write anything. If he did, I never saw it.

This morning I looked through my bedroom window and the sky was turning a lighter and lighter blue as the sun came up over the motorway. Everything around was beginning to glow. By the time I got to work the clouds had come, colours went grey, and at lunchtime it started raining. It was pouring down as I drove home at five. I sat in a traffic jam on Cathedral Road, blowing the heaters to clear the windscreen, getting hot and prickly, opening the window and getting splashed, and thinking, well, how quickly it came and went, that early sun, and what a long time ago it seemed now.

There's a Welsh saying, Nid yn y bore mae canmol diwrnod teg. A rough translation would be something like, Morning is not the time to praise a fine day. In other words, it's very unwise to call it a nice day when it's still early and it might well piss down later. I love that. It's one of the cliches about the Welsh, that we're very pessimistic. All down to the rain, or the diet, or being conquered, or the Miners Strike. I can't speak for anyone else though, Welsh or otherwise. You might call it pessimism, fair enough - I just call it realism.

I've just got back from a conference in Rome. The paper I gave looked at some of the connections between Macsen Wledig of the Mabinogion and the real life Roman emperor Magnus Maximus. It was beautiful, of course, as it always is in the autumn, golden, and glowing. I walked down by the Tiber where all the plane trees had turned orange and were dropping their leaves into the river. Being the maudlin bitch I am, I made a point of walking pretty much the exact route I walked with Will, eleven years ago now, from the Circus to the Colosseum and up to the Capitoline Hill. It was dark by the time I got to the top and my legs were aching. I leaned on a railing, looking down at the spotlit Forum, and I thought about Will, and I thought about my father, who died six months ago next Tuesday, and I felt like crying to be honest. But I didn't, partly because it would have been pathetic and made me feel worse, but mainly because these anti-depressants I'm on seem to dry up my tear ducts. I get the trigger to cry but nothing comes. Probably for the best.

When I get home from these things I'm always exhausted. Even a short trip with no paper to give leaves me completely worn out. I know what it is. It's not the work, that's nothing. It's not even giving the paper, I've long since built my public speaking armour, I can climb into it whenever I need to. No, it's all the other stuff. The chatting and socialising. Relaxing, kicking back. Networking. All that side of it. I'm useless at it. Wears me out. Never been any good at that stuff.

So I tend to get home, lock myself in my house, set the phone to messages, and basically not talk to anyone for, well, for as long as I can get away with. Which is usually about 48 hours, then I go back to work. I always make sure to book time off for exactly this purpose. I call it my decompression period. If I don't get it, if I have to go straight back to work, I go a bit mad. Noticably so. Incredibly irritable, interspersed with moments of mild hysteria. To be fair to my colleagues, they're used to it by now, they've adapted, it's become 'a thing', an amusing thing everyone knows about me, Anna. Academia is a perfect trap for eccentrics. Everyone has their quirks, but actual, diagnosable personality disorders are no more or less common than in any other vocation.

I haven't really changed. Not really.

During decompression I can't even read anything. All my books stay on their shelves. I turn instead to the internet. Last night I watched a whole series of a forgotten ITV sitcom from the 80s called Me and My Girl, starring Richard O'Sullivan as a widower bringing up his now teenage daughter Sam, played by Emma Ridley. Don't ask me why, it's not very good. And this morning I looked up Will's Facebook. Don't ask me why. He's got his profile set to public so I can have a good look at all his family holidays, his wife's birthday, their anniversaries, their kids growing up. Not that I envy her, I can just imagine all the crap she has to put up with. She probably doesn't even know the half of it. She looks more and more hopeless in the pictures, to be quite honest, and a bit thinner every time. This – looking at Will's Facebook – this is no good. I realise that and I hardly ever do it. Why would I, really? I found out all about Will a long time ago, and that's why we're not together now. The main feeling I get when I think of how close I came to ending up with him is relief. I look around my cosy house and I think, wow, close escape. But when I'm in this state, post-conference, I end up doing it, peeking into Will's life, I don't know why.

I wondered if Will ever did rouse himself to write anything. If he ever made something of his time machine thing. By the look of his Facebook, he hadn't, he was still at the humanities library, head of department. When I was full of his family pictures I just sorted of drifted through various Google searches, all pretty desultory. I suppose I was vaguely wondering if anyone else had come up with a similar idea anywhere in the world. Turned out, someone had. My drifting led to a review of a book of short stories, called Minimum City, including one which sounded remarkably similar to Will's time machine story. It was just a synopsis really but it was enough to make me look up the short story collection and its author. It was an American author, a man, quite a big name but I'd never heard of him. Contemporary set fiction still isn't really my thing. From reading the Amazon reviews and all the rest of it, this is what I learned about Minimum City:

It was made up of 28 stories

They were all very short, some only a paragraph long

It was a very slim book, with big type and wide margins

All the stories were set in the modern world

They all tended to have some kind of twist / sting in the tail

The tone was cynical, darkly funny, etc etc

It didn't sound like my kind of thing but I could imagine Will enjoying it, at least Will as he was when I knew him, I can't speak for now obviously. I found the story. It had first been published in an online literature journal before being collected in the Minimum City collection. Its title was The Return Trip. It was very short. A couple come into possession of a time machine. All the rest follows exactly as in the story Will told me on the balcony of his flat in The Crescent at about four in the morning, twelve years ago. Right down to the spambots line.

I'd already checked publication dates. The Return Trip by this American author whose name eludes me now was first published in an online magazine called Young Boasthard's four years and eight months before Will told me the story. It was collected in Minimum City and published by Harper Collins six months before Will told me that story and passed it off as his own, on the balcony of his flat.

And I started laughing and laughing, until I had to put my bowl down in case I got milky cornflakes over my t-shirt.

#The Effluent Lagoon #roadswim collective #three times he lied to me #fairport convention #german minimal techno #richard dawkins #ursula le guin #tolkein #iain m banks #sub-roman britain #the dream of macsen wledig #magnus maximus #st dyfrig #bladerunner #agora #time machine #time travel #minimum city the return trip

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fatehbaz · 4 years ago

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The Black Warrior River has died many deaths.

And the Mulberry Fork, one of its headwaters, is the nexus of that cyclical dying. On 6 June 2019, a Tyson Farms chicken rendering plant in Hanceville, Alabama, spilled approximately 220,000 gallons (close to 832,900 liters) of wastewater into the Mulberry Fork, killing a conservatively estimated two hundred thousand fish and “fouling the Mulberry so completely that it became unusable for over 50 miles [80.5 kilometers] downstream” (Black Warrior Riverkeeper). “Unusable” is an important and contested term here not just in the sense of fishing, sport, and play, but also because the river is a major source of drinking water for at least six cities [...].

While the exact constitution of Tyson’s wastewater remains opaque for the public, this partially-treated, anerobic effluent kills by dissolving oxygen in the river water, a fluvia-cide by drowning.

In reality-bending corporate denialism, Tyson wrote to the locals: “We want residents to understand [that the fish kill] was due to low levels of oxygen in the water and not because of the release of man-made chemicals.” Their plant, located on the banks of Dave Young Creek, a small tributary running into the Mulberry Fork, ponds its wastewater only meters from the waterway. The wastewater spilled from a broken pipe as it was being transported from one noxious lagoon to another. Tyson blames their pipeline contractors.

For kilometers downstream, corpses rose to the surface, accumulating in massive stinking floats.

Land-dwellers smelled the disaster before understanding it. While Tyson assured the public that the Mulberry Fork would be usable with the return of oxygen, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM) tested water quality at several locations past the spill, revealing concentrations of E. coli bacteria up to 30 times the level considered safe for swimming and contact by the state. Unfortunately, as revealed by the Black Warrior Riverkeeper, the ADEM failed to make this information public until months after initial testing. Several parties have since taken legal action against Tyson, alleging unreasonable disruption, danger, and illness. [MG], who owns a boat shop on the river, claims to have spent over 80 days in the hospital receiving surgical care for bacterial infections as a direct result of consuming the river’s water (Killian 2020). And, as most news coverage failed to acknowledge, the massive fallout in marine ecology is irrevocable.

Fish can’t file lawsuits. [...] Not to mention, the ADEM has a maximum civil administrative penalty value of just $250,000, which is why the Alabama Attorney General, the ADEM, and the Alabama DCNR are currently taking Tyson to civil court (Hodgin 2019). The cultural toll this corporate negligence takes on small-town, riverside Alabama is another concern. “There are so many good things [about the river],” one local human put it. “We just can’t … continue to let people from the outside come in and take [the river] from us” (Hodgin 2019). Industry is ostensibly from the outside.

This is one of the paradoxes of the US Deep South: strong, insider regionality and attachment to land (over)matched by predominantly conservative politics that undercut environmental protections in favor of corporate investment.

The Black Warrior River is named after Chief Tuskaloosa, translated from the Choctaw, who fought against the sixteenth-century Spanish colonizer Hernando de Soto. White, Southern attachments to the land are built over this colonization and consistently fail to acknowledge more longstanding relations between humans, landscapes, and non-human flora and fauna. Perhaps this Anthropocenic devaluation is one explanation why the Mulberry Fork can be prized culturally as well as poisoned by Tyson, power plants, and coal mines, landing Black Warrior on the list of America’s Most Endangered Rivers in 2013 (Black Warrior Riverkeeper).

This is not the Mulberry’s first fish kill by industrial poisoning, and it almost certainly won’t be the last (Sack 2016).

So far, no corporations have been harmed in the making of this long disaster, and Alabama lawmakers tend to play it safe when it comes to maintaining the state’s corporate investments and their voters’ demands for high-paying, blue-collar jobs. Tyson remains to this day unpunished and unaccountable. [...]

Within this theater of grassroots surveillance and activism, the river’s many deaths, and the state’s failures to exact corporate accountability, the Alabama citizenry will continue deciding with their attention [...] whether this region will remain one of the most biodiverse in North America or the stomping grounds of Big Industry. It cannot remain both.

-------

Headline, images, captions, and text published by: Nicholas Tyler Reich. “Tyson Kills the Mulberry.” Arcadia no. 16 - Environment and Society Portal. Spring 2021.

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atlanticcanada · 4 years ago

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Plan to restart idled Northern Pulp mill in Nova Scotia to be redrafted: company

The owners of an idled pulp mill in northern Nova Scotia say their plans for a new effluent treatment facility have been withdrawn from the province's environmental assessment process.

Northern Pulp issued a statement today saying the company is instead drafting a new plan that calls for an overhaul of the mill near Pictou, N.S., and a more advanced treatment facility.

The plant, which once employed about 300 people, was shuttered in January 2020 after then premier Stephen McNeil decided Northern Pulp would no longer be allowed to dump effluent near the Pictou Landing First Nation.

The company had submitted two plans that would have seen the mill dumping wastewater directly into the Northumberland Strait, but the province rejected both options in December 2019.

Despite the shutdown of the mill, owned by Paper Excellence Canada, new plans for effluent treatment were submitted for environmental review and the province announced in May 2020 it would spend up to $10 million to help the company clean up the site.

The province said the money would help pay for removal of leachate, decommissioning of effluent pipes and cleanup of ditches and aeration basins on the site. It said the work is expected to be completed by June 30, 2021.

The province owns the pipe that runs from the mill to the now-closed effluent lagoon.

In June 2020, the mill was granted protection from its creditors under the Companies' Creditors Arrangement Act, a move aimed at allowing the company to restructure. At the time, Paper Excellence said it wanted to preserve the value of its assets as it explored alternatives for restarting the mill.

"We are committed to doing things differently," Northern Pulp spokesman Graham Kissack said in today's statement.

Northern Pulp is developing a plan to "transform the mill" and address the concerns of local residents, special interest groups and First Nations, he said.

"We have taken the time to listen and review input received over the past few years to inform the development of environmental transformation and modernization plans for everything from community engagement to forestry practices to addressing odour, air, and water emissions," he said.

The mill's bleached softwood kraft pulp was used to make tissue, paper towels, fine writing paper and other products.

The company plans to submit a new proposal to the provincial government before the end of the month.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published May 5, 2021.

from CTV News - Atlantic https://ift.tt/3tsA0PK

#new brunswick #prince edward island #nova scotia #news #politics #canada #CTVAtlantic

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trixie3788 · 5 years ago

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Why should you choose Grabe Industrial Equipment?

GRABE mechanical aerators contribute to aerobic processes' functioning by incorporating high amounts of oxygen to the liquid medium of effluent treatment tanks along with breeding ponds. On the list of main processes which may be benefited with aerators' usage are aerated lagoons, activated sludge, aerobic digestion, biological filter, and also the farming of aquatic organisms. This movement makes a high numbers of ports between atmospheric atmosphere and the liquid medium, capable of assimilating considerable amounts of oxygen, in addition to contributing to the homogenization of their content and minimizing odors resulting from the degradation means of organic matter.

Grabe Industrial Equipment is one of the best industrial equipment suppliers. They're also noted for providing or producing quality machinery. Only at Grabe Industrial Equipment, you will find some excellent and fantastic Grabe equipment for different jobs. Now there isn't to wait any longer. Your wait to find the best industrial equipment is finally over and finished with Grabe Industrial Equipment. You don't have to own any pressure or tension about any industrial equipment or material with them.

Grabe Industrial Equipment mainly emphasizes and is targeted on giving much priority and importance to operational potency. With high and outstanding finished equipment, you could have the proper various business processes. And this is how Grabe Industrial Equipment is working and expanding its foundation using their valuable products. At grabe Industrial Equipment, you are able to avail varied and different industrial equipment and materials. They have some of the greatest industrial tools and products like aerators, agitators, metering pumps, drum pumps, and pneumatic pumps.

The rectangular or square GR-SAO-P water and oil separator have a constructive format that occupies less space in the installation site (smaller width and height) compared to the cylindrical water and oil separator. This system uses overlapping coalescent tiles (parabola) with the horizontal flow, allowing the construction of lower profiles without damaging the equipment's efficiency. The prismatic oil and water separators can be purchased in various sizes and maximum flow rates between 3,000 and 100,000 liters / h.

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not-available-for-comment · 2 years ago

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Wastewater treatment is not achieved through a series of chemical treatments. Instead, it’s a managed natural process in which the effluent from the sewer system is filtered, aerated and then broken down by wild microbes.

Technically it doesn’t need to be aerated, but anaerobic bacteria, which don’t need oxygen, produce much stinkier byproducts during this breakdown process, so most decent-sized urban wastewater treatment plants do aerate in order to spare the neighbors. Very simple rural wastewater plants may just pump the wastewater into a lagoon—an outdoor pond, usually with a liner of some kind—and just let whatever grows in there do so.

As the wastewater is breaking down, it separates into a layer of muck (sludge) and a layer of cleaner water. Large wastewater treatment plants have a series of stages with clearer and cleaner water emerging from each one. Small plants may have a series of lagoons or just one. The more stuff you have in your wastewater that’s not poop (say maybe you accept discharge from a local factory, or there’s a restaurant district with a lot of food waste in their greywater), the longer and harder it is to treat.

Discharge from wastewater treatment plants to natural water bodies is heavily regulated and monitored for quality. In the US, it’s regulated by the EPA, and they take it seriously. The finishing step involves testing your discharge to make sure it’s within your approved discharge limits. This is the only step where a chemical treatment is commonly added: a little chlorine, to kill off the last of your microbes. But some plants use constructed wetlands or sand filters instead. If they do apply chlorine, they also have to take it back out before releasing the water, so that they don’t upset the ecosystem the water will be released to.

(If you have wastewater that’s mostly human waste and a correctly sized plant, you shouldn’t technically need this step. The microbes should be slowly precipitating out of the water along with the sludge. But things like high volume, cold temperatures, and complex effluent can make those benchmarks hard to hit without a finishing step.)

MORE COOL STUFF ABOUT WASTEWATER:

DID YOU KNOW? Potassium, an important component in fertilizer, is actually mined out of the earth? Did you know potassium deposits are running low? DID YOU KNOW POTASSIUM IS A WASTEWATER BYPRODUCT!?

DID YOU KNOW? Some large plants can trap and clean methane from their wastewater and use it for power?

DID YOU KNOW? The precipitated sludge can be further treated and used for fertilizer? I particularly liked the plant that was using it to fertilize fast-growing trees for the paper trade.

DID YOU KNOW? Many wastewater plant operators have a protective—if sometimes frustrated—relationship with their microbes, which they call “the bugs”, and include not just bacteria but also other microorganisms like algae and daphnia. The bugs are the workhorses of the wastewater plant: if their ecosystem becomes imbalanced, everyone’s job gets harder. I doubt they’d appreciate this, but in my mind, wastewater treatment operators are microbe herders. Though I suppose thinking of them as bog technicians is also accurate.

This has been the short version of my “wastewater treatment is fricking awesome” rant. I generalized a lot but the gist is still true. You asked for something cool, behold: Wastewater treatment, first wonder of man’s interface with nature.

tell me something cool

#wastewater treatment #is fucking neat #rocky rambles

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netsolwater · 5 years ago

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Definition of different Water Bodies

HUMANKIND has built civilizations around water. From the very beginning, we have subsisted on and resided near water. Let us explore the definition of the various forms of aquatic geology. The precise definitions could be very blurry and confusing, however.

What exactly is a sound, a sike and a ghyll?

What’s the difference between a bight and a bay?

What are the different words for a small stream?

Living on the American seacoast, can make you familiar with shoals and inlets. Living in Norway or Scotland can make you familiar with the definition of the fjords or lochs respectively. Let us explore many different types of bodies of water that define the wetter parts of the world.

To understand the distinction between the most common terms for flowing water (anything with a natural current moving from high to low), it is roughly defined by size.

There is an old saying which goes as,

“one can step over a brook, one can jump over a creek, one can wade across a stream and one can swim across a river.”

A stream is the generic term for flowing water.

A river is the largest form of stream

A creek is a small stream

A brook is an even smaller stream (used in Old English)

A rivulet is a very small stream or baby stream

A rill is a very small brook or rivulet

A beck is another name for small stream

A kill is an old Dutch term in colonial New York for creek or stream

A streamlet is a small stream

A runnel, also called runlet, run, rundle or rindle is a small stream or brook or rivulet

A brooklet is a small brook

a bourn is a small stream, particularly one that flows intermittently or seasonally

A beck is a small river or synonym for stream or brook

A crick is a variation in the pronunciation of creek in parts of the U.S.

A ghyll is a narrow stream or rivulet, or a ravine through which through small stream flows

A syke or sike is another Old English term for small stream, especially one that is dry in summer

A burn is a large stream in Scotland and England

A spring is when water flows up from under the ground to the surface.

A bayou is very slow moving water, referring to a tributary of a lake or river that is sluggish, marshy as well as filled with vegetation.

A tributary is a stream that flows into a larger main stream or river,

A distributary is a stream that branches off from the main river and flows away from it.

A meander is a turn or bend in a winding river.

A freshet is a sudden flow of freshwater from rapid heavy rain or melting snow after a spring thaw. (It can also refer to the place where a river or stream empties into the ocean, merging freshwater with salt water.)

An estuary is where a river empties into the sea—the place where the mouth of the river meets out the ocean tide.

The headwaters is the source, the very beginning of a river or stream.

A gulf is the largest of these broad inlets, and tends to have a narrow mouth opening to the sea.

A bay is smaller than gulf and also largely landlocked but with a wider mouth.

A cove is a small recess or indent in the shoreline that forms a sheltered nook with a narrow entrance to the sea.

A bight is a wide indent of the shore, like a bay but smaller and broader—these bights were historically a perfect safe harbor for pirates.

The ports are defined as any geographical area where ships are loaded and unloaded.

A roadstead (or “roads”) is a sheltered body of water near the shore but slightly outside the enclosed harbor (place where ships anchor while they wait to enter the port).

A lake is the term for a large body of water surrounded by land on all sides.

A pond is just a smaller version, and often formed artificially.

A mere is a shallow but broad sheet of standing water, particularly in Old English dialects or literature.

A puddle is even smaller and shallower, typically consisting of dirty rainwater.

A pool is a deep body of still freshwater.

A tarn is a small pool or lake found in the mountains, sometimes with steep banks formed by a glacier.

An oxbow lake (named for its characteristic U-shaped curve) is formed when a wide bend in a river is eventually cut off from the main stream entirely by erosion and becomes a free-standing pool of water.

A loch is a lake or inlet of the sea that is nearly landlocked primarily in Scotland.

An inlet is a place where the sea projects inland as an indent in the shoreline like a bay or gulf.

An arm of the sea or sea arm is a place where the sea projects inland like a more narrow water passage opening from the coastline.

A firth is a regional word used in Scotland, is similar in that it’s a narrow inlet of the sea, or a large sea bay, or long arm of the sea.

A fjord is a long, narrow inlet flanked by steep cliffs on three sides and is connected to the sea. It’s formed when a glacier (common along the Norwegian coast) cuts a U-shaped valley below sea level that fills with sea when the glacier retreats.

A sound is an ocean inlet quite larger than a bay and wider than a fjord. It is specifically a part of the ocean between two bodies of land, like a wide inlet which is parallel to the coastline flanked by a nearby island.

A channel is also constrained on two sides by banks, but is specifically a bed of water that joins two larger bodies of water.

A strait is similar to a channel only narrower.

A lagoon is a shallow elongated body of water separated form a larger body of water by a sandbank, coral reef or other barrier,

A barachois is a coastal lagoon separation by the ocean by a sandbar that may periodically get filled with salt water when the tide is high.

A billabong defines where a river changes course and creates an isolated stagnant pool of backwater behind where the former branch dead ends.

A narrows is a narrow water passage where a strait or river passes through a vertical bed of hard rock.

A lee is a natural body of running water flowing under the earth