Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
Every two weeks, we'll bring you new episodes of “Make It Clear” that cover timely and relevant topics in the water and wastewater industries. Our guests will also provide their unique insights as we discuss the world’s most precious resource.
While our content is mainly geared toward water and wastewater professionals, we welcome everyone who’d like to listen.
Make It Clear: Why You Can't Just Flush and Forget
A Brief History of Wastewater - Pt 2
In this episode, we pick up our historical deep dive and explore how wastewater treatment was transformed between the 1800s and the present day. From cholera-prevention breakthroughs to modern filtration, AI, and reuse strategies, we trace the innovations that shaped the clean, reliable systems we depend on now.
If you have comments or questions about our podcast, you can reach us through this link. To discuss a project or talk to one of our engineers, call 800-348-9843.
00:08
Angela: Hello and welcome to Make It Clear, a conversational podcast about all things related to water and wastewater. I'm your host, Angela Bounds, and I'm joined by my co-host, Shawn Rapp. In each episode, we'll tackle a relevant topic with facts and expert opinions and make things clear.
Hello and thank you for joining us. Today, we're getting another history lesson from Shawn. Hi, Shawn.
Shawn: Hello.
Angela: I have to laugh,
00:38
because even before we started recording the podcast, he starts rattling off all these years and all these things that have happened.
Shawn: I can't help it. It's kind of cool to talk about this stuff. It's just, it's fun to, it's fun to go through this and it's going to get more fun today, I think versus the last episode we recorded because there's just so much more that happened.
Angela: It's so interesting. I am fascinated by people like you who just have these dates in their head. Like I…
01:06
For some reason, my brain does not commit the dates to memory. So I can recount what's happened. I can talk about what's happened in history, but as far as having a timeframe of reference, was that, you know, this year or that year? My daughter asked me what happened the year that I was 20.
01:30
And I was like, you want me to remember exactly what happened in that 12 month span?
Shawn: Right.
Angela: I was like, that's not, hold on one moment. I need to Google that.
Shawn: Yeah, exactly. Let me go back and Google that.
Angela: Let me Google that. So we left off, we left off talking about the medieval times, right?
Shawn: Yep.
Angela: And then there was nothing that really happened.
01:59
until the 1800s, except for the invention of the flushable toilet.
Shawn: yeah. Sir John Harrington, 1596, he invented the flushable toilet, actually gifted it to Queen Elizabeth I. can you imagine getting that as a gift?
Angela: Yes, I would be very thankful. I would be thrilled.
Shawn: Probably not so much today, but back then it was probably something to celebrate.
Angela: At that point in time, I would be very, very happy with that.
Shawn: Right.
02:27
But yeah, like you said, there really wasn't a whole lot that went on. There was little things here and there of communities trying to implement sewer systems and some way of moving the waste from one place to another place. But nothing of note really happened until the 1800s.
Angela: What do you know about the first iteration of the flushable toilet?
Shawn: Not a lot. I mean, there's actually drawings of it and there's photos of it. I mean, you can see…
02:56
Well, I'm not sure about photos, but there are illustrations of it anyway.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: Because I don't know if it actually still exists or not. I haven't checked that out.
Angela: Interesting. that will be coming on another podcast. The invention of the toilet and its evolution.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: All right. So let's, let's start in the 1800s then.
Shawn: Yeah. So the 1800s brought the Industrial Revolution and a lot of places like
03:25
Berlin, London, saw a huge population growth just because everybody's coming to work in factories. It's labor, it's well paid. Well, I'm not saying well paid, it's-
Angela: Well, back then-
Shawn: Back then it wasn't bad, even though the working conditions were not great.
Angela: Nope. But they had work.
Shawn: That's right. They had work. They weren't just working in the fields. And so, yeah, the industrial revolution happened. And of course, with all those people coming and congregating in one place,
03:55
You can imagine that sewage became a problem. So in 1848, the city of London commissioned a report. And there was a gentleman by name of Chadwick, Edwin Chadwick. Couldn't remember his first name, but yeah. Anyway, he was commissioned to investigate the conditions for living conditions and sewage and all of that stuff and came back with this report.
04:25
And because of his report, they established a general board of health. Now that doesn't mean they really did anything about his report. They just established this board of health and they were encouraged but not required to manage sewers and drainage and create these things. But nobody seemed to really be motivated to do it.
04:50
The Public Health Act of 1848 was passed and this act empowered them to borrow money to build these sewers and improvements, but it had more bark than bite. It really didn't have a whole lot of teeth to it. So it was mostly voluntary. Not a whole lot of stuff went forward on that. However,
05:13
As a consequence, I think there was a cholera outbreak in 1848. Actually, several of them happened in London and Berlin and so on. 1848 to 1849 was one that was recorded as well as one in 1853 and 1854. And the cholera outbreak spurred kind of limited action. Some towns, some outlying towns built improved sewage systems and so on to try to mitigate some of these problems. But there wasn't really anything
05:42
done about it and they didn't know why it was happening until a gentleman by name of John Snow, he did some investigation. This was kind of a, it's kind of a footnote in their whole journey of sewage, but it's a very important little piece that sort of got overlooked by them at the time. In that in 1840 or 1854, he conducted this investigation and found that
06:12
a lot of cholera outbreaks were happening around the town pump or lot of infections and things were happening around the town pump. so in order to test his theory, they removed the handle of the pump and the outbreak sort of lessened after that, which is to them was kind of a head scratcher because they still believed in the idea of the miasma theory where it was carried through bad air.
Angela: right. But air was the cause of the
06:41
predominance of illness, right?
Shawn: That's what they thought. Yeah. In essence though, it was actually waterborne because cholera is a waterborne disease.
Angela: Correct.
Shawn: And so you have people not using the pump, so they aren't touching the pump. So the disease kind of lessens. But again, like I said, they kind of, they didn't jump on that idea of the fact that, it's being transmitted through the water. So not a whole lot was done about that. And then
07:11
In 1858, Parliament was actually spurred to do something about the sewage. 1858 was the great stink. So it wasn't science that spurred innovation.
Angela: It was discomfort.
Shawn: It was discomfort. It was a very hot summer apparently in London in 1858. The Thames was full of sewage and filth and you name it, it was probably in the Thames. And as you know,
07:40
hot temperatures and sewage do not mix.
Angela: they do. They just produce very, very bad odors.
Shawn: And that apparently made its way to Parliament and Parliament was gassed out of their chambers.
Angela: Way to get the government to move.
Shawn: Exactly. So yeah, it took a very bad smell to get them to actually do anything. So that was sort of their...
08:10
their impetus to get it to move. So things started to change. You know, the great stink started to cause some things to happen. They started making some improvements. They commissioned new studies and so on and so forth. Of note in 1892, just kind of as a side note for John Snow's revelations about cholera, there was a huge cholera outbreak in Hamburg.
08:40
The thing about Hamburg was that they had a huge outbreak there, but a few miles away in a different city called Altona, almost nobody was affected.
Angela: Okay.
Shawn: Which kind of raised some eyebrows and they couldn't figure out why. Until they figured out that Altona was not pulling their water directly out of the river and using it, it was filtered first. So they would run their water through sand.
Angela: There you go.
Shawn: Yep. And so that got some people thinking.
09:11
So yeah, instead of pulling the water directly from the Elba River like Hamburg did, they filtered it through sand and they didn't have the same problem with cholera that Hamburg did. So just some interesting things that kind of fell along the way there. But with the whole great stink thing, there was a push to build more sewers in London. So a gentleman by the name of Joseph, and I'm going to butcher this name, Bazalagete,…
09:41
Angela: It's better than I could have done.
Shawn: had been commissioned to design and construct a set of sewer pipes or sewer network in London. But it wasn't until the great stink that this all was spurred on. So he started to do that and it was meant to divert the waste away from the Thames. So they weren't putting the waste into the Thames and taking it away from
10:10
outside the city. However, there's still no treatment. So it's just merely being transported. It's not being…
Angela: moved from one place to another.
Shawn: Yeah. So just kicking the can down the road, basically.
Angela: Yeah. Passing the problem along.
Shawn: Yep. That in and of itself, moving outside the city sort of prompted the rise of what they called sewage farming.
Angela: Hmm.
Shawn: Yeah. It's a lovely pastime.
Angela: another pleasant smell.
10:39
Shawn: I mean, we would go from Rome with the soup baths, to sewage farming. Lovely.
Angela: We are very, very fortunate today.
Shawn: Yes, we are.
Angela: Very. I don't think everybody realizes how fortunate we are today.
Shawn: I know.
Angela: There are places where treatment occurs and there may be some odor. We smell it. Driving along I-5 sometimes. But we are so fortunate that it's localized.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Right. That it's contained.
11:08
And that that's not happening. You're not sitting in your living room or out on your back porch and all of a sudden get a whiff of something.
Shawn: And unfortunately that's not the case for everyone.
Angela: No, it's not.
Shawn: And there are places today that that is still a reality, but it's getting better.
Angela: But many of us are fortunate.
Shawn: Okay. So sewage farms.
Angela: Sewage farming.
Shawn: Yep. So sewage became a resource.
11:39
Take that for what you will. But they would irrigate the crops with the raw sewage, which had all kinds of implications for odor and for contamination and disease transmission. So that lasted for a while, but not… thankfully, it was one of those things, I think, that people just kind of put up with it until they couldn't anymore. And then in the 1880s, then we start getting
12:06
we start getting treatment. This is unbeknownst to them that this was actually a huge step forward. They started experimenting with chemical precipitation. So they started treating raw sewage with lime and alum and I guess iron salts, things like that, to help settle the sewage, which was actually really kind of… it's almost like a moon landing kind of big step forward. The early chemical works in Britain were the first efforts at
12:35
primary treatment. so they were then able to start getting clarified effluent as opposed to just suspended solids all the time. However, it wasn't really effective. mean, it was sort of effective for clarity, but it didn't do anything for any of the dissolved solids or any of the constituents that are in there. All it did was just help sediment the clearer effluent from the sludge. And then a huge, huge step forward came with
13:05
the discovery of the microbial and bacterial world.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: The microscopic world.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: And that I think was sort of like the tipping point for everything.
Angela: It's so interesting. It's always so fascinating to me because these are things that we take for granted nowadays.
Shawn: Yes.
Angela: Right. Like just look at it under a microscope. Like just, you know, or I mean, just get an antibiotic.
Shawn: Right.
13:35
Angela: Right. Like just get an antibiotic. It's, fine. And there are things that we absolutely take for granted. Like I think about it all the time. My daughter can't take regular antibiotics. And I'm constantly like, if anything ever happens to the flow of, you know, sulfur based antibiotics, like what are we going to do? Cause I can't just grow mold and create
14:04
a natural antibiotic for her, that would be bad for her. But it's things we take for granted. Like we have all of this stuff and they had no idea about it back then.
Shawn: Yeah. But can you imagine them discovering this and it's like, oh my gosh.
Angela: Yeah. Yeah. That's a, I'm sitting here thinking about how long it took them just to get here. Hundreds and hundreds of years from where we started this whole discussion, Hundreds of years to get to this point.
14:34
where they discovered microbiology. They discovered super small bugs and stuff and what effect that might have.
Shawn: Yeah. It's like, oh my gosh, is that what's causing this?
Angela: Yeah. And now we just kind of take it for granted and things are moving at such a rapid pace right now and changing. Anyways, back to the regularly scheduled program.
Shawn: All right. So, a gentleman by the name of Robert Koch in the 1880s,
15:03
discovered the cholera bacterium and that it could be transmitted through contaminated water. So it sort of brought the whole thing of John Snow right back to the forefront, like, Oh my gosh, he was right. It really validated his hypothesis that… to give a scientific backing, at least to clean water and sewage treatment reform. So, it really had quite an impact on them.
15:32
And then in the 1890s, there were groups of engineers and scientists that started to realize that microorganisms could be used to purify sewage naturally. so in the 1890s, they developed either what they called percolating or what we call trickling filters in England. And wastewater was sprayed over beds of gravel that were coated with a bacterial film. So the bacterial film was allowed to grow on the gravel.
16:02
They were… they spread the wastewater over that. And then that bacterial film degraded the organic matter in the wastewater. And that's sort of how we got the very first biological treatment of wastewater. Just kind of as a side note in 1892, that was what we were talking about, the Hamburg collar outbreak. That was sort of a side note. The great part about that though was that even though it was such a tragedy, it accelerated the movement of water filtration throughout Europe.
16:32
because typically when you have things like pandemics, it tends to move some scientific things along.
Angela: Advance
Shawn: Move advances along. And so that was a positive thing that came out of that was that they started to pay attention to water filtration and wastewater management. So that's going to sort of close out the 1800s and then we're going to move into the early 1900s. And things start to kind of move a little bit faster now because we have people that are looking at the microscopic bacterium
17:01
Angela: And there's the recognition now that it's waterborne.
Shawn: Yep. And they're starting to realize all of this, that wastewater carries disease.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: All right. So in the early 1900s, like 1900 and 1910, somewhere around there, the early mechanical and biological advances start to be seen. So we're starting to get a Settledge Tank.
Angela: Uh-huh.
Shawn: Can't even talk today.
Angela: Settling Tanks.
Shawn: Settling Tanks. Thank you. Sludge digestion and things like aeration that start to be used
17:32
just all the time. it becomes a standard for what they're doing.
Angela: Well, and I did a little research only because I knew that this was coming and that this test came from that period of time. But the BOD test, the BOD-5 test came about in 1908.
Shawn: Okay. So this is what we talked about the last episode.
Angela: This is what we talked about the last episode. So it came about in 1908 and it was because the time that it would take
18:01
to for water to travel down the river to the sea from the furthest point, they estimated at five days and they wanted to see what the oxygen demand was at the end of that five days so that they could test how clean the water was.
Shawn: Makes sense.
Angela: Yes.
Shawn: All right. Let's see here. So talking again about the
18:32
early, early 1900s, 1900, 1910. That's when they started playing with the idea of activated sludge or returning the biologically treated activated sludge back to new wastewater streams. This really got the attention of a couple of gentlemen by the names of Edward Ardern and William Lockett. This was back in 1913, 1914, somewhere around there. These guys are chemists and
19:01
They were working for a company called the Manchester Corporation Rivers Department. And one of them, actually both of them, made this major breakthrough in wastewater treatment with the development of this activated sludge process. And they started studying activated sludge and how it worked and so on. And they found that when they returned the incoming sewage to the waste stream, it greatly sped up
19:29
the purification process. Because as you know, the sludge is rich in microorganisms and so on. And so that's what ends up treating the wastewater or those microorganisms. And it efficiently would break down the suspended solids and things in wastewater and dissolve it and consume it, whatever bacteria do, and then convert that into what they call non-putrifying solids.
19:59
So they labeled them. And so they're the ones that actually coined the term activated sludge. They wrote a paper in 1914 talking about the process and how it worked, but nothing really happened beyond that until after, because remember 1914 was also World War I. so once the war was over, then because nations are rebuilding and so on, their work became very important. And so it started to be used throughout Europe
20:27
this whole idea of activated sludge and it greatly changed the way we understood wastewater and wastewater treatment. So that's a kind of a very pivotal watershed moment. So that's when we move into what they call the early industrial adoption phase. It happens from 1900 or 1919 to 1920, somewhere around there. And that's when implementation all over Europe began of commercial municipal wastewater treatment.
20:56
They started using that in larger cities and so on. Of course, smaller communities still, of course, would not have the resources to able to make large scale, but they could do what they could at the time in order to help mitigate problems with wastewater. And moving on to 1920s, 1930s, now we're talking about post-war expansion because it's been a few years since World War I.
21:24
things have kind of settled down a bit. Cities in the US and the UK, Europe, they all started experimenting and building activated sludge plants, basically based on the stuff that Ardern and Lockett brought about in their report, or talked about in their report. So that, again, started to revolutionize the way wastewater is treated. And engineers started using things like aeration tanks and diffusers, settling mechanisms, things like that, because
21:54
they're realizing that they can make activated sludge a whole lot better. So these innovations are coming along.
Angela: Right, right.
Shawn: Help with the settling and help with that to create that activated sludge. And they're optimizing this process, which led to the, what we call the CAS, the conventional activated sludge process that we still use. That all came about in 1920s and 1930s. And then in the 1920s,
22:21
there was an invention, it had been actually invented earlier than that, was invented just after the turn of the century, something called Imhoff tank. is still crazy enough, is still used today because it's efficient and it works for what it's intended to do. And that became sort of the standard for primary sludge settling and sedimentation, producing that without odor. So I mean, it's a great passive way of
22:52
of creating that and creating or working through that process.
Angela: So for those of you that don't know what an Imhoff tank is, it's got essentially a sedimentation chamber.
Shawn: Yes.
Angela: So it's basically two chambers.
Shawn: Yeah.
Angela: In there. one collects sediment.
Shawn: Yeah. So it comes into the one, the central chamber.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: All the sedimentation kind of flows
23:21
or settles out of it through an opening in the bottom with a natural baffle to keep it from coming back in, or at least prevent most of it from coming back in. That kind of sloughs back off if it does. And then the outside chamber around that will be where you've got your scum rising and your sludge accumulating in the bottom. makes it easier to clean though, which is really nice because you just clean out the bottom chamber.
23:51
You don't have to worry about the central chamber as much.
Angela: Yep.
Shawn: Which is kind of nice. So thank you for bringing that up.
Angela: Yes.
Shawn: I appreciate that. Something else that came out of the 19's and 20's and 1930's was the expansion of trickling filters to smaller communities. Cause just like today, older technology becomes less expensive kind of thing. It's much more common, so it's not as cost prohibitive to put in. So smaller communities started getting trickling filters, which is a huge step for them.
24:20
Moving on to the 40’s and 50’s, now we have the development of things like mechanical aerators. So surface and turbine type aerators become much more common. They're much more efficient. They're scalable. you've got larger cities moving into those kinds of processes. And then they took the step of the activated sludge one step further introducing now what we
24:48
know as return activated sludge. So that was another innovation because they're improving the microbial control. creating stability in the process. can kind of manage it better. A lot of systems still use that, is right, which is really kind of neat. it's been, it's proven it's time tested and it's proven. Doesn't mean that it hasn't been improved upon.
Angela: Right. But it's a proven method.
Shawn: It's a proven method. Yeah.
25:19
And then there was early research into anaerobic digestion, which produced a biogas production, which is kind of a new thing for industry. was the whole idea about early adoption of biofuels and things like that. Sort of came out of all that whole process, which was a brand-new discovery for them, which was kind of cool. So wastewater creating new industry. knew?
Angela: We knew.
Shawn: Right.
25:48
Of course, then again, there was the other great war, World War II, that happened sort of in that era and a lot of stuff came to a standstill. After World War II, of course, reconstruction again, a lot of urban infrastructure expansion, that kind of thing. And that wasn't just here in the States, that was in Europe. It was all over.
Angela: Everywhere, yeah.
Shawn: So they're taking the things that they learned and improving upon them.
26:17
And then in the 60s, we start to see things like regulations coming into play. that's when they first started noticing or paying attention to nitrification and denitrification as a problem in wastewater, as part of wastewater. so engineers began tracking nutrient removal, which today is a really big deal.
Angela: It's still a big topic. Yeah.
Shawn: Before the 1960s, it really wasn't.
26:45
discussed or talked about, because I don't think they really knew that much about it. But in 1960s, it suddenly became a deal. so concept for secondary treatment standards was established and it started, they used that to define effluent quality expectations for wastewater. Here in the US they came up with the federal water pollution control act, the FWPCA in 1948. And that helped with strengthening
27:15
industrialization, pollution standards, that kind of thing. So that act has quite a bit of teeth to it. that was a definite boon. And globally, cities began building secondary treatment systems to protect their waterways from what's called eutrophication and diseases and things like that. So, we're helping… this is sort of where the whole
27:43
creating clean water helps the environment. Yeah. This is where this is starting to come from in the 1960s. Clean waterways promote good health and all that. Moving to the 70s. This is… a lot of, a lot of people point to this as like the hippie era and so on. So it actually did. They had a point…
Angela: you know, got to take the good, find the good.
Shawn: Find the good. And yeah, exactly.
28:10
1972 was the US Clean Water Act, which is also another very prominent piece of legislation. And that set national discharge standards.
Angela: Right.
Shawn: it mandatory mandatated...
Angela: Mandated?
Shawn: Mandated.
Shawn: Mandatated?
Shawn: Mandated. I haven't had enough coffee.
Angela: I can tell.
Shawn: Mandated secondary treatment. And it also enacted
28:39
a purse to provide funds for constructing wastewater treatment plants.
Angela: This is again where I'm like, you know, I was not alive in 1972, not quite yet. But it's one of those things where, again, I think that we take for granted our clean waterways. And because a lot, you know, a good part of our population either
29:09
wasn't alive back then or didn't see it. If you lived on, if you lived in Oregon back then, you didn't see, you didn't see all of the polluted waterways, right?
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Like it was, it was pristine like it is now. Similar. But there were a lot of waterways in the, in the US that were polluted. If you look at, if you look at photos, like of New York city from
29:38
the sixties, you can see the pollution.
Shawn: Oh yeah. Or highly industrialized areas like Detroit or…
Angela: highly industrialized areas. that's why these things were put into place.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: So nothing just happens.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: These were put into place because of that pollution.
Shawn: Yes.
Angela: Because it was happening and because the water needed to be more clean.
Shawn: Yeah. It was a response.
Angela: Yes. It was a response.
30:07
And so I know that people talk about, the hippies. And of course they did that. But it helped our nation.
Shawn: Yes. Yup. Agreed. So, yeah, in the 70s, there was a, of course, very evident rise in environmental movements. You know, like Greenpeace and a lot of the other environmental groups that.
30:37
So, but it also brought about things like new advanced treatment methods, like tertiary filtration, phosphorus removal using chemicals, activated carbon absorption for odors, things like that, and chlorination for disinfection, which was a big one.
Angela: Huge.
Shawn: And so by the late 1970s, people started seeing wastewater treatment plants as essential civic infrastructure,
Angela: Yep. Rather than…
31:07
Shawn: Yep. Rather than just optional utilities, things that were nice to have, no, they were essential to have. They started seeing that. And that moves us into the 1980s with the concept of the sequence batch reactor.
Angela: Yeah. SBRs.
Shawn: Yep. Which are still in use.
Angela: Yep.
Shawn: They started getting a lot more attention because they were a flexible variation of activated sludge.
31:35
computerized process controllers, SCADA systems. That was a new thing back then, or semi-new thing back then. It gained a lot of popularity in the 80s, because you could monitor from a central control room. You wouldn't have to be at a plant and see what's going on there.
Angela: It was a huge movement. It was a huge shift in controlling septic systems and the controls of
32:02
septic systems when we were able to move into that SCADA era.
Shawn: Yeah.
Angela: Or the beginning of SCADA.
Shawn: Yeah. And interestingly enough, it was also sort of the birth of the membrane technologies.
Angela: Yeah.
Shawn: Which is kind of cool.
Angela: Yeah. More refined filtration.
Shawn: Yeah. Membrane bioreactors were becoming a thing back then. And the anaerobic contact process.
32:31
and upflow anaerobic sludge blankets, which I had to look up those terms. Not familiar enough with those particular terms, because we don't necessarily use them in our industry here, but those became useful for advanced industrial wastewater treatment. I nterestingly enough, 1980s was also when Orenco started talking about advanced filtration and so on.
Angela: We were focused on sand.
33:00
Shawn: We were at the time.
Angela: soils, soils and sand. Yeah.
Shawn: Yeah. As things started moving, actually it was kind of interesting because necessity kind of moved us toward other treatment processes like AdvanTex.
Angela: I know we've talked about this before in the podcast, but we really moved to textile material because it wasn't that sand didn't work.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: Right? Sand was amazing and it was an amazing advancement.
Shawn: It still works.
33:31
Angela: And it still, still works to this day. I think I talked about this in a recent podcast. Like I just moved into a new home. Home has a sand filter on it and that sand filter has been there and it is kicking. The house was built in like the early 2000s. Sand filter is great and it will remain there until it fails. But part of the problem was a, smaller lot constraints and you couldn't
34:01
or didn't want to take up 360 square feet for a sand filter and dirty sand.
Shawn: Yeah. The availability of clean sand that you could use.
Angela: Which I know is a foreign concept to a lot of people. They're always like, what do mean dirty sand? But when you get too fine particles in there, it ends up clogging. So when you get dirty sand, your sand filter can clog and fail.
34:30
And that's what we were seeing was there were some areas of the country where you could get great sand readily available, clean. They tested their pits regularly. You could confirm that the sand was going to work and do exactly what it was supposed to do. And then there were other parts of the country where you had sand filters that were failing regularly.
34:58
the sand pit would tell you that the sand was the correct gradation and that it was what you were supposed to be using. And then it would fail. And they'd be like, why did it fail? Because the sand wasn't good. And so that's really what caused us to start looking into other
35:27
types of materials, right?
Shawn: Right.
Angela: It wasn't, it wasn't about the, it wasn't about sand not working. It was about the installation of sand filters that were not optimal.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: You know, if you, when you were drilling your holes in your laterals, you weren't using a sharp drill bit or bore out that hole after you drilled it.
35:57
Next thing you know, your spray pattern's off. You're not getting equal distribution across the sand filter like you're supposed to. There are many, many factors that could go into a failed sand filter. And we really wanted to eliminate that. Eliminate the possibility for a system to fail. It's not only is it costly if
36:26
your system fails. It's also a nuisance. Who wants to now have to dig up their backyard or a part of their backyard? You have a family in a house, you have children who are used to playing in that backyard and now you have to cordon off part of it and keep them out of it. So that's what led us.
36:56
Shawn: Exactly. All right. Let's see here. Oh, where were we back to the 1990s? That wasn't that long ago, was it?
Angela: It was yesterday. According to my music selection this morning, it's this morning.
Shawn: Exactly. So in the 90s, they started thinking more about nutrient removal and that sort of became the standard. So the biological nutrient removal systems,
37:24
what they call BNRs, alternating aerobic systems and anoxic systems, that kind of thing, were coming into use, being a little more heavily utilized. And membrane bioreactors, they sort of matured, the technology got better. They started combining biological treatment with ultra filtration. They became more efficient, that kind of thing. we started seeing improved efficiencies for communities.
37:53
UV disinfection gained a lot of popularity because people were traditionally using chlorine and nobody really likes the taste of chlorine in water. it's… So that became a much more used system, UV disinfection. And then there was just increased emphasis on energy efficiency, sludge management, water reuse, that kind of thing. it wasn't just local, it was global.
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We started to see a global movement for wastewater treatment in the 1990s.
Angela: Yeah, I think that's still going on today.
Shawn: It is, it is. And it's only getting more prevalent, I think, as we see that water sources are becoming more scarce, or least usable water sources.
Angela: Well, and everyone knows, like, water is a source of life. You have to have water to live.
Shawn: Yep.
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as they showed back in the early days, it's also a carrier for disease. So…
Angela: Yeah
Shawn: got to keep it clean in order to keep from having these outbreaks. But now we're looking at the, the 2000s up to present day and into the future. so in the 2000s, we're looking at wider adoption of membrane bioreactors. This is a good thing. A lot of communities are now more able to afford that because the technology is advanced. And so
39:17
as a lot of technology, technology as it ages becomes more affordable and more advanced. Just kind of cool. There's a lot more emphasis now on stricter nutrient removal and resource recovery. So that again, we're creating another industry in resource recovery. So we're using the nutrients from sludge and repurposing that for other things. Microplastics and pollutions of
39:46
emerging concern, pollutants of emerging concerns. Huge issue right now. Microplastics are in everything. They're coming up with new ways now.
Angela: Quite literally.
Shawn: Yeah. They're coming up with new ways now to combat that. They've got, they've been working with bacteria that eat microplastics. They've been working on other ways to trap microplastics. Same thing with the pollutants of emerging concern. They're trying to figure out new ways to combat that.
40:15
And so that is still an emerging science and it's actually very exciting to watch. Digitization AI and advanced controls. AI is on the rise, whether we like it or not.
Angela: Oh, it's here.
Shawn: And it's one of those things that it's being utilized as a tool to create greater efficiencies in wastewater treatment. They're finding new ways to, to utilize AI to make the process better, new ways of treating wastewater.
40:45
to manage wastewater processes. so that's on the rise now. Water reuse and what they call fit for purpose. So recycling, reusing wastewater. It's a big thing in places that have water scarcity. Parts of California, there are other countries that have problems with water scarcity. building reclamation plants. They're working on ways to filter gray water to reuse in toilet flushing.
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industrial uses and things like that.
Angela: Well, or if you just want to reuse your water, like their systems in Portland and Seattle and, you know, Montana, places where it's not necessarily about water scarcity, it's more about just stewardship, right? And reusing what you've got as opposed to using more resh.
Shawn: Right. And we're also seeing great advances in alternative energy sources for powering
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plants and treatment systems. Solar is much more efficient than it used to be. And so finding different ways of providing power for wastewater treatment plants is on the rise as well. So all in all, there has been a lot of innovation in the last hundred years that, I mean, things have just gone from basics to now we're looking at things that used to be science fiction.
Angela: Yeah. Can you imagine telling
42:13
John Snow about microplastics?
Shawn: I would like to be able to see John Snow and tell him, you were right.
Angela: You were right, You were onto something. But I mean, you think about that, we've talked about a lot of the people, but going back, and that was really only 150, 175 years ago?
Shawn: Something like that, yeah.
Angela: and going back and telling him about microplastics now.
Shawn: Yeah.
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Angela: Pollutants of emerging concern.
Shawn: They would think that we are crazy.
Angela: Yeah, he'd be like, what are you even talking about?
Shawn: Yeah.
Angela: Like, absolutely not.
Shawn: Yeah, because the plastics weren't a thing until like, what, the 1920s?
Angela: Or going back and be like, you know, you had to really do was run this through some sand.
Shawn: Right.
43:02
Angela: I mean, when you don't know, you don't know. And then all of a sudden you go, okay. Okay, yeah, I should have been doing that. Interesting, so interesting and so fascinating.
Shawn: Yeah, it really is kind of fun to look back and see the progression.
Angela: I think it's really interesting to understand. I know that I've said repeatedly that history is not my thing, but I do hold the…
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I have a very deeply held belief that you have to understand the things that have happened in history so that you can continue to move forward. Because if you don't look at what's happened in history, you will move backward.
Shawn: Right.
Angela: If we don't look at waterborne diseases and understand that the reason that we do these things is because there were cholera outbreaks.
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Right? Because there was this disease spread. That's why we are fastidious about treating our water right now. If we don't keep that in our minds, why we did it and understand the history of it, we're bound to move backward. So I find it very, very fascinating and interesting and a necessity to understand.
Shawn: Yeah, I agree.
44:27
Angela: All right, well, thank you, Shawn, for our history lesson. And thank you all for listening.
We want to thank you again for joining us today. Before you go, don't forget to subscribe where you listen to podcasts so you're notified when new episodes are posted. Also, you can leave your comments or suggestions through the contact link on our website, www.orenco.com. Until next time, have a great day.
