What You Flush or Pour Down Your Drain Affects the Rivers,
Lakes, and Coastal Waters in Our Community!!
Where does the water go after you flush the toilet or drain the sinks in your home?
When the wastewater flushed from your toilet or drained from your household sinks, washing
machine, or dishwasher leaves your home, it flows through your community's sanitary sewer system to a wastewater treatment facility. The wastewater from homes, along with wastewater from businesses, industries, and other facilities, is treated by a variety of processes to reduce or
remove pollutants.
What happens to the treated water when it leaves the wastewater treatment plant?
The treated wastewater is released into local waterways where it’s used again for any number of purposes, such as supplying drinking water, irrigating crops, and sustaining aquatic life.
Wastewater Treatment:
Many communities have a wastewater treatment plant that incorporates a series of processes to
remove pollutants from water used in homes,small businesses, industries, and other facilities.
All wastewater first goes through the primary treatment process, which involves screening
and settling out large particles.
The wastewater then moves on to the secondary treatment process, during which
organic matter is removed by allowing bacteria to break down the pollutants. The treated
wastewater is then usually disinfected with chlorine to remove the remaining bacteria.
Some communities go one step further and put the wastewater through an advanced
treatment process to reduce the level of pollutants of special concern to the local
waterbody, such as nitrogen or phosphorus.
After this step, the treated water finally flows through pipes back to a local water body.
This is how it effects the environment:
Many causes of pollution including sewage and fertilizers contain nutrients such as nitrates and phosphates. In excess levels, nutrients over stimulate the growth of aquatic plants and algae. Excessive growth of these types of organisms consequently clogs our waterways, use up dissolved oxygen as they decompose, and block light to deeper waters.
This, in turn, proves very harmful to aquatic organisms as it affects the respiration ability or fish and other invertebrates that reside in water.
Pollution is also caused when silt and other suspended solids, such as soil, washoff plowed fields, construction and logging sites, urban areas, and eroded river banks when it rains. Under natural conditions, lakes, rivers, and other water bodies undergo Eutrophication, an aging process that slowly fills in the water body with sediment and organic matter. When these sediments enter various bodies of water, fish respirationbecomes impaired, plant productivity and water depth become reduced, and aquatic organisms and their environments become suffocated. Pollution in the form of organic material enters waterways in many different forms as sewage, as leaves and grass clippings, or as runoff from livestock feedlots and pastures. When natural bacteria and protozoan in the water break down this organic material, they begin to use up the oxygen dissolved in the water. Many types of fish and bottom-dwelling animals cannot survive when levels of dissolved oxygen drop below two to five parts per million. When this occurs, it kills aquatic organisms in large numbers which leads to disruptions in the food chain.
