Pollution Prevention: Putting Sewage Treatment Plants in the Vanguard

Sewers are the great pollution sinks of the modern metropolis. Miles and miles of sewer pipes collect all that goes down drains or is washed off streets. They belch this toxic mess into wastewater treatment plants, where no technology exists or can ever be made to neutralize the thousands of poisons in the wastewater. What treatment plants can do is screen the visible refuse and reduce the pathogens and nutrients (nitrogen and phosphorous) in the wastewater. This is what is meant by “treatment.”

Sewage looks remarkably better after treatment than before. But this is just cosmetic. The patient is dead (and deadly). Wastewater treatment plant operators are like morticians. They need to start acting like are doctors.

Prevention is the only cure. The question is: what would pollution prevention look like if the long-term goal of treatment plant operators really were to protect public health and prevent the degradation of the receiving waters?

For one, it would have the stamp of serious public involvement. This is important because it is the only way people can come to understand and support some very difficult decisions that have to be made. By and large, public authorities, usually at the behest of cities, are responsible for the operation of wastewater treatment plants. They are concerned - as they should be - with nutrients, pathogens, and the management of untreated discharges during heavy rains. But they must also add to their concerns a greatly expanded list of pollutants, including endocrine disrupting chemicals (coming from, for example, pharmaceuticals and detergents) and neurdevelopmental toxicants (coming from, for example, pesticides and heavy metals), both of which are ubiquitous in the wastewater stream. The public must come to understand what it is the wastewater treatment plants can and cannot do. They can reduce the burden of nutrients in the treated water, but they can do little or nothing about most of the other contaminants entering the plant. These contaminants are either discharged in the wastewater effluent or become part of the sewage sludge, itself a new and terrible problem.

Our grandfathers and grandmothers did not have to deal with the 80,000 or so different chemicals in commercial production, 3,000 of these manufactured in quantities of over one million pounds annually. The only way to deal with them in the context of wastewater treatment is to prevent their discharge into the publicly owned treatment works in the first place. Move up the pipe to the source of contamination. Imagine if the city, through its wastewater treatment facilities, was proactive on this issue and had the clout to make regulatory standards stick.

As it stands, wastewater treatment plants and their industry trade organizations, like the Water Environment Federation in the U.S., would have you believe they are arbiters of good environmental behavior and in the business of pollution prevention. It’s just pretend (and a lot of PR).

What if the treatment plant engineers’ genuine pollution concerns included all of the toxic waste going into the sewage treatment plant? What would happen if they could act on those concerns and plug the dischargers? Imagine if plant operators demanded an end to the production of chemicals, like alkylphenol polyethoxylates, that have a deleterious effect on people and are routinely found in sewers. Imagine if they became advocates for the precautionary principle rather than the principal launderers of toxic waste.

It can happen. It will first take a monumental attitude change at the plants and in municipal governments. This will come with public support for the expanded mission and state and federal financing for the added work. Meanwhile, the first step should be tougher standards for effluent control. And tough standards for effluent control must mean not better treatment but better prevention.

Laura Orlando

ReSource editorials are archived in the ReSource Musings Archive