The Manchester Wastewater Treatment Plant has done it again,
earning a perfect performance award for compliance with its state
water-quality permit.
The Manchester plant, operated by Kitsap County, remains ahead
of the pack, being the only sewage-treatment plant in Washington
state with a perfect score since the Department of Ecology launched
its Outstanding Performance Awards program in 1995. That’s 23
years.
Port Townsend Wastewater Treatment Plant has maintained perfect
performance for 20 years, and six plants have reached that level
for 10 consecutive years. For this year alone, 111 treatment plants
achieved perfect scores — about a third of all the plants in the
state.
UPDATE, March 10, 2016
I’ve added links for three previous reports related to the
degradation of pharmaceuticals and personal care products.
—–
Concerns are growing about medications and person-care products
that pass through sewage-treatment plants and into Puget Sound,
where the chemicals can alter the physiology and behavior of fish
and other organisms.
Almost everywhere scientists have looked, they have found drugs
that people have either flushed down the drain or passed through
their bodies. Either way, many active pharmaceutical compounds are
ending up in the sewage at low levels. Conventional
sewage-treatment plants can break down up to 90 percent or more of
some compounds, but others pass through unaltered.
Now, researchers are working on a process that would use
specialized bacteria to break down pharmaceutical compounds at
existing sewage-treatment plants. The idea, developed by
researchers at the University of Washington, is ready for a limited
pilot project at one of the treatment plants in the Puget Sound
region.
Heidi Gough, left, and
Nicolette Zhou with a table-top sewage-treatment plant in the
lab.
UW photo
Studies into this issue began more than 20 years ago, when it
became clear that all sorts of compounds were passing through
sewage-treatment plants and getting into the environment. Among the
early findings was that male fish exposed to artificial
birth-control hormones were changing into female fish. Later
studies showed that common antidepressant medications seemed to be
changing the behavior of fish, making them easier targets for
predators.
In addition to estrogens and antidepressants, researchers have
found blood thinners, cholesterol-reducing drugs, various heart
medications, several hormones and painkillers, along with caffeine,
cocaine and various cosmetic and cleansing chemicals.
A study funded by the
Environmental Protection Agency looked for 56 active
pharmaceutical compounds in sewage effluent from 50 major treatment
plants around the country, finding significant levels of many
compounds.
A new study by NOAA’s Northwest Fisheries Science Center and the
University of Washington looked at 150 compounds coming from two
sewage treatment plants in Puget Sound. They were Bremerton’s plant
on Sinclair Inlet and Tacoma’s plant on Commencement Bay. They also
tested the local waters along with juvenile chinook salmon and
Pacific staghorn sculpin to see if the fish were picking up the
compounds.
According to a
NOAA news release, the study “found some of the nation’s
highest concentrations of these chemical compounds and detected
many in fish at concentrations that may affect their growth or
behavior.” For additional reporting on that study, check out the
Kitsap Sun story by Tristan Baurick and the
Seattle Times story by Lynda Mapes.
These chemicals could be having effects on various animals in
the food web — from benthic organisms that live in the sediments to
marine mammals — but more study is needed. Complicating the
situation is that multiple pharmaceutical chemicals may work
together to create different effects, depending on their
concentrations and the affected organism.
Many people would argue that we have enough information to
dramatically increase our efforts to remove these compounds from
wastewater going into Puget Sound. Drug take-back programs have
been started in many cities and counties throughout Puget Sound to
encourage people not to flush unused pills down the toilet or
drain. See the
Take Back Your Meds website. Still, Washington state has yet to
develop a comprehensive statewide program that would cover
everyone.
Meanwhile, nobody can say what percentage of the drugs going
into the treatment plants were dumped down the drain versus being
excreted from the human body. But it wouldn’t matter as much if the
chemicals could be eliminated at the sewage-treatment plant.
More than a decade ago, Heidi Gough of the UW’s Department of
Civil & Environmental Engineering began working on the development
of bacteria that could break down these chemicals of concern. She
and her colleagues have isolated cultures of bacteria that can
break down triclosan, an antimicrobial; bisphenol A, a plasticizer;
ibuprofen, an anti-inflammatory drug; 17β-estradiol, a natural
hormone; and gemifibrozil, a cholesterol-lowering drug.
The process of isolating helpful bacteria and boosting their
numbers could theoretically be used to break down almost any
chemical of concern. To be suitable, the bacteria must 1) break
down the target chemical to a very low level, 2) grow well in
common growth media without the target chemical, 3) break down the
chemical even when other nutrient sources are abundant, and 4) work
quickly within the normal rate of sewage treatment.
Nicolette Zhou, a former UW graduate student, worked with Heidi
to successfully develop a bench-top treatment plant to test the
process. Nicolette also produced a computer model of how the
operation would perform at a large-scale treatment plant. She
completed her analysis and received her doctorate degree last fall.
Her latest findings are now awaiting publication in a scientific
journal.
Degradation of triclosan and bisphenol A by five bacteria,
Pub
Med.
Cultivation and characterization of bacteria capable of
degrading pharmaceutical and personal care products, Pub Med.
Other systems have been proposed for breaking down complex
pharmaceuticals, such as advanced oxidation or other chemical or
physical treatment. But biological breakdown offers the most hope
in the short term,
because it is how most
sewage-treatment plants workcan be implemented quickly without
major modifications and appears to be economical on a large
scale, Nocolette told me.
In a large-scale system, the first step would be to identify the
specific contaminants to be reduced and then select the bacteria.
Some bacteria will break down multiple chemicals, she said.
The bacteria would be grown in a tank and be fed into the sewage
digestersreactors,
preferably in a continual flow. Multiple chemicals of concern might
require several tanks for growing different bactieria.
If the process is successful and adopted by many treatment
plants, an alternative process could be developed. Instead of
growing the bacteria onsite, where conditions could be difficult to
control, all sorts of bacteria could be grown in an industrial
facility. The industrial plant would isolate the actual enzymes
needed to break down the chemicals and ship them to the treatment
plants. The enzymes could be stored and fed into the treatment
process as needed.
The research into this treatment process has progressed to where
the next step is a small-scale pilot project at a sewage-treatment
plant in the Puget Sound area, Nicolette said. A portion of the
actual wastewater would be diverted to the pilot plant, where
sewage would be subjected to the specialized bacteria and tested
for the level of treatment.
Ultimately, more studies are needed to establish a safe
concentration for the various chemicals that come from
pharmaceuticals and personal-care products. That way, one could
culture the appropriate bacteria and establish a reasonable
effluent limit for chemicals going into Puget Sound.
Four years ago, I wrote an “Amusing Monday” blog post I
called “Toilet songs for the holidays.” This year, I was
unsuccessful in finding some good water-related songs for the
Christmas season, so I thought a replay might be in order. The
following, from Dec. 19, 2011, features an amusing song called “O
Christmas Grease” by Steve Anderson.
Knowing more than a few sewer operators in my day, I can tell
you that their leading pet peeve is all the stuff that people dump
down their toilets and drains.
I’ll never forget the courtroom description of a giant “rag
ball” — some 30 feet long — found in Bremerton’s sewer. Rag balls
are the accumulation of diapers, tampons and baby wipes that get
flushed down the toilet and become caught somewhere in the sewer
lines.
Bremerton’s famous rag ball became wrapped up in courtroom
testimony during a lawsuit against a sewer contractor hired by the
city to run the operation. For details, check out my story from
April of 1998.
Steve
Anderson
What I really wanted to share with you this week is a song
called “O Christmas Grease” by Steve Anderson, a water resources
analyst at Clean Water Services. This is the agency that manages
wastewater and stormwater in a 12-city region west of Portland,
Ore.
Steve often writes music and performs in a band when he’s not
working at the utility. He told me that he started writing original
songs as well as parodies of existing tunes to entertain his fellow
water experts at conferences. Last week, for example, he showed up
at a conference to help educators decide whether humor is useful in
educating people about wastewater issues.
Steve says the public-education folks at Clean Water Services
tolerates his songs, but they do not fully embrace his activities.
His first song — a parody about the low levels of drugs that make
it through the treatment process — got him into a little hot water
with some folks in the business. “Dope in the Water” is sung to the
tune of the Deep Purple original.
“The Ballad of Betty Poop” was written as a kid’s song for
Take-Your-Children-to-Work Day. It’s about the adventures of a
plastic GI Joe and other characters. It includes these famous
lines: “Give it up, you toilet treasures… You’ll never make it all
the way to the river…”
Steve has not released these songs to the public, though he
readily shares them with friends and anyone who will listen. I must
thank Gayle Leonard, who writes a blog called “Thirsty
in Suburbia,” for bringing Steve’s songs out into the light and
putting me in touch with this creative force in the sewer
world.
A record number of sewage-treatment plants in Washington state
fully complied with state water-quality requirements in 2014, with
128 plants winning the coveted Outstanding Performance Award from
the Department of Ecology.
The number of sewage-treatment
plants recognized for meeting all water-quality requirements grew
from 14 in 1995 to 128 last year.
The awards program has reached its 20th year, and the Manchester
Wastewater Treatment Plant in South Kitsap remains ahead of the
pack. It’s the only plant with a perfect score every year since the
program began.
In the first year of Ecology’s awards program, only 14 plants
across the state were recognized as doing everything right, but
that number has grown nearly every year.
Last year, 128 winning treatment plants — more than a third of
all the plants in the state — passed every environmental test,
analyzed every required sample, turned in all reports and allowed
no permit violations.
“The talents of our professional operators are critical to
successful plant operations and protecting the health of
Washington’s waters”, said Heather Bartlett, manager of Ecology’s
Water Quality Program, in a news release. “It is
an honor to recognize their contributions with these awards.”
Kitsap County officials are rightly proud of the perfect record.
Five years ago, in an article in Treatment
Plant Operator magazine, lead operator Don Johnson said the
success of the Manchester plant could be credited to the dedicated
wastewater staff and support from all levels of county government.
Don, who retired last year, has been replaced by Ken Young.
The magazine article may tell you more than you want to know
about the design and operation of the Manchester plant. The plant
was a modern facility when Ecology’s awards program was launched 20
years ago, and it has been kept up to date through the years.
Johnson stressed that treatment-plant operators should always be
prepared for new developments.
“My advice is for them to remain adaptable and up to date,” he
said. “There are many changes in the industry, and it’s important
to pursue energy efficiency and create reusable resources.”
Reaching the 20-year mark deserves some kind of celebration for
the Manchester plant. I would suggest organized tours of the
facility, public recognition for all the plant workers through the
years and maybe a slice of cake. So far, I’m told, no specific
plans have been made.
Port Townsend’s treatment plant has had a perfect score for 19
of the 20 years, missing only 1997. Meeting the perfect standard
for 16 of the past 20 years are two plants owned by the city of
Vancouver — Marine Park and Westside.
Kitsap County’s Kingston plant has received the award for nine
straight years. The county’s Suquamish plant, which is regulated by
the Environmental Protection agency because it is on tribal land,
has met all permit requirement for 15 years straight. (EPA does not
issue awards.)
Kingston’s sewage treatment plant could provide irrigation water
for the nearby White Horse Golf Course and possibly other uses
under a plan now in development.
Kitsap County commissioners recently signed a $325,000
“predesign” contract with Brown and Caldwell engineers. The firm
was hired to answer a host of questions about the feasibility of
producing high-quality effluent at the plant and then putting the
clean water to good use.
“We’re just starting to look at the whole project,” said Barbara
Zaroff of Kitsap County’s Wastewater Division. “We just had our
kickoff meeting two weeks ago, and now Brown and Caldwell will be
going out to collect data.”
I peppered Barbara with questions that she could not answer at
this point, because the detail work is yet to be done. But we know
from a previous study by
Golder Associates (PDF 18.2 mb) that producing high-quality
effluent in Kingston is more than a random thought.
Golder found benefits from using the water for supplementing
flows in nearby Grover’s Creek while recharging much-needed
groundwater in that area of the county. The Suquamish Tribe, which
owns White Horse Golf Course, has expressed interest in acquiring
the water if various issues can be resolved.
The Kingston treatment plant, completed in 2005, produces an
average of 150,000 gallons of effluent per day, currently
discharged into Appletree Cove. As population grows, the plant can
be expanded to about 300,000 gallons per day.
It appears it would be cost-effective to treat the water to
tertiary standards with sand filters, although other technologies
will be explored. A pond could be built on or near the golf course,
which would store the water for irrigation and allow infiltration
into the ground. The available water should provide the needs of
the course with plenty of water left over.
Discharging into a wetland that feeds into Grover’s Creek is
another idea, along with providing irrigation at the county’s North
Kitsap Heritage Park. Unused water might still be discharged into
Puget Sound, particularly in winter months when irrigation water is
not needed.
One question that always arises with reclaimed water is what
happens to trace amounts of chemicals that pass through the
treatment process, such as pharmaceutical drugs that mimic
hormones. We know from studies that some of these chemicals can
affect the growth, development and metabolism of fish in some
situations.
An analysis by
Golder Associates (PDF 18.2 mb) concluded that future treatment
processes in the Kingston plant would remove between 80 and 97
percent of endocrine disrupting compounds coming into the plant.
Environmental conditions where reclaimed water is discharged would
degrade the chemicals further, so the overall risk would be low for
salmon and other fish, according to the report.
The new study is expected to look further into the risks.
Meanwhile, the state Department of Ecology is continuing to work on
a new
reclaimed-water rule that could improve permitting and
monitoring by producers of reclaimed water.
The Kingston project would be similar to what is happening at
the Central Kitsap Wastewater Treatment Plant near Brownsville,
where construction is adding sand filters as part of an overall
upgrade to the plant.
Work continues at the Central
Kitsap Wastewater Treatment Plant // File photo: Kitsap Sun,
Feb. 4, 2014
The nearby Silverdale Water District has installed about 15,000
feet of “purple pipe” for reclaimed water on the major arterials of
Silverdale, including Silverdale Way. The project is part of the
water district’s major pipe-replacement project. Another 2,000 feet
will be added as part of the Bucklin Hill Bridge project, General
Manager Morgan Johnson told me.
Much of the new commercial construction in Silverdale is being
designed to use reclaimed water for irrigation, and some buildings
are being plumbed to use reclaimed water for flushing toilets and
other secondary uses. Ballfields in the area could get some of the
water.
A public-outreach program is being planned to educate the public
about reclaimed water and to answer questions that people may have.
Under the current schedule, the reclaimed-water valve would be
turned on in 2020, but that date may be pushed back, Morgan
said.
In Kingston, it will take about a year to put the information
together and identify a preferred alternative, Barbara told me.
Final engineering and design will follow under a new contract if
things go as expected.
The current contract will examine pipeline routes to convey the
water to the potential users. Costs for building and operating the
system will be explored.
Yet to be determined is how costs and benefits of the reclaimed
water will be shared between the county, which owns the treatment
facilities, and those who will use the water. That goes for both
Kingston and Central Kitsap.
Many golf courses across the country — especially in the arid
Southwest — are using reclaimed water for irrigation. In a few
places where water is in extremely short supply, water systems have
begun adding the clean effluent straight into their drinking water.
Check out reporter Emily Schmall’s story for
the Associated Press.
While water is still somewhat plentiful in the Puget Sound area,
it only makes sense to find uses for freshwater that would
otherwise be dumped into salty Puget Sound.
Knowing more than a few sewer operators in my day, I can tell
you that their leading pet peeve is all the stuff that people dump
down their toilets and drains.
I’ll never forget the courtroom description of a giant “rag
ball” — some 30 feet long — found in Bremerton’s sewer. Rag balls
are the accumulation of diapers, tampons and baby wipes that get
flushed down the toilet and become caught somewhere in the sewer
lines.
Bremerton’s famous rag ball became wrapped up in courtroom
testimony during a lawsuit against a sewer contractor hired by the
city to run the operation. For details, check out my story from
April of 1998.
Steve
Anderson
What I really wanted to share with you this week is a song
called “O Christmas Grease” by Steve Anderson, a water resources
analyst at Clean Water Services. This is the agency that manages
wastewater and stormwater in a 12-city region west of Portland,
Ore.
Steve often writes music and performs in a band when he’s not
working at the utility. He told me that he started writing original
songs as well as parodies of existing tunes to entertain his fellow
water experts at conferences. Last week, for example, he showed up
at a conference to help educators decide whether humor is useful in
educating people about wastewater issues.
Steve says the public-education folks at Clean Water Services
tolerates his songs, but they do not fully embrace his activities.
His first song — a parody about the low levels of drugs that make
it through the treatment process — got him into a little hot water
with some folks in the business. “Dope in the Water” is sung to the
tune of the Deep Purple original.
“The Ballad of Betty Poop” was written as a kid’s song for
Take-Your-Children-to-Work Day. It’s about the adventures of a
plastic GI Joe and other characters. It includes these famous
lines: “Give it up, you toilet treasures… You’ll never make it all
the way to the river…”
Steve has not released these songs to the public, though he
readily shares them with friends and anyone who will listen. I must
thank Gayle Leonard, who writes a blog called “Thirsty
in Suburbia,” for bringing Steve’s songs out into the light and
putting me in touch with this creative force in the sewer
world.
It seems as if it has taken forever for someone in Kitsap County
to put treated sewage to beneficial use, but a demonstration
project on Retsil Road in South Kitsap is just around the corner.
Check out my story in
Saturday’s Kitsap Sun.
Darren Noon of Pape and
Sons Construction Co. welds a section of "purple pipe" along Retsil
Road in South Kitsap, the first reclaimed water project in Kitsap
County.
Kitsap Sun photo by Meegan M. Reid
Local water experts were contemplating uses for highly treated
wastewater even before “low-impact development” became a common
phrase for infiltrating stormwater into the ground.
LID has caught on fairly quickly as a method of keeping polluted
stormwater from reaching our streams and Puget Sound. The concept
got an extra push from new stormwater regulations, which have
greatly increased the cost of conventional pipe-and-pond methods of
stormwater management.
The less-touted benefit of LID is groundwater recharge, which
boosts our long-range water supply.
Kitsap County’s Watershed Management Plan (PDF 147 kb),
developed in 2005, estimated that Kitsap County’s sewage treatment
plants release 8 million gallons of treated water into Puget Sound
each day. That’s enough to increase the base flow of 10 streams by
10 cubic feet per second, raise aquifer levels throughout the
county or launch a new industry without touching our drinking water
supplies.
“The most significant barriers to recycling wastewater are the
cost of infrastructure and additional treatment, as well as public
perception,” the report states. “Elected officials in WRIA 15 (the
Kitsap Peninsula) have expressed support for public education about
reclaimed water.”
The report mentions that highly treated effluent from the
Central Kitsap Wastewater Treatment Plant near Brownsville could be
used to supplement streamflows in nearby Steele Creek. But more
recently Kitsap County and Silverdale Water District have begun
working together on a plan to pipe the water into the heart of
Silverdale, where it can be used to water ballfields and
landscaping.
That’s also the initial plan put forth by West Sound Utility
District, as I mentioned in Saturday’s story. Using wastewater for
irrigation cuts down on peak demand, which is what drives water
utilities to drill new wells. Needless to say, drilling deep wells
comes at a tremendous expense — an expense that grows greater as
Kitsap County approaches the limits of its groundwater supplies in
some locations.
To many people, using reclaimed wastewater seems like a novel
idea, especially in an region known for its rain. People remain
squeamish about getting anywhere near sewage water, even if it is
treated. But I don’t believe it will take long for people to accept
the idea of using treated wastewater for irrigation, once they
realize it is treated to basically the same level as drinking
water.
On the other hand, drinking treated effluent becomes another
issue, even though it has been done indirectly for years in many
places. If you live in a town on the Mississippi River, your local
utility may be drawing water out of the river for your consumption
just downstream of where a sewage treatment plant is dumping its
effluent.
There are several other places where reclaimed water is mixed
with freshwater, such as in a reservoir, then drawn back out for
drinking. Ironically, putting the wastewater into a reservoir makes
it seem more palatable, even though it probably was cleaner before.
Treating the water in the reservoir is essentially treating the
wastewater again — although water is just water in the end.
A community in Texas made news across the country last week,
when reporter Angela Brown of the
Associated Press wrote about a new $13-million
water-reclamation plant to turn effluent into drinking water, the
first to be built in that state. Really, it is nothing new, as
Angela herself points out.
What I have not found anywhere so far is a direct use of
reclaimed water. That’s what you would get by pumping the highly
treated wastewater directly into a municipal water system’s piping
network. From a health standpoint, there would be nothing wrong
with that, provided the water could be shut off in the event of a
problem at the treatment plant. No doubt this kind of direct use
will be a little harder to get used to, even in areas where water
is scarce.
Alix Spiegel of National Public Radio does a nice job analyzing
the psychology behind the aversion to using treated wastewater and
why people are more accepting of indirect use. Read or listen to
“Why Cleaned Wastewater Stays Dirty In Our Minds .”
