Time to dump some tabs that I’ve accumulated in the browser over the past few weeks:

You can never go down the drain:

This week’s City Paper cover story is a short piece on DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility (arrange your own tour here!).  The accompanying photographs show the infrastructural landscape in all of its glory.

For an incredibly in-depth tour of the facility (without the smell), check out this mammoth post from September, showing the entire process in excruciating detail.  Mammoth notes the fundamental process of cleaning the water mimics the existing natural processes that rivers use, albeit concentrated and accelerated.

The two basic tracks are to separate liquids and solids, while making the liquids more liquid and the solids more solid at each step in the process.  The end result of one process is water back into the Potomac (cleaner than the river it enters); and the other result is ‘concentrated biosolid’, also known as the concentrated crap of Washington, DC.

The biosolid is sold as fertilizer for agricultural applications for non-human consumption. Waste nothing.  For an in-depth tour of how such a facility works, I can’t recommend the mammoth piece enough.

On the water delivery side (as opposed to the sewage disposal side), Atlantic Cities has a piece on why your water bill must go up to help finance the replacement of the infrastructure we’ve taken for granted. Both the delivery and disposal networks are in need of investment.

JD Land has a set of photos from the new Yards Park-Diamond Teague bridge, including one of the historic pump house that sends sewage from the District south to Blue Plains. Another shot shows the bridge’s informational signage from DC Water, documenting the agency’s own long-term control plan for management of DC’s combined sewer system.

It’s all about jobs:

The remarkable takeaway from the Blue Plains phototours is the role of natural processes in the system (minimizing pumping in favor of gravity, for example) to maximize efficiency via infrastructure.  Thus, it was curious to see the Washington Post writing about the expansion data centers in old manufacturing towns to serve as the physical location of cloud computing servers, but noting that such infrastructure doesn’t provide many long term jobs.

Granted, jobs are the narrative of the Great Recession, but using the data center seems like an odd place to focus.  Using a similar infrastructure investment like Blue Plains as an example, a better comparison would be to the economic activity enabled by clean water and sewage disposal – just as the data centers should look at the indirect effects of internet connectivity and activity, not direct employment via the infrastructure that sustains the internet.

Mammoth has a few thoughts on IT infrastructure, aesthetics, and the return of light industry to mixed use urban environments.

Here comes the sun:

Some solar powered notes – the cost of PV cells is coming down.  Some thoughts on the implications for the climate (Joe Romm), for the economy (Paul Krugman) and for DC (Lydia DePillis).

Is transportation too expensive?

David Levinson proffers a few hypotheses as to why transportation investments are so expensive.  Many are interesting, (thin markets and insufficient economies of scale trigger thoughts of rolling stock protectionism; project scoping and organizational structure are similarly compelling) though I’d take issue with a few of them.

One is #5, discussing incorrect scope.  David mentions big buses serving few passengers, but as Jarret Walker notes, the real cost is in operations; the real cost is the driver.

The idea of standards run amok is intriguing, but I think a more relevant point is asking if standards make sense.

Nitpicks aside, the idea is a great one – this is a conversation that needs to happen.