Time to dump some tabs that I’ve accumulated in the browser over the past few weeks:<\/p>\n
You can never go down the drain:<\/strong><\/p>\n This week’s City Paper cover story is a short piece<\/a> on DC Water’s Blue Plains Advanced Wastewater Treatment Facility (arrange your own tour here!<\/a>).\u00a0 The accompanying photographs<\/a> show the infrastructural landscape in all of its glory.<\/p>\n For an incredibly in-depth tour of the facility (without the smell), check out this mammoth post<\/a> from September, showing the entire process in excruciating detail.\u00a0 Mammoth notes the fundamental process of cleaning the water mimics the existing natural processes that rivers use, albeit concentrated and accelerated.<\/p>\n 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.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n