Stuff You Should Know - How Wastewater Treatment Works

Episode Date: April 16, 2020

All that gross stuff we humans put in the water that gets flushed down the sewers has to be taken back out before that water is reintroduced to the environment. That’s the ideal, and it’s essential to staving off the imbalance people bring to the planet. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass

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Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Welcome to Step You Should Know, a production of iHeart radios, How Stuff Works. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles W. Chuck Bryant over there, and Jerry just ghosted us.

Like a catfish, I think is how they put it. And that, of course, makes this stuff you should know from the abyss. How you doing? Man, I'm just doing great. Everything's totally normal. Everything feels comfortable and fun. So I'm good, how about you?

Have you done anything really weird in the last two weeks? I think a more legit question would be, what have I not done that's weird? What's the weirdest thing you've done? I'm trying to think, like I shouldn't have said anything because I really haven't done anything that weird. I've just been more like, I've developed this weird kind of,

I guess it's indigestion, which I don't get. I have like an iron constitution, but I don't know if it's because I've been pounding vitamins lately and they keep lodging in this one spot in my esophagus. I think there's a weird bend in there somewhere. And so I constantly feel like I've got some throw up just sitting in the middle of my chest.

Oh God. That's a new development. And I've noticed that when I don't take vitamins, it still happens. So I'm kind of up the creek on that respect. And I know that's not doing anything weird, but I mean, I guess aside from that and setting out box traps for coyotes

and then eating the coyotes when I catch them, those are the two weirdest things. All right, that's not bad. What about you? I haven't really done anything weird. I shaved my head, but that was just as I was bored and hot. Nice.

Has nothing to do with it. Did they have Britney Spears? Yeah, I mean, I haven't, you know, I usually do that once a year and I haven't done it in a few years for some reason, so. Yeah, it has been a little while. You've been rocking the grown out stuff. I know.

I thought about shaving my beard too, just for funsies, but I don't know. I think now's the time to try all these weird things where no one's going to see you for six weeks. Yeah, as a matter of fact, after we get done recording, I have a date with you, me to go cut my hair because I've got the COVID hair.

It is really long. Yeah. Real long. It's just out of control. You know that point where when you grow your fingernails out too far and they just turn that corner? Well, you wouldn't know this

because you bite your fingernails, right? I quit biting my fingernails a while ago, yeah. Okay, so maybe you've experienced this. There's a point and it can happen within an hour where they're just too close to being too long and then all of a sudden they turn this corner and you can't go like another minute with them being unclipped.

They just feel so gross all of a sudden. That's how my hair feels right now. I think the corner of your fingernails turn is called the tip of your finger. Start wrapping around. Sure, yeah, man. So I guess we're talking wastewater treatment then, obviously, with all this fingernail talk.

Yeah, and I gotta say, who did this one? Did Ed put this together for us? Ed did this with a high fever from what I understand. Right, non-COVID related, we should point out. Yeah, he was just sick. He came through, he's doing okay, he's on the mend. But yeah, he turned this in. He's like, I had a fever when I wrote this

so it might not make that much sense, but it did. I think it did, but we should say if you work in wastewater treatment, what I did find out doing supplementary research was that there are clearly a lot of, like there are almost 15,000 treatment plants in the United States, and there are clearly a bunch of different ways to do it

because I saw a bunch of other different stuff. Right. So let's just say what we're gonna talk about is one way that it can go. Yeah, and we'll probably touch on some of the other ones that people use, but there's just no way we could cover everything. And the other thing that I saw too is there's a real sentiment

that the United States in particular's infrastructure for treating wastewater is aging really rapidly. Like we need to do something about it soon. I saw some watchdog group said we need to spend about $240 billion to upgrade our wastewater treatment around the country. Somebody else said $600 billion, but everybody's saying, wait, wait, wait, okay, that's great

because we're using really antiquated methods that work. They work pretty well, but they're having a lot of trouble keeping up with the Joneses. With the Joneses, yes, because the Joneses now, because we live amongst like plastic everywhere, they poop and pee plastic, they throw stuff in antibiotics into their toilets. There's like a different world

than the wastewater treatment plants were built to handle like in the early and mid 20th century. So this is like a real opportunity to update our infrastructure as we rebuild it. So hopefully we'll be doing that. Hopefully, and you know what? $250 billion doesn't sound like a lot of money. I thought I was gonna hear a number like one trillion.

That's what I would have thought too. I was actually kind of surprised. I went back and looked and now they were talking about the wastewater treatment. So I don't know if it's, I know that some of the technologies are very expensive. And maybe they're saying to rebuild as is, it would be $240 to $600 billion,

but maybe to implement some of the more high tech stuff that has come along in the last few years. Maybe that would be a little more high dollar. All right, well, let's talk about low dollar. Okay. By way of history, because at the beginning of wastewater treatment, well, you can't even call it wastewater treatment.

It was just calling, it was basically like how we dealt with wastewater. We weren't treating it at all. No. The very most rudimentary thing that you still can see in places are outhouses and latrines, which latrine is just an outhouse, or an outhouse is just a latrine

with a little bit of privacy involved. Yeah, and you know what? I was looking up outhouses, they're still around. They are. There's like composting toilets and urine diverters and all sorts of like hippy stuff you can get into if you want. But one thing I kept seeing was, you know,

like there's always like a crescent moon cutout on the outhouse. Yeah, I've seen those. It's like almost synonymous with an outhouse. It looks weird without one, to me. So I looked it up and it turns out that back in colonial times, when there was a pre-literate population,

the crescent moon indicated that that outhouse was for women and a star cutout indicated it was for men. I think I knew that from... Oh, you knew that? Yeah. I never had any idea. Yeah, I learned that visiting Mount Vernon. That would be a good place to learn that for sure.

And George Washington's just had a big cutout of a marijuana leaf. He did. It was only for him. Yeah, he'd come home from working in the fields and Martha would have a big bowl, big fat bowl waiting for him at the end of the day. Very nice.

Yeah. So if you're talking about 20th century, you would think like, yeah, but surely when we got to the 20th century, they were really handling the sewage properly. Not so at all. Just, you know, it was well into the 20th century when we still had suburbs with people living in them

with no sewer connections and outhouses. And this was, this is kind of hard to believe, but I guess in more rural areas, but Ed even says suburbs. Yeah, he made it sound like basically if you went into like, I don't know, Dunwoody or something like that, which is a suburb of Atlanta, you would have found outhouses in the 50s,

which maybe that's true. I don't know. I mean, if you think about it, the septic tank is really just kind of a fancy latrine pit. Yeah, but it's interesting too, because in like 6,500 BCE, there were places that, you know, it's funny cause it seems like there's a lot of

advanced thinking in ancient times that goes by the wayside for just thousands of years. And then it comes back. But in what is now modern Syria, they actually had drainage pipes and stuff that fed wastewater from the outhouses, basically to the streets and rivers. So it's not like it was great,

but it at least got it out of there. They didn't have a lot of follow through on their ideas. Great first idea, and then they were like, just forget it after that. Pretty much. But hey, have you ever heard why things were like, possibly more advanced or very advanced early on, and then they went dark for a little while?

I feel like we talked about this before. It must have been the Enlightenment episode because it was the Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, when the church took over and basically said, science can burn in hell. Amazing, that works, huh? Yeah, it's crazy. And then the Enlightenment came along and said,

no, science is back everybody. And we started to have like sewage treatment again, which I mean, not coincidentally, that's around the time we started taking sewage treatment seriously. And it wasn't just that we got a lot smarter all of a sudden from the Enlightenment, which definitely was partially the case,

but there were way more people. And so things like digging a hole in the ground, pooping and peeing into it. And then once it got full, burying it and digging another hole, methods like that just became unsustainable or putting all of your sewage out into the street. It became unsustainable just because

there were so many people. Yeah, and there was poop and pee literally everywhere in the streets and the rivers and the lakes. And the first sort of push toward treating the sewage was literally just because the smell, eventually they were like, this is terrible to live amongst. Maybe we could do something. Maybe we could throw some lime or some charcoal

or some sawdust on this stuff. And at least, and it won't be safe, but we won't be like walking around gagging 24-7. Right. They're like, at least there's some sawdust on there. Do something for God's sake. Kitty litter? Sure.

So they did do that, right? But that still wasn't enough. I mean, people were still just, they, I think in our great stink episode, Joseph Bazalgette was just revered as a saint, basically for saving people by diverting sewage into sewers away from people's drinking water and stuff. But even still, I think he was also responsible

for helping design some of the earliest wastewater treatment plants, but it's still around the time and into the 20th century. It was basically like, here's a sewer and then we're just gonna make the sewer come out downstream of our drinking water supply and then problem solved. Right, like sorry for Shelbyville, but we're fine.

Exactly, exactly. Chew on it, Shelbyville. Chew on our fecal matter. Oh, God. But that was kind of exactly what happened. If you were down river downstream or on the other side of the lake from this area, you got their poop in your backyard and you didn't want that.

So eventually people started realizing that there are things that you can do to make water better and then put it into rivers and lakes and streams and even the ocean and seas. And that is basically where we're at right now with wastewater treatment, which is we poop and pee and we flush stuff into the sewer and then the stuff goes into a wastewater treatment plant

and we do some stuff to it and then we put out slightly better than sewage water into the rivers and lakes and streams and hope for the best. Yeah, that's right. Some of the early things they also did was like flood a field with wastewater. This allowed sedimentation,

which is the feces basically settling. And then actually the plants can help out. The plants take up all that gross stuff as water that they use to grow and kind of traps it in there, which is nice. And then you sell those plants to Shelbyville to eat. But it still didn't change. It didn't make anything less harmful

as far as bacteria goes. So that's why typhoid and cholera and everything was a huge problem and that's why wastewater may be the biggest advancement in life-saving device. Like that and penicillin are neck and neck, I think. Yeah, really. I mean, just not being around water that contains all sorts of harmful bacteria

that people pooped out, that's definitely going to improve your lifespan for sure. And that whole thing about putting sewage onto a field and letting the plants deal with it, that's actually still around. That's like a sensible way to treat sewage because not only do the plants take care of it, but as it trickles down through the soil to the groundwater,

there's all sorts of microbes and minerals and all sorts of ions that pick up that harmful stuff. And that actually purifies the water. The problem is, is once you get too many people, which can happen really quickly, that soil and those plants get overwhelmed and a lot of bad stuff gets through and then you're polluting the groundwater.

So as more and more people came along, we realized we had to come up with technology. We couldn't just rely on soil anymore. Yeah, Massachusetts was a little forward thinking in a Worcester mass in 1889. They actually treated sewage with chemicals. And this was one of the first chemical treatments for sewage in America, I think.

And that would cause these solids to clump together and then settle out like obviously the fecal matter. And that was good because bacteria is more apt to cling to the poop than it will to stay in the water. So that helped for a little while. And then for a long time after that, they would just sort of dilute the water with clean water and say, well, this is as good as we can do basically.

Yeah, which I mean, again, that's kind of what we're doing now, which just the stuff we're putting out now is way better, way less harmful and has way more stuff taken out than it did in the 19th century. But that's ultimately, that's what I'm saying. We're still working mostly on those premises. One is that you allow sedimentation to happen,

which is like putting sewage over a field and letting the sediment settle. And then you use chemical or biological treatments to filter out stuff that is leftover even after sedimentation. And that's, again, that's where we're at today. It's just the techniques we're using are much more advanced. Yeah, and I don't think we even said what wastewater is

because I think a lot of people might think that wastewater is just something that goes down your toilet. But wastewater is any kind of water affected by human use at all period. So there's, there's storm runoff, you know, rainwater is wastewater. And you might think like rainwater is beautiful, it falls from the sky and it's so clean.

But this stuff is running through cities, it's running, and especially in cities because there's not enough dirt and grass to soak it all up. So it's taking everything on every urban city street in America and collecting that and taking it with it. So fertilizer, pesticides, any kind of agricultural grossness. Oil, gas.

Roadkill, I mean, just think about every disgusting thing on the ground. And that's what stormwater is. And that's why stormwater is treated. Just like it is, which is wastewater. Whole possums. Tons of possums. Guns, apparently.

What? I saw one wastewater treatment explainer video and apparently a lot of guns end up getting filtered out in that first big filter. Oh my gosh. Because I think people like, I don't know if they're just murder weapons that people throw down a sewer drain.

I mean, I would guess so, or at least crime weapons, you know? It's kind of scary. Yeah, you'd like to think like that happened one time somewhere, not like that's a regular occurrence. That's nuts, man. Well, I mean, I say a lot of guns. I don't know how many guns, but. Tons of guns.

It was enough for them to mention that guns show up quite often. Right, the one you were talking about, which is like all that wastewater that goes down toilets, the poop in the bee water, that's actually called black water. I love that term, man. I'm gonna go make some black water.

Yeah, that sounds like a hardcore cocktail that would involve Yeagermeister. And the doobie brothers. Let's work it out here. So Yeagermeister. Okay. A little bit of simple syrup. Very simple syrup.

Orange juice, fresh squeezed orange juice. How would that be with, I'll bet that'd be awful with Yeagermeister. Of course, everything's gonna be awful with Yeagermeister. Yeah. And then a little freshly muddled basil. Little star anise, perhaps? That's the black water cocktail.

Oh my God, that's terrible. Gray water is not as gross as that by any stretch. This is all the water, and we've talked about gray water in our eco-friendly episodes, because a lot of households will reuse their gray water, the water that goes down your sink or your shower. A lot of individual households try to recycle their own gray water

if you're one of those forward thinking hippie-dippy types. Sure, if you've got a composting toilet outhouse in your backyard. Yeah, but generally there aren't like big cities with huge gray water recycling systems. Yet, I predict that in the next 20 years, we will see those rise pretty commonly. Yeah, I hope so.

I do too, I mean, it's definitely about time. Like we waste water like it's nothing. Yeah, it's crazy how cheap our water is, especially in the States, you know? Yeah. There's also a couple of other things that if you're a waste, I think they actually,

they don't call them wastewater any longer. They call it water resource reclamation plants, which really kind of drives home what we're talking about a little more. Like this is something you don't wanna just pee away, you know what I'm saying? Like this is important stuff. And so they're starting to use like that kind of nomenclature

to indicate how important it is. But if you run one of these plants or you work at them, a couple of other things you're gonna be on the lookout for is the amount of pollutants that you have in your water at any given time. The amount that comes through. And then in addition to storm runoff, black water and gray water,

you're also on the lookout for industrial effluent. Sure. And we should probably say real quick, effluent is what most people call wastewater, all forms going into the treatment plant. That's not effluent. No, no. Effluent is all wastewater if you're not in the know.

If you are in the know, effluent is what a water reclamation treatment plant puts out, the treated water is effluent. The all the untreated stuff that comes in is effluent. That's right. But I think if we could say effluent, we're probably just gonna be talking about it in general throughout this episode.

Yeah, and you mentioned industrial processes. We should probably point out too that if you have an industrial plant manufacturing something, you probably have your own wastewater treatment system on site, you don't just dump all that stuff and say here, county or city, deal with it, you have to clean that stuff first to send that really still gross water to the city.

Probably depends on your mayor, if he's spineless or she's spineless. That's true. Mayor Quimby? Mayor Quimby, he wouldn't let it happen because he was spineless. He'd let it happen because he was getting kickbacks for it. Oh man, my favorite.

I don't even know if I can say this on the air. Okay. Should I? Do you know the line? My favorite? No, no, I can't wait to hear it. We'll edit it out if you can't, geez. All right, I can't remember which episode,

but it was when everyone was freaking out about something and Quimby came up to the podium and said, calm down everyone. I know we're all frightened and horny. Yeah, that's right. I think that was the comment episode where the comment was headed towards Springfield. We're all frightened and horny.

That's so, so funny. And then he introduces Professor Frank and Professor Frank goes, good evening everyone. And somebody stands up and goes, quit stalling. What's the plan? He goes, okay, all right, sit down. Oh man, I missed that show. I do too.

You want to take a break? Yeah, let's take a break and we'll talk about how this stuff is treated. Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lashor and Christine Taylor,

stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it.

It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and non-stop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to Blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting Frosted Tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL Instant Messenger and the dial-up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in

as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s, called on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart Podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough

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And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life, step by step. Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. Okay, so we've basically, we've talked a lot about wastewater up to this point, Chuck. And I feel like we should talk about it some more. Yeah, and let me point something out too real quick

because Ed said in here that wastewater treatment plants is not water that you're going to end up drinking. That is not fully true. In water-challenged places in the world, they don't like to call it this, but there are treatment facilities where they can go toilet to tap. Places like Australia, Singapore, Namibia, and then New Mexico, Virginia, and California,

they convert this stuff back into potable water. And it's pretty great, actually, because they've said it's shown that it actually has fewer contaminants than existing, just like what you and I are drinking in Atlanta, let's say. Yeah, for sure, because they put it through such a rigorous process that from what I saw, Singapore actually has to remix it with rainwater

so that it'll get some of the local minerals and terroir, basically, because they strip everything out. It's just like water molecules, and that's it from what they do with it. And the one in Singapore I was reading about, did you read about that one? They seem to be the leaders of the pack with this stuff. Yeah, I think Singapore is especially challenged

with water supplies. Yeah, so they actually came up with something called new water, NEW water, and the NEW is capitalized. It's just a great little word and spelling and everything. But they also, in addition to just coming up with a bang-up water filtration system or water reclamation system, they also had a bang-up PR campaign

and got everybody behind it. You have to, man. You totally do. There was a town, I can't remember in, I can't remember the name of it, in Australia where they needed to do this, and it got sunk because some people started speaking out against it. All of a sudden, the city councils started turning,

changing their minds. I think Malcolm Turnbull forced a referendum to try to gain favor with some of the residents there, and it was just a big mess, but this paper was basically demonstrating side by side how bad it could be and how good it could be, but a big part of talking people into drinking water that somebody else peed out at some point

or was contained poop at some point, like you really have to be committed to it and have a united front and basically show the science saying this is 100% harmless. There's nothing wrong with it. It's more pure than anything we're feeding you now, so just try it, and Singapore was apparently very successful with it.

Yeah, you really have to do that. I saw other places where they say they try not to make it too big of a show of it, but... Sure. I think the opposite. I think you really gotta educate people so they know that this water is safe and tastes fine, and I mean, it's a miracle of modern technology.

It really is. It totally is, and I'm with you. Like, I think that's one of those things you need to be upfront and transparent about not letting people find out the hard way. Yeah, and new water is, you know, that's a great way to go, because if you notice new water sounds nothing like fecal water.

No, no. Sounds like new Coke. Right, that was a big hit. Yeah, it was. So, all right, let's follow this stuff. Like, if you, let's say it's raining one day, we're standing in a sewer now, Chuck, okay? Yeah, and by the way, what we're about to describe

takes about 24 to 36 hours, depending on the plant. Cool, so we're standing right outside of a sewage treatment plant. Smells great. Or a water reclamation plant, and we are knee deep. Our galoshes are on, and we're standing there, and all this water is coming through. It's raining, so there's storm water runoff.

Wait, where'd you get galoshes? I'm sorry, I only have the one pair. I got flip flops. It's saved up for them. That's so gross. And there's a possum floating by, because there's a storm water runoff. Maybe there's a gun over there.

People are pooping and peeing, so there's black water all around us as well. People are taking showers, so there's gray water coming through. There's corn all over the place. I could not stop thinking about corn when I was researching this. Yeah, at what point does corn get filtered out?

So we're about at that point. One of the first things that all this water is going to do is go through a pretty good size fence, right? And that's gonna hold back all of the big stuff, the possums, the tree branches, probably a gun, unless it's a real tiny little, old-time gambler's derringer, right? And all this stuff is gonna get caught up on a fence,

and eventually somebody's gonna come along and scrape it off, sell the gun, eat the possum, who knows what with the tree branch, and then just basically keep it clean for other stuff. That's the very first step that really before the water ever even goes into the plant, it's gonna pass through one of these grates. Yeah, or there may be like a vertical conveyor system,

so some unlucky individual doesn't have to scoop poop possums and poop guns out of water. Right, a clean possum is bad enough, but one that's been bathed in black water, that's not good. And man, we're making jokes, but God bless those people who do this work, you know? Oh yeah, for sure. For sure, hats off to them,

because again, they're keeping all of us safe and healthy. That's right. Galash is off. Right, so, oh no, I'm keeping mine on. Okay. So we've gone through that first grate. Now there's another series of screens that are gonna pick out smaller stuff,

like bits of tire or little car accident pieces that run off with the storm water. Do you know what I'm talking about? Sure. There's just all sorts of glittery stuff in the road, all that stuff gets picked up and coarse sand, that kind of thing. And now you're talking.

Now you've got some water that's ready to be treated. Yeah, there's something called a grit chamber. They can be horizontal, aerated, or vortex. The vortex ones are kinda cool. I had called it a hydro cyclone. I think it's the same thing. And it basically just spins the water and slings all that grit and stuff,

I guess, car accident stuff out to the side where it's filtered out. Do you remember at like the county fair or whatever that ride that was like that? It would press you up against the wall? Yeah. Six flags had one? Yeah, it was called the, what was it called?

But yeah, it spun and then the floor dropped out from under you. Yeah, right. It was probably called the black water cocktail. I can't remember. I did not like it though. Oh, I loved it. Six flags have one of those, huh?

Yeah, they got rid of it pretty quickly. And of course, you know, you always get these six flags rumors. The rumor was that some child didn't get slung out and like got trapped when the floor came back up. Which may have been true for all I know, but I just, I don't like dizzying things. Yeah, the trick was to just keep your focus on something

inside in the middle, like the person across from you who was moving relative to you and that kept you from getting dizzy. Gotcha. Okay. Okay, so yes, so, but you can, if you were so inclined, and also I have to say, like reading all of these different steps, I'm like, this would be kind of a fun ride

actually to like slide through here. 24 hours. If you were small, if like you were just a little piece of car headlight to make it all the way through, that would be pretty fun. It's a wild ride. So now you've got water that's ready to be treated. It's been, the grits been taken out,

the big pieces have been taken out, but there's still plenty of stuff in it. And the water's very turbid, right? There's a lot of suspended particulate matter just kind of floating around making the water murky. And this is where it enters, what's known as primary treatment. Where basically if there's any water reclamation plant

anywhere in the world, it's going to go through this stage at least the primary treatment. Yeah, and I think it's, you know, you think about during the daytime, there's a lot more activity. So these facilities aren't meant to like operate at full board during the day and then be cool at night. Like they depend on a very steady flow

and you know, pollution can't all bum rush it when everyone goes and takes their morning poop. So they have these holding tanks basically where they can hold this stuff during the day that's coming in and just sort of balance it out and distribute it over a 24 hour period. So it's not, the systems never overwhelmed basically. Yeah, it's called flow equalization

where if you imagine this as a river running through, they keep very tight control over the volume and the speed and the flow of the wastewater that's going through the plant. And so when that flow is exceeded, whatever is exceeded gets diverted off to one of these holding basins so that when the flow goes down, they can move some from the, from the,

the holding basin into that flow to make it. So it's steady basically 24 hours a day. That's pretty ingenious stuff. If you ask me, I didn't know that. It is. And then one more gross thing that we should mention is- Oh yeah, we forgot this. Yeah, grease and fat, you know,

restaurants use grease traps, but there's still so much industrial and consumer. Like, you know, think about anytime someone pours grease down their drain or oil down their drain in their house, which you shouldn't be doing. That stuff ends up in the wastewater treatment facility and it all loves to hang out with each other and congeal up together.

And there's something called fatbergs that form. Yeah. And it's disgusting. Oh God. Yeah, they're horrid. It's a, it's a huge, sometimes multi-ton ball of fat and grease and apparently they're really good at attracting flushable wipes.

Oh, I thought you were going to say the ladies. Right. The ones that have like gold medallions and chest hair stuck to them. Yes. Oh God. But the, the normal fatbergs, the ones with glasses and buck teeth, they don't.

Right. So disco stew versus cletus is like Jod Yokel. Exactly. And I didn't know this was going to be so Simpson's heavy. I had no idea either, but, but yeah, I remember learning about fatbergs back in, I think it was 2011, something like that, where London had one and they were like,

everybody stopped flushing wipes. And everyone said, no, you can just get the fatbergs out every once in a while. But yeah, that's, that's horrid. But they have to get those out, not just because the fatbergs are so gross, but like you were saying, that can really screw with the machinery

in the, in the water reclamation plant. So I guess that would be after grit potentially. Yeah. They go into these aeration basins and they basically just inject a bunch of air in the bottom of the tanks or not even tanks. A lot of these are open air that, you know, we'll mention that later,

but it just creates bubbles and it aerates the water and that kind of just works everything free where it can float to the top. So you can just skim it right on off and slap it on a hoagie roll and go to town. Yep. It's a great mayo substitute. I bet.

Okay. So now we finally enter this primary treatment. Although I would, I would argue that removing grease and fat or I think the acronym is fog, fat, oil and grease. That's part of primary treatment, but we'll say that it's step negative 0.5. We finally reached step one,

which is where this turbid water with all of this kind of suspended particulate matter in it is going to be dumped into a tank. Usually, well, I can't say usually, but there's like two main versions that I've seen. One is a big round one where the water just flows into the middle and then just kind of slows down

as it reaches the outside of the tank that are the edges of the tank. The other is a makes a little more, since it's almost like a big swimming pool where the water comes in one end and slows down as it makes its way toward the other. Either way, the point of this is slowing the water down so that it continues to flow,

but flows so slowly that all those suspended particles have a chance to settle to the bottom under gravity. And that's sedimentation. Like we talked about, you know, way back in the day where they used to take sewer water and put it over a field as it was trickling through that soil under the force of gravity, that's sedimentation.

We do the same thing today, except we usually do it in a tank rather than a field. And then we also may use some agents to speed it up, like flocculating agents, which is one of my favorite words, maybe a good band name, I'm not sure. Not bad. There's also coagulating agents,

which is a terrible band name. And they'll actually do what they were trying to do with the grease, which is kind of fluff it up or make it attracted to one another and form larger solids that are way easier to get out of there. And after this primary treatment, the water looks pretty good,

but you would not drink it because you would die almost immediately of a horrible, terrible death. Yeah, and the key with these primary clarifiers, which are these main tanks that they go into at first, is there's something called settling velocity, and that's the speed at which the particulate is gonna settle.

And we mentioned earlier the flow rate coming in, the reason they have to be just manic about how much stuff is coming in there is because your flow rate, 100% of the time, can never exceed that settling velocity. So, in other words, the stuff coming in can't be coming in faster than all that nasty stuff can settle.

Right, right. But that nasty stuff does settle and it forms what everybody calls sludge. But what I saw, Chuck, is that it is not the term of art these days. The current term is raw primary biosolids, formerly sludge. That's the full name of it. R-P-Bs?

R-P-B-F-Ss. Oh, those are different words. Like, formerly sludge is part of the name. Like, they change the name of sludge to raw primary biosolids, formerly sludge. Like, prints, basically. Yeah, right, exactly. The artist formerly known as prints.

Right. Oh man, R-I-P. Yeah, for real, oh my gosh. So, things are gonna stink. There's no way to get around it. If you've been to a wastewater treatment plant, it's gonna smell. That's why they're usually not close to residential areas,

although there is one in Atlanta over in the west side that's just kind of right there. Yeah, I've never smelled it. I haven't either. It may be capped. Like, if you get complaints of odors, then basically, if you get enough of them, then the city says, all right,

we gotta do something here. Party's over. Yeah, maybe we need to put a roof on this thing. It can't be open air any longer. Or maybe we need to, and this is probably what they do and the one on the west side is they treat that air. They duct it out and treat it, you know, old school.

They basically take a bunch of toilet paper rolls and stuff them with dryer sheets. Mm-hmm. Like the old dorm trick. Oh, I remember, sure. We talked about that recently. I don't remember what episode, though. Oh, did we?

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I can't remember what it was, but yeah, yes, we did. But if you work in one of these plants, it's not gonna, it's not like working at a tulip farm in Holland, you know? Yeah, it would be a nice smell, though I don't think tulips actually smell,

but I'm sure it's still better than whatever everybody at these reclamation plants are smelling. But you know what, tulip farmers in Holland smell great. Right, they do. They have a musky earthy odor. So, okay, so yes, it smells. I thought that was a cute, hilarious little, like sidetrack included in this for us.

But this water though, Chuck, right? Once it's treated primarily, it looks fine, but it's not fine. And for a very long time, like that was the extent of water reclamation. You would scoop out the sludge, send that primary treated water out to lakes and rivers, and then you go, geez, why are all these fish dying off?

What's the problem? And the problem it turned out was that we really needed to add a second stage of treatment that even though you couldn't see the bad stuff in there anymore because you'd taken it out, there was still plenty of microscopic material that could cause all sorts of havoc on the body of water that you release this out to.

And they're described by a term called biochemical oxygen demand, which is the amount of basically living aerobic bacteria in this treated water and how much oxygen it will suck out of that body of water growing, like forming an algae bloom. And then as the algae bloom uses up all the oxygen and dies off, the bacteria that eats those

use up the rest of the oxygen and kill off a lot of fish and a lot of other wildlife in that body of water that you dump that sewage into. And so as they kind of figured out that there's this stuff you can't see in there that's still a real problem, we've added a secondary form of water treatment. And that's really improved things tremendously.

Yeah, so let's take another break and we'll talk about secondary treatment and then eventually tertiary treatment right after this. Chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug, chug. On the podcast, Hey Dude, The 90's called David Lasser and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude,

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All right, so where we left off was, and we should also say too that, like, there are probably out of the 15,000 treatment plants in the country. I'm sure there are still some that stop at the primary treatment. Yeah, I'm positive too. Which is, like, that to me is an ecological crime. It's an environmental crime.

Oh, absolutely, because it's so damaging to water resources. It's just, and wildlife resources too, it should be a crime, it's not yet, but hopefully it will be soon. Oh, absolutely. So secondary treatment is key, and if you're working at a modern wastewater treatment facility, then you're definitely gonna go with secondary treatment.

I'm not sure what year they started coming around, but anything modern. Actually, I can tell you. Something, yeah, the main process of secondary treatment is called activated sludge, and it was developed starting in 1912. OK, so there are still some that are behind the 1912 barrier. Yeah.

Wow. Yeah. So in the secondary treatment, this is where it gets kind of interesting in a chemical way. You talked about the algae blooms, which are no good. So to prevent stuff like that from happening, what's going on in this water is there are all these, what's basically going on is aerobic digestion.

They're putting things in there that can eat this stuff. Right, it's crazy. Like, it's beneficial bacteria to the rescue, which is just wonderful. Like, they're using, this is that biological treatment we referred to earlier, where they're saying, hey, there's all this bacteria and all these other terrible little byproducts and things that we don't want in there.

Everything from gasoline molecules to whatever. And there are different types of bacteria, protozoa, even tiny, tiny, tiny little invertebrates that live in the water. Most of the time are microscopic, and they'll eat this stuff. And if we feed them this treated sewage, they'll make it even pure. And that's the secondary treatment, which I just love. And we've been doing it for over a hundred years now.

Well, most of us have been, I should say. Yeah, and it's crazy to think about when you look at a wastewater treatment plant, they have all these cool mechanical processes going on, but they're also growing essentially in living things there that are their little work buddies. They're their little cohorts that do part two, and they have to foster life for these microorganisms.

I assume on site, right? Yeah, but from what I saw, it's kind of like a self-sustaining thing. It's not sea monkeys? Right, there probably are a few sea monkeys mixed in there. I wouldn't be surprised. But from what I saw with the activated sludge, you're actually taking bacteria that's already alive

and eating this stuff in the sewage. You're just fostering it by pumping air and more specifically oxygen into the mix, which mixes this stuff up, but also gives them oxygen to really kind of be powered by. And so they really go to town eating this. So not only do they break down during this activated sludge process,

these beneficial bacteria not only break down the stuff you're trying to get out of the water, they also multiply and create more and more bacteria so that part of the activated sludge process is after being treated for several hours, you move that secondary treated water out and then you take the sludge that you let settle to the bottom and pump it back through for another round

because you've got all new bacteria that was produced in that last round. And so it's kind of like this nice circular closed system that is so effective. I saw that usually at night, they have to skim off some of the bacteria that's been produced that day because it's usually so successful.

Yeah, and I think they even pay someone to stand there and go, what'd you think of that? How about one more round? It's a miracle. Every six hours after a treatment process goes through, they just shout, it's a miracle. So we're talking about like bacterial membranes, like a sheet of bacteria that might churn

through this one of these basins or maybe an algae sheet or something like that. And like you said, you got to keep this stuff alive. So the pH is important, oxygenating like you were talking about, the temperature's got to be regulated. You just have to make sure these little boogers stay healthy. And happy, you want them to be happy as can be.

And as long as you're pumping oxygen there and making the pH the way that you want it or the way that they want it, they're going to be happy and reproduce and multiply and go forth and spread the gospel. All right, so that is secondary treatment. And that is, apparently it gets it to the point where the United States has said, fine, dump it in a lake,

dump it in a river, dump it in the ocean. It's perfectly fine. Just don't call me late for dinner. But then if you really want to kick things up a notch, you can go for a tertiary treatment. This is just showing off. Yeah, it really is, isn't it? Another word for it is disinfection or polishing.

And this is pretty interesting because you wouldn't know it, but there are tiny little things ranging from parasites to antibiotics. And we'll talk about all these a little more in detail to microplastics. Like there are microplastics in some soaps or just larger plastics that break down.

And some of that stuff gets through these first two processes and there's actually plastic in the water. Yeah, I'm guessing Emily doesn't use plastics in the soap she makes for Love Your Mama. She does not, no plastics. No, but I had no idea until I read this that that was a thing, but it makes sense.

So like that, I guess the exfoliating stuff, it's not all crushed walnuts shells or anything like that. Like it would make a lot of sense to use all of this waste plastic or it makes sense and I guess is strictly business sense. But these plastics that they can be filtered out, but they can also be broken down to this point where they're microscopic as well.

And so if you're just doing primary treatment, you're sending a lot of those microplastics right out the other side. And that's allowed them to kind of spread throughout the entire food chain. I saw this, I think it was a frontline, just the other night on plastics. And man, it was eye opening.

Like we need to do an episode on plastics. I've been wanting to for a while, but this one kind of lit a fire under my butt. But it, I mean, it's just everywhere. And so much so that not just washing up on beaches, but it's in the water we drink, right? So one of the things they figured out is there are types of bacteria that eat plastics.

So now they're trying to figure out how to cultivate those bacteria. And that's another thing too, what we were saying with that secondary treatment, like activated sludge. It's not just one kind of bacteria. It's a huge microbiome of bacteria that eat all sorts of different things,

specialized in all these different things. But when you have a big, huge diverse colony, you can get that much more stuff out. And so there are some bacteria that eat microplastics. Then I also saw, and this to me is the future. It's ozone, O3, three oxygen atoms put together. Yeah. From what I saw, Chuck,

it handles every single thing that you would possibly want to get out of water. Yeah, so with ozone, what they'll do is they'll send an electrical charge through the water. And these O2 molecules disassociate from one another and then recombine to form ozone, O3. And it's just a kind of a superhero oxidant that does a great, great job killing bacteria.

I saw it as more like a coked up John Belushi just running through a room or something like that. That's how I saw it. Because it just goes in there and messes stuff up. Like anything it touches, it just starts to break down. Because it's so reactive that it basically says, give me an electron, baby. And whatever it just took an electron from

starts to fall apart. Yeah, you can also chlorinate the wastewater. We've talked about chlorination before. It works pretty well, but it's not like a 100% disinfectant. And the chlorine itself can break down into toxic substances, which is not good. Because then you gotta go treat that

with other tertiary methods. And that's no good either. That's right. Like chloroform I think is a byproduct of it. And then there's UV radiation, which takes a ton of energy. It can be effective, but it's really expensive. Yeah, it is.

But it does work. I mean, most things do not stand up very well to UV radiation or UV light. We have one of those phone cleaners, a UV phone cleaner. Have you seen those? Yeah, I saw those on Shark Tank many years ago. Oh yeah, so I can't tell if it works or not, but I think it does.

I realize it's kind of a matter of faith here, but it makes me feel good. And then there's another one called reverse osmosis, which I think deserves its own episode, or at least needs to figure in like a desalination episode or something, but it is basically using a membrane that is so small, only water can pass through it. So when you push sewage or treated water or anything

through this membrane, on the other side, water comes out, everything else is left behind. And what I saw about Singapore's new water is not only do they use that very expensive, very effective UV radiation, they also use reverse osmosis, in addition to micro filtering to produce this new water, which is why it's like so pure

that they have to add it back with rainwater to get some of the minerals back into it. Yeah, reverse osmosis works, it rejects I think 99.9% of bacteria. Los Angeles and some other cities are using this, like we said, cities that have water shortages generally. It really depends on not only this membrane, but tons of pressure, up to 600 pounds per square inch,

very highly pressurized. And if you wanna get what they're calling IPR, indirect potable reuse, which is eventually you can drink this stuff. I've seen all kinds of, I mean, I guess this new water, that's what their aim is, but you take your tertiary, tertiary, tertiary, tertiary treated water,

you hold that in a reservoir for a while, then it goes through osmosis, then it's treated with either UV or ozone or both, then it goes back to a reservoir for about six months for just natural processes to go to work. And then it gets sent just through the regular standard water treatment that everyone else's water goes through.

Wow, that's like LA's doing that? I think if you're doing IPR right, then you're doing many of these steps in concert with one another, and then sending it through the regular system in the end. That's really interesting. I'm sure there are different ways in different places, but it's pretty amazing that you can,

that you can drink water that goes down your toilet eventually, and it's probably better than a lot of city water. Yeah, oh, for sure. One of the things that got me, Chuck, was that we still do that thing where we take that sludge and spread it over farmland, create those sewage farms,

so everything's kind of come back full circle again. And we also use semi-treated water for like you're getting parks and stuff like that. So there's a lot of good uses for water that's not quite indirect potable reuse quality, but it's still good enough. You just wouldn't want to drink it. Yeah.

Or you can just dump it back into your local river lake or something like that. Yeah, that's always great. And then just lastly real quick, the future of the stuff that I saw is that they're getting so good at filtering stuff out that they're like, well, wait a minute, we're accumulating a lot of this plastic.

So let's start collecting it and selling it for reuse, right? Whoop, plastic. Which is wonderful because I mean, otherwise they're just diverting this stuff to a landfill, or they're getting so good at getting like phosphorus or nitrogen out. Let's make a sideline of selling fertilizer to farmers or something like that.

Rather than adding more to the water supply, we'll just reuse the stuff that didn't get used the first time. And then they're also reusing cellulose fiber from used toilet paper. Isn't that amazing? That is amazing. So they're filtering out cellulose

that was part of toilet paper at one point and they're using it for everything from insulation to roadways, I believe, which I didn't know they used cellulose and roadways, but by God, they do now. Crazy. So that's wastewater treatment, everybody. One of those great engineering episodes

that we do from time to time. Hope you enjoyed it. Yeah, I got one more. We always like to think of our friends in New York because that's sort of the gold standard of huge city doing amazing things. And there are 14 plants in New York City alone. And they, how many gallons of water per day

do you think they treat? Just take a stab. 90 million. 1.3 billion gallons of water per day. Wow, I was way, way off. Which apparently the statistic I saw said, if you, that is enough over eight years to fill the entire Dead Sea with toilet water.

Wow. Which you should not do. Don't do it. Because the Dead Sea's special. Do you got anything else? I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about wastewater, just show up at your local wastewater treatment plant

or your water rec, water resource reclamation plant. And they'll probably give you a tour, especially if they're friendly types. And since I said that, it's time for Listener Mail. Yeah, show up and say, I want to see the artist formerly known as Sludge. Right. But also doing a really like kind of hostile demanding way.

Yeah, absolutely. All right, I'm going to call this from a teacher. We love hearing from our teachers here during the worldwide lockdown now that Georgia is finally on board. Yeah, they just found out that you could be contagious and not show symptoms yesterday. I'm so angry about that.

It's nuts. My daughter literally knew that before our governor said he did. Yeah, for probably a good month, I would guess. Probably. Yeah. You should listen to our show. We talked about it last week.

Well, in real time, weeks ago, by the time this comes out. That's right. All right, so this is from a teacher named Jay Alexander in the mathematics department at LHS. Good morning, guys. I wanted to thank you for the distraction episodes. As a teacher working from home,

I've been helping my 130 plus students and their parents navigate this challenge while also making sure my two biological kiddos are doing their work as well. With the governor closing schools for the rest of the year, I woke up pretty sad this morning. I'm sad for my seniors.

We didn't know the last time we were together would truly be the last time. I was thinking about the other day too, man. Like, it's just, it's all sad, but seniors and prom and last day of school and all that fun stuff is just, to miss that is, it just sucks. Yeah, it really does.

Do you know what they're gonna do? Is it like you're just gonna continue on the rest of the year from home and still graduate on time? I think everyone's just trying to figure this out in real time. Man. My own daughter is graduating from her preschool

so she's not gonna see a lot of these kids ever again, which is super sad. That's sad, but also congratulations. Well, they're doing these two times a week, these Zoom meetings, which is kind of fun to see all these kids on there. I'll bet just crawling around not paying attention. They're actually pretty locked in.

It's very impressive. Oh, really? Yeah, their teachers are on there and they kind of are in a rhythm. It's kind of cool to see. That's cool, man. All right, so let's just continue here. I'm sad for my own kids who won't see their friends

and teachers for the rest of the school year. I'm sad for all my coworkers who are retiring this year. They didn't plan for it to end this way, although, frankly, they may be pretty stoked. Yeah. Early retirement. They're definitely silver lining, so I'm seven months pregnant and don't mind working in my pajamas.

The weather's great and your podcast is keeping me sane. So thank y'all so much for being my normal in this Twilight Zone world. I pray that you and your families are safe and healthy. And again, that is Jay Alexander, the letter J, from the mathematics department at LHS. And right back at you too, from us to you. Thank you very much and thanks to everybody

out there sending us good vibes. We're sending them right back out to the entire world. It's basically like a D-Lite concert in here. That's right. If you want to get in touch with us during this weird time or any time, you can send us an email. Wrap it up, spank it on the bottom,

hit it with the Lysol Wipe, and send it to StuffPodcast.iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio's How Stuff Works. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called, David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're gonna use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, The Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. Do you ever think to yourself,

what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. And a different hot, sexy teen crush boy bander each week to guide you through life. Tell everybody, ya everybody, about my new podcast and make sure to listen

so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you listen to podcasts.