Here's where New York City's sewage really goes

New York City has 14 wastewater treatment plants in total we treat about 1.3 billion gallons per day there are about 8 and a half million people in New York City all of their wastewater is treated at one of the 14 plants here at Newtown Creek the service area is about 1.1 million people this plant here at Newtown Creek though is the largest of the 14 plants treats on average about 225 million gallons a day we received sewage from parts of Brooklyn a little bit of Queens and actually almost the entire East Side of Manhattan and lower Manhattan right now at the lowest level of the facility about 50 feet below street level where the raw untreated sewage enters the plant we have the sewage passed through a series of metal bars that are spaced about an inch apart and those bars remove anything that may get into the sewer system that could clog up pumps or other equipment a lot of the material we do see our sanitary wipes which unlike toilet paper really don't break down in the sewer system so occasionally things wash up on the screens that shouldn't be in sewer systems fish we get Turtles we get dollar bills from time to time a few years ago there was a firearm that came onto the screens NYPD got involved with with that a lot of things that are in sewage can't be physically or mechanically removed they have to be removed in other methods so we remove that material here and we're called the aeration tanks and in these tanks we cultivate microorganisms that are naturally occurring and they actually consume organic material that's in sewage and that's part of the what we call the biological treatment process here at the plant we're now at a part of the process called the final settling tanks organic material that has now been consumed by microbes is heavy enough where it can settle to the bottom of these tanks and be physically removed for later processing obviously treating sewage from a million people can be odorous so we do a lot of odor control here at this plant all of the tanks are are essentially covered where there can be odors and that odorous air that are trapped under the covers passes through activated charcoal which removes a lot of the odor causing materials the organic material that we remove from the wastewater is called sewage sludge and we now have a couple of processes for that material one of them is called thickening rat the top of one of the eight egg-shaped digesters here at the plant we're about a hundred and forty feet in the air gives you a good view of the city the purpose of digestion is fairly simple we want to take the organic material that's in the sewage sludge that's proteins carbohydrates and break them down into more basic components like carbon dioxide water vapor and methane gas and that's done here in these digester you see here there's the last step in the process we've added bleach to the wastewater and it's leaving the plant at this point and going down to an outfall that releases the treated sewage into the East River there are federal regulations that require all wastewater treatment plants in the country to remove at least 85 percent of the organic material that comes into a plant this plant generally removes between 92 and 95 percent of the materials so we do better than federal standards

Channel: Business Insider

Views: 1,885,489

Rating: 4.865922 out of 5

Keywords: Business, Insider, NYC, sewage

Id: 4Tv6EKHWxd0

Length: 3min 52sec (232 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 26 2016

Reddit Comments

[u/hiteckredneck]

No shit.

[u/k3nnyd]

Nothing like telling your SO you want to hit up the special Valentine's Day sewage treatment plant tour!

[u/scottsmith46]

tldw: cleaned, then the East River.

[u/FearlessChange]

Beaches here in New Jersey are literally shit down during the summer sometimes because of too much sewage in the water

[u/birdmanunited]

I am never swimming in the ocean again

[u/there_I-said-it]

I like that thumbnail.

[u/99k1500]

My father in law took me to tour a gigantic Southern California wastewater plant where he worked. The smell was unbearable. He said one time they had a dead baby show up on that first grate which broke my heart. There’s also a conveyer that is dedicated to sorting out the undigested corn kernels and beans, it was really funny just seeing a giant pile of beans and corn. Fun fact: the consistently highest volume period of wastewater out of the entire year comes in the first few minutes of the Super Bowl halftime. We’re talking oceans of septic.