Tag: wastewater treatment

An aerial view of Lehigh County Authority's Industrial Pretreatment Plant in Fogelsville, for a post on industrial waste treatment.

Businesses Create Wastewater, Too — How Does LCA Treat That?

Above, LCA’s Pretreatment Plant in Fogelsville. Last year, we kicked off our Behind The Scenes at LCA series with a number of blog posts detailing the wastewater treatment process. Now we’re kicking off 2020 by adding to that series with a post about another important step in that process: the EPA’s Industrial Pretreatment Program. As…

Disinfection and Testing — the Final Steps in Wastewater Treatment

Over the past several months, we’ve talked about why wastewater must be treated, and detailed each step in the treatment process at Allentown’s Kline’s Island Wastewater Treatment Plant. Now we’ve come to the final treatment step: disinfection, in which we use a chlorine solution to kill pathogenic (disease-causing) microorganisms before the wastewater is released into…

Tertiary Nitrification: How Ammonia Is Removed From Wastewater

In our last post, we explained how plastic media filters remove contaminants during secondary treatment. Today we’re going to talk about the next level of treatment, which removes ammonia through a process called tertiary nitrification. As you can see from the picture above, it’s probably not what you imagine when you think of water treatment!…

How Is Liquid Waste Treated? It’s All About Biology

As part of our ongoing series explaining the wastewater treatment process, we’ve discussed how solids are removed from wastewater, how we use waste to create energy, what happens to the byproducts of treatment, and even what happens to things that should not be flushed. Now we’re going to explain what happens to the liquid waste:…

The Sludge Report: What Happens After Treatment?

If you’re a regular visitor, you’ll know we’ve been doing a series of posts explaining how wastewater is treated. In our last post, we talked about why it needs to be treated — and what happens when it’s not. Today, we’re going to discuss one of the byproducts of treatment: sewage sludge. Sewage sludge is a…

Why Does Wastewater Need to be Treated?

Above, untreated wastewater pollutes a waterway in India. If you’ve been following along, you’ll know we’ve been doing a series of posts explaining how wastewater is treated. In our last one, we talked about how solids are removed from wastewater, then sent to the primary settling tanks for stabilization and treatment. What we haven’t covered…