Environmental Health and Safety

Waste Water Management

The comparison on wastewater management has several options that municipalities consider while engineers research the efficient use of either secondary treatment or tertiary treatment . The two has opened a debate by a city council member wanting to use secondary water treatment instead of tertiary treatment . To compare secondary water treatment and tertiary treatment the EPA has a report that represents 23 municipalities in the United States . Their observation includes the study of chemicals additives and filtration that have proven to lower levels of phosphorus

The comparisons are

outline on EPA web site

Chemical addition to waste water with aluminum or iron based coagulants followed by tertiary filtration can reduce in the final effluent to very low levels . The concentrates achieved by some of these WWTP 's are consistently near or below0 .01 mg /l

The cost applying tertiary treatment for phosphorus removal is affordable , when measured by the monthly residential sewer fees charged by the municipalities that operate the exemplary facilities . The monthly residential rates charged to maintain and operates the entire treatment facility ranged from as low as 18 to the highest fee of 46

There appeared to be no technical or economic reason that precludes other discharges from using any of the tertiary treatment technologies that are employed at WWTP 's . Any of these technologies that are may be scaled as necessary to fulfill treatment capacity needs after consideration of site-specific conditions

Other pollutants that are commonly found affect water...