Okay, so of all my thread ideas, I suspect this won't be the most attention grabbing, but what the heck ;D ask me anything about wastewater and sewage (& related). Maybe you're curious about treatment or sludge or whatever.
To answer questions, I will call upon my experience working with wastewater management and from my time working as a pollution case worker working with industrial wastewater. Possibly, I may also have to conjure up something from my ever more distant background in biology.
Shoot! 💩
Believe it or not my sibling has had a very similar career to you!
Quote from: Janszoon on Jan 25, 2023, 09:21 PMBelieve it or not my sibling has had a very similar career to you!
Wow, that's weird. I hope he encounters as many poop jokes on a daily basis as I do :laughing:
What does he do in wastewater?
Quote from: Guybrush on Jan 25, 2023, 09:26 PMI hope he encounters as many poop jokes on a daily basis as I do
He did when he worked at a sewage treatment plant. :laughing:
Quote from: Guybrush on Jan 25, 2023, 09:26 PMWhat does he do in wastewater?
He's a marine scientist, or whatever the term would be that covers fresh water too. These day he's involved with a lot of testing and cleanup of polluted waterways.
Quote from: Janszoon on Jan 25, 2023, 09:36 PMQuote from: Guybrush on Jan 25, 2023, 09:26 PMI hope he encounters as many poop jokes on a daily basis as I do
He did when he worked at a sewage treatment plant. :laughing:
Quote from: Guybrush on Jan 25, 2023, 09:26 PMWhat does he do in wastewater?
He's a marine scientist, or whatever the term would be that covers fresh water too. These day he's involved with a lot of testing and cleanup of polluted waterways.
Probably marine biologist and limnologist combined.. or something.
Honestly, it roughly sounds like the sort of thing I'd like to be doing. I hope I can have a similar career arc :)
I'm sure you will! You've always seemed like an intelligent and competent person to me, I'm sure you're very good at what you do.
Where does the poop go
Quote from: Janszoon on Jan 25, 2023, 09:55 PMI'm sure you will! You've always seemed like an intelligent and competent person to me, I'm sure you're very good at what you do.
Thanks Jans :)
Quote from: tristan_geoff on Jan 26, 2023, 03:10 AMWhere does the poop go
If you flush it down a toilet, it hopefully goes into a network of sewage pipes and pumping stations that bring it to a wastewater treatment facility.
At the facility, your poop has been mixed into large amounts of water and is probably just a greyish thin soup. The trick is turning it back into a poop.
A series of processes take out t-shirts and action toys, rocks, sand and fats, perhaps also finer particles. Then you may have processes where bacteria are allowed to feed on the sewage to remove organic content or nitrogen and then there may be a big sedimentation pool that the water travels through slowly which allows particles to settle. To make them clump together and sink faster, chemicals are often used at this stage; iron or aluminum here, typically, mixed with an acid. Sometimes a polymer is also used. At the end of the sedimentation pool, you skim clean water off the top as hopefully the particles that were in the water are either already taken out or have settled on the bottom. The clean(ish) water is sent out into nature, like a lake, river or ocean.
(Side note: some facilities do flotation instead of sedimentation where they blow bubbles into a smaller volume to make the sludge catch air and rise to the top where it is skimmed off).
The particular matter / gunk from these pools we call sludge. It gets sucked out from the bottom and sometimes sent into big tanks with bacteria to turn part of the the carbon and hydrogen content into methane. It also typically goes through processes that takes a lot of the water out (like centrifuges or sludge presses) so that after treatment, you're at a water content of 75% or (preferably) less where it's kinda gone back to being a poo. You can compost that and turn it into dirt you can put in a landfill or somewhere else.
If you get a lot of water out, say perhaps more than 60%, you can burn it in an oven to run a steam turbine. You then get ashes high in metals (hazardous) that you typically have to lock away someplace. On the upside, you get a lot of energy you can use and the volume of ashes will be small compared to the much larger amounts of sludge you'd have to manage otherwise.
Some facilities have other cool processes like pressure boiling sludge at very high temperatures, but this is the jist of it, at least here.
IF you pooped on a rainy day, that poop may not get to the treatment facility as it may get flushed out to the nearest river or seaside, typically from a pumping station, if the rainwater steals all capacity and the pipes are full. This is something we're constantly working to avoid / reduce.
TLDR; it depends, but your poop probably ends up as dirt somewhere after being separated from the water as sludge at a wastewater treatment facility.
Quote from: Guybrush on Jan 26, 2023, 06:54 AMIf you flush it down a toilet, it hopefully goes into a network of sewage pipes and pumping stations that bring it to a wastewater treatment facility.
At the facility, your poop has been mixed into large amounts of water and is probably just a greyish thin soup. The trick is turning it back into a poop.
A series of processes take out t-shirts and action toys, rocks, sand and fats, perhaps also finer particles.
(https://i.ibb.co/5483ZjR/O.jpg) (https://ibb.co/qjs86gr)
what's the most destructive substance that is likely to end up in the sewage
Quote from: TheNonSexual OccultHawk on Jan 27, 2023, 07:06 PMwhat's the most destructive substance that is likely to end up in the sewage
Something we're struggling with now in a certain area is concrete. Lots of it which has basically fucked up the surface / storm water system in a certain area. It's runoff from a concrete factory in the area. I don't even know how you get hardened concrete out of a pipe or even if you can.
We also had our entire gas facility shut down for at least two weeks last year. We believe a truck with oil sludge (from oil separation units at gas stations and car washes etc) got dumped here. It's hazardous waste and should not go here. It killed off our entire methane producing bacteria culture and we eventually had to get a starter from another facility.
Last year, we got sludge from a local ice cream factory. It was full of these wodden sticks / handles that jammed up all our pumps. Also we had an employee who got poked by a discarded syringe, although I believe that generally sounds worse than it actually is and he was fine.
You could theoretically get something like ebola disease poop coming down, but they got special wastewater protocols for the hospital quarantine wards in those instances.
Someone always knows someone who's seen an explosion in the sewer system due to people dumping gas / oil / paint / hydrocarbons of some kind. You hear stories about lids going flying many meters up in the air. They're really heavy.
For us, if you're asking what's gonna hurt us in an economic sense, then whatever kills our methane bacteria is the most likely hurt. Each day that gas facility is out of operation, we have to buy more electricity, transport way more sludge and have to buy diesel to warm our facility, so those costs rack up fast.
Heavy metals is an occasional annoyance as it fucks with how our sludge can be treated. If it contains too much of a metal, it becomes hazardous waste.
Edit:
Oh and storm drains sometimes get fucked up by trees or large branches jamming stuff up, but an umbrella or a bike could do similar damage. Whole areas with many houses can quickly become flooded that way.
Reading all that made me think of that horrific fatberg they found in London a few years ago.
QuoteHeavy metals is an occasional annoyance as it fucks with how our sludge can be treated. If it contains too much of a metal, it becomes hazardous waste.
Do they change thechemical compound from H2O to something else?
Quote from: Janszoon on Jan 27, 2023, 08:01 PMReading all that made me think of that horrific fatberg they found in London a few years ago.
Yeah, they spent like what.. 10 days flushing that thing? :laughing: might be an exaggeration, but I remember it was supposedly humongous.
Sewer fat is NASTY. The Squamish may not wanna watch this, though it is fascinating:
Quote from: TheNonSexual OccultHawk on Jan 27, 2023, 08:04 PMQuoteHeavy metals is an occasional annoyance as it fucks with how our sludge can be treated. If it contains too much of a metal, it becomes hazardous waste.
Do they change thechemical compound from H2O to something else?
They can form salts that dissolve in water that are hard to treat / get out, but the problem we have is in the sludge which is turned into dirt. If it's low in metals, it can eventually be put back into gardens & agriculture (after composting etc). If it contains a lot of, say, lead, that's gonna poison the carrots and so you have to treat it differently.
Worst thing you've seen?
Are you immune to the smell of shit now?
Quote from: jimmy jazz on Jan 27, 2023, 11:28 PMWorst thing you've seen?
Are you immune to the smell of shit now?
My job mostly happens from an office, so I'm not yet immune to poop smells.
I don't lay eyes on that much sewage and worst can be defined in so many ways, but I know what the grimiest job I've seen in sewage is. So quite a few years ago, I was trying to get familiar with the city's fat traps/separators, these installations that separate fat from wastewater that you may find downstream of kitchens in restaurants, cantinas, etc. Some of them are quite big when you're at like a hotel or a McDonald's.
To get familiar with these, I took a ride with an operator for a private contractor who was tasked with emptying these fat traps. That was a dirty job.
The fat in these tanks float on water, so it forms a big, hard, rotting cake of fat at the top of these tanks. To suck this fat up, they would use a high pressure hose to break it up into smaller pieces, then suck those up with a big hose attached to the car. When they start hosing that fat, things stink up
bad, especially if you're also in a small technical room underground or in a basement. It was way worse than when, say, hosing down one of our pumping stations. It's a stink that sticks to your skin and probably your eyeballs afterwards.
I'm sure those rooms must also fill up with harmful aerosols and probably dangerous hydrogen sulfide and this guy didn't really wear a mask or any protection, so there was that too.
Other than that, I've seen a full log under a manhole, but that's not so bad. Kind of impressive, really. :)
Do you know anyone who got hepatitis or dysentery or any other illness from failing to maintain universal cautions when dealing directly with waste?
Quote from: TheNonSexual OccultHawk on Jan 28, 2023, 12:42 AMDo you know anyone who got hepatitis or dysentery or any other illness from failing to maintain universal cautions when dealing directly with waste?
No. In general, our guys are healthy and on average have fewer sick days than the national average. All I've heard people get from exposure to sewage is your basic diarrhea.
Knock on wood :)
I suspect a lot of would-be pathogens don't survive or stay infective for long after ending up in wastewater which may have the wrong temperature etc. to what they want.
Edit:
The biggest danger about sewage, it seems to me, is that it contains bacteria that produce hydrogen sulfide when there's little oxygen. It smells bad, but it's also very toxic so our guys carry gas detectors with alarms.
If there's a lot of it (like 800 ppm or more), it can have a knockdown effect where you literally just faint and start to die as it ties up all the oxygen in your blood. You don't smell it at that point because your olfactory nerves also get knocked out.
As far as unusual items being flushed down toilets, is there any particular item which shouldn't be disposed of in a toilet which shows up more frequently than any other? And I'm assuming you were only half-joking about action figures so just out of curiosity, is there any one action figure series which ends up in the sewers more frequently than any other action figure series?
Quote from: Psy-Fi on Feb 13, 2023, 02:16 PMAs far as unusual items being flushed down toilets, is there any particular item which shouldn't be disposed of in a toilet which shows up more frequently than any other? And I'm assuming you were only half-joking about action figures so just out of curiosity, is there any one action figure series which ends up in the sewers more frequently than any other action figure series?
I haven't actually seen any action figures, but I remember they found one at the wastewater facility in the neighbouring municipality. I am hoping it was Turtles. They'd be the most appropriate, I think.
As for stuff people toss into toilets, most things that are not pee, poo, vomit or toilet paper can cause problems. Here, the biggest problem seems to be wet wipes. Peeps, please - don't toss those suckers in the loo! I understand the temptation, but they don't dissolve in water and will sometimes get stuck inside pumps etc. When a pump starts accumulating wet wipes, it may keep accumulating them until you get this big, hairy lump of shredded wipes that looks more like a drenched, dead dog than anything sold as a hygiene product. In order to get them out and restore normal operation, we need to take those pumps apart. It's expensive and causes frustration as well as pollution.
The second thing I'd say is fat, like cooking oil. Even if it looks liquid in your kitchen, it is likely to turn less viscous and harden once it's in the sewer, at least up here in Norway where it's relatively cold. It collects in the wells in our pumping stations, making them nasty and greasy, and it also creates nasty fat deposits in some of our pipes.
Every now and then, it seems some industry will empty a tank of cleaning chemicals or some real nasty goop rich in metals that will either screw up our ph-regulated sedimentation processes or poison the sludge, turning that into dangerous waste.
Quotewet wipes
even if they're advertised as flushable?
Quotecooking oil
that's a good way to cause damage to your own sewage as well
pour it in pastic cup - keep in the freeze - when the cup is about half full and the contents cold and hard put it in the trash
still not a fantastic solution but don't put oil into your own plumbing geez
Quote from: Guybrush on Feb 13, 2023, 04:41 PMQuote from: Psy-Fi on Feb 13, 2023, 02:16 PMAs far as unusual items being flushed down toilets, is there any particular item which shouldn't be disposed of in a toilet which shows up more frequently than any other? And I'm assuming you were only half-joking about action figures so just out of curiosity, is there any one action figure series which ends up in the sewers more frequently than any other action figure series?
I haven't actually seen any action figures, but I remember they found one at the wastewater facility in the neighbouring municipality. I am hoping it was Turtles. They'd be the most appropriate, I think.
I was also thinking of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and hoping those figures would be the answer when I posted my question. :laughing:
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/feb/17/nhs-unsafe-sewage-leaks
QuoteSewage leak figures prompt warning over state of England's hospitals
Exclusive: freedom of information requests reveal overspill on cancer wards, maternity units and A&E departments
Ouch, that sounds pretty bad. Crumbling infrastructure is a problem here too, but my impression is it hasn't become quite that bad yet.
Our general goal for our infrastructure is it should last 100 years. Put kinda stupidly, that means we have to replace 1% of it every year and after 100 years, we will have replaced 100% of it and then the oldest infrastructure should be 100 years old and ready for replacement.
However, our infrastructure very often doesn't last anything close to 100 years and we don't always replace 1% of it either, meaning it's all deteriorating faster than we can mend or replace it.
QuoteOur general goal for our infrastructure is it should last 100 years. Put kinda stupidly, that means we have to replace 1% of it every year and after 100 years, we will have replaced 100% of it and then the oldest infrastructure should be 100 years old and ready for replacement.
i like that - it's obvious after you say it that a hundred year plan means 1% replacement per year but if you hadn't said it i wouldn't have thought of it that way
it's relaxing when a writer tells you something you know but you didn't know you knew, you know?