Holy Shemoly! Los Angeles is going to allow treated sewage to be used as drinking water. Yes, the State Water Control Board has regulations that lets millions of gallons of “reclaimed” water to be drunk by LA and Orange County residents.
Continue reading Direct Potable Reuse
An early warning system.
First, I’ll describe it. Then, I’ll tell you why this adds fuel to my admonitions that many in power love to disregard.
Continue reading Waning? Waxing?
I’ve written beforeabout methods and processes to treat wastewater (here and here, for starters- you can find more by searching the index to the right for wastewater)- including methods that may be able to provide power to attenuate the costs of such treatment. Now, another concept to employ microbes to generate electricity has been published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (right now, it’s ahead of print) describing work being done by Dr. Craig Criddle’s group at Stanford.
Continue reading A Microbial Battery For Waste Treatment?
We reported yesterday about Dr. Bretschger’s (J. Craig Venter Institute) MFC (microbial fuel cells) to recover energy from wastewater. Today, we’ll discuss a slightly different version, under development at Penn State University and for which results were recently published in Science.
Continue reading Energy from sewage- revisited
One of my theses involved the conversion of Honest-to-Goodness Solid Waste (HGSW) to energy. The process made sense then- and makes even more sense now. (Believe it or not, there’s only one company examining this process on a large scale, some 4 decades later.) But, we also need to treat our liquid wastes (sewage)- because we want to keep our rivers and streams (which is where we discharged those treated waters) safe. Amazingly, we employ about 2% of our energy supply to treat this waste stream.
Continue reading Sewage as an energy source?