Save Water!!

So yesterday, I made a trip down to the Bonnybrook Wastewater Treatment Plant to take a tour around the facilities, and I have to say from what I heard there and read, it is probably one of the most important infrastructures we have in Calgary.  In a nutshell,  Bonnybrook takes about 70-80%0 of all the sewage in Calgary and surrounding areas, and processes it before releasing it back into the river.  All the stuff from your toilets, showers, sinks, stuff that goes down the drain pretty much all end up there.  When they arrive, they’ll go through three steps of treatment: primary, secondary and tertiary…Simple enough?

Primary takes care of the visible solids that’s in the sewage that comes in so that things like toilet paper, poop and, well, I’ll leave you to imagine the rest. Secondary treatment takes care of the dissolved chemicals – mostly nutrients – in the water and also gets rid of the solids that are left that didn’t get filtered in primary.  They do this with big tanks filled with bacteria that feed on these chemicals.  Finally, we come to tertiary treatment where intense, and I mean intense, UV light are used to mutate the DNA of the bacteria still left in the water so they can’t reproduce anymore so you won’t get a huge boom of bacteria downstream killing off all the fish and other wildlife.  So, I would stay away from those lights if I were you, you’ll get hurt pretty bad!

Anyhow, Bonnybrook helps to clean the water dramatically.  Without it, our river will be completely filled with sewage and be completely disgusting.  It provides the conditions for Calgarians to go out and enjoy the river.  Believe it or not, Calgary’s got one of the best fishing spots in the world.  One more thing to be proud of, the waste-water treatment plants in Calgary are rated A+ amongst others in the world.  You can’t get better than that.

However, all this treatment takes a lot of money and it’s not 100% fool proof.  So, the less water that is being used or wasted, the less cost and less chance of bad chemicals going into the river.  Guess the point I’m trying to get through is, be efficient with water.  It’s an important part of every single living organism’s life: you, me, animals, fish and birds. Don’t dump random things that you are not suppose to down the toilet or sink and don’t waste water.  Know that you have the leisure of this wonderful plant and others in the world don’t.  So, save your water!