sewage plant tour

I sure would believe that.

Whenever I drive 237 towards Mountain View there is an awful sewage stench in the air, near where the Ericsson campus is. I have no idea how people working there can stand it.

The SF plant was fine outdoors. The primary separation belts and settling tanks were a bit smelly, but really not bad at all. Nobody got sick or anything.

It was free, well done, and the tour guides were great. Makes one think about the great, mostly subsurface and invisible, machine that a city is.

Their final products are treated water, dumped into the bay, and an odorless black putty-like stuff called "cake." It's class B cake, which can't be used to fertilize human food crops because of trace amounts of heavy metals, the worst being lead and mercury.

One biological processing step requires pure oxygen, which they extract from air on-site. That's the opposite of our process, where we extract the nitrogen and throw the oxygen away.

Unless I'm mistaken, cake is sewage + lime. What do they do with it?

NT

It's used as fertilizer, for golf courses and such, non-food stuff.

The plant in NYC is just as interesting, They use the waste to power the plant.

And if your interested in bridge building, check out the Tapnzee replacemnt

Cheers

The one here makes 30% of their power on-site from methane. I think they plan to increase that. A lot of energy goes to heat the huge aneroboc digester tanks, which have to be kept at about body temperature, in a chilly climate.

Civil engineering is fascinating, building huge things out of megatons of concrete. With no prototypes.

People outside the processing industry mostly don't appreciate the finesse and attention to detail that accompanies just about all processing facilities, even the ones that look ugly from the roadside. Modern day, real life alchemy.

It is also known, but not discussed, that more people die in hospitals than in any war (and that includes the holocaust). Almost safer walking across a (busy) street blindfolded...

Sounds like "cake" should be a relatively inexpensive resource for those metals (no digging in ground,etc). Betcha nobody investigated that..

I suspect the amount of metal in the " cake " is way too low to be a useful source of any metals. But still way too high to use " cake " for growing food.

Dan

Can we say, "bio-accumulation"? The problem isn't that these contaminants are in high concentrations, but even at low concentrations they will become high concentrations as they ascend the food chain.

Yeah, you never want to go to a hospital. There are a lot of sick people there. What a dummy!

Yeah, there's also more dead people in cemeteries than other places... so?

Which is why you can't have your cake, and eat it too.

Cheers, James Arthur

A more interesting statistic would be how many people die in hospitals from something that they didn't have when they were admitted.

A fairly elderly parent of a friend was admitted for a neck injury caused by a serious car accident. She has so far weathered two bouts of pneumonia and a bladder infection. I guess if she survives they'll get to finsh treating the actual injury.

--sp

You are now a Excrementalogist.

Hope that trip put some added value to your engineering status :)

Jamie

It enabled him to identify YOU.

John Larkin schreef op 08/22/2015 om 10:30 PM:

Even the Romans already knew that! BTW I recall seeing a documentary showing that they lifted many buildings in Chigaco to implement a sewage system. Pretty impressive!

From your comment, I can only assume you spend much of your time identifying s*it heads? I've noticed over the years that in most cases it takes one to recognize one.

Sincerely Yours.

Jamie