This week’s speaker was Jay Wetherbee. He works for Veolia Water, the world’s leading operator in water services  and he is also an assistant project manager at the Smithfield Wastewater treatment plant and is the leader for the town pump stations and collection system.

He started off talking about his career as a waste water treatment operator. At first, I thought listening to waste water wouldn’t be that interesting but as he started talking more and more, i found it very interesting.
He first began with how treatment facilities work. The process begins with removing roots, rags, cans and large debris from the system. Then a grit removal happens. (removes sand and gravel). According to Mr.Wetherbee, this process is the most important because this is what most wastes have problems with. If all of the debris cannot be removed, then it goes to another haul as landfill. The rest of the sewage then gets move down to smaller grit removal, this causes the water velocity increases. As the movement changes, the water is freshened and more oil is removed. The top layer of the sewage gets cleaner and heavy solids sick down and settles there. Those solids at the end gets removed to the sludge disposal where it would get disinfected with sodium hypochloride and ultraviolet.

During his talk, he was emphasizing very strongly on the process of disinfection. He was stating how usage of sodium hypochloride has been an extremely big problem in the cities. Although getting this chemical is very cheap, it is causing an enormous amount of contamination especially in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. So lately, they have been adding sodium bisulfide to clean the residue of what the sodium hypochloride leaves over.

From what i have heard this day, i thought it was very environmental in a sense that people are trying to be more eco-friendly with this world.