Philadelphia water reuse

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COVID vaccine. The vaccine is available to everyone 12 and older! Find a City-run vaccine clinic or partner vaccine clinic to protect yourself and your loved ones. In a basic pumped system greywater flows into a large usually 50 gallon plastic barrel that is either buried or located at ground level. Inside the barrel an effluent pump pushes the water out through irrigation lines no emitters to the landscape. Pumps add cost, use electricity, and will break, so avoid this if you can.

In most residential situations it is much simpler and more economical to utilize greywater outside, and not create a system that treats the water for indoor use.

The exceptions are in houses that have high water use and minimal outdoor irrigation, and for larger buildings like apartments. Buckets can catch greywater and clear water, the water wasted while warming up a shower. There are also simple designs like Sink Positive, and more complicated systems like the Brac system.

Earthships have an interesting system that reuse greywater inside with greenhouse wetlands. Low tech, simple greywater systems are best suited to specific, large plants.

Use them to water trees, bushes, berry patches, shrubs, and large annuals. About Greywater Reuse Greywater is gently used water from your bathroom sinks, showers, tubs, and washing machines.

Our philosophy We believe that for residential greywater systems simple designs are best. Basic Greywater Guidelines Greywater is different from fresh water and requires different guidelines for it to be reused. If you store greywater the nutrients in it will start to break down, creating bad odors. Minimize contact with greywater.

It was something that they were already doing in Europe. Lisa: Basically, imagine a giant room with sand pits that are all filled with water. After a few days, a gelatinous layer of bacteria will form on top of the sand, and it will start absorbing other organic matter too. The water that eventually percolates through the sand to the bottom is clean of bacteria. Sebastian: By the city had built five of these sand filtration plants. The city had to do more. Burlingame: So they removed a lot of the germs, but not all of them.

And then in around we started adding chlorine at our treatment plans. And chlorine was a big thing. But we got it through here in Philadelphia. Lisa: And the chlorine killed the germs. Since the water was so polluted, they had to use a lot of it, and it gave off a distinctive smell. Levine: Once we finished the filter plants and started chlorinating the water supply in , typhoid fever and other waterborne diseases basically disappeared.

There was just background levels of those diseases, which begs the question, what happened to the sewage that was being dumped in the rivers? It was still a huge problem. Levine: Most of it's just still running directly into the rivers. They were about two million people in the city then. Lisa: We increasingly had the technology to fix this problem, now we needed the regulations. Sebastian: The clean streams law [Purity of Water Act] basically made it illegal to pollute the rivers and streams with sewage.

Even though everyone agreed sewage was the problem, the city dragged its feet. The war and the Great Depression also caused delays. But one of the main reasons was because of politics: even though they dealt with the same deeply connected system, one city agency was in charge of the sewers, and another was in charge of drinking water. You can imagine the kinds of problems this caused.

You need to do something. You need to at least have a plan. When the flow of sewage first enters the plant, it is screened to remove coarse materials and rags and then passes through the grit chamber to remove fine grit and sand. Lisa: So if the benefits are obvious, why did the city drag its feet for so long to build these plants? Sebastian: Remember when we said earlier that one department was in charge of sewers and another was in charge of water? There was competition, politics, and money.

Lisa: Around the s it became obvious that the situation had to change. The water department had to be consolidated. And Philadelphia had just the guy to do it.

Dilworth: We can portray only a few results of combined planning and action here. These are measured in terms of brick and stone and steel.

Also very much present is the heart and soul of a city reborn, the spirit of its dedicated people. Lisa: Dilworth is best known for being the mayor of Philadelphia in the s. In fact, Dilworth Park, right outside City Hall, bears his name. Sebastian: But before Dilworth was mayor, he was the city treasurer, and more than most, he wanted to root out the corruption at City Hall. Alexis Schulman: Everything is extremely corrupt, and that is not like an overstatement or generalization. Lisa: One of the biggest issues was missing money.

Among the departments that were investigated was the Philadelphia water department, which was in charge of collecting rate fees. It leads to a grand jury investigation, and the national press arrives in Philadelphia.

Alexis Schulman: Philadelphia sort of became like a horrifying laughingstock at the time because things were just so terrible. Yeah, multiple people in government killed themselves, including someone at the water department, because it just was revealed that a lot of money was going missing. Lisa: The Dilworth investigation had even more wide-ranging consequences.

In the next election, reform-minded Democrats were elected, and they voted for a new city charter—a sort of new constitution for the city. And this new charter changed the way municipal services were organized. The Department of Surveys in charge of sewers was merged with the Department of Water in charge of the drinking water. Alexis Schulman: And it gives this organization a lot of political independence. Its fees are set by itself. Sebastian: By the early 20th century, the water department is modern in terms of technology and governance, and this brings it in line with other cities.

The quality of the drinking water is good too. Alexis Schulman: But then cities are hit with this other pressure, which is the Clean Water Act, which says, you know, you need to upgrade your treatment so less pollution is going into the rivers.

Sebastian: Filtration made the water drinkable and the sewage was getting treated, but there was still a lot of industrial pollution; both the Schuylkill and the Delaware Rivers were lined with heavy offenders. Waters of Our Commonwealth: Pollution comes from the rotting and decaying matter floating on or suspended in the waters, from liquid wastes discharged by factories and mills, from the black silt washed away when coal is cleaned before shipping, and from the discharge of vast quantities of raw, untreated sewage from our cities and towns.

Sebastian: The act also made it illegal for companies to dump waste into the river without a permit, and it gave cities more money to create secondary sewage treatment. Waters of Our Commonwealth: Pennsylvania has well over sewage treatment plants now in operation. Sebastian: By the s people actually began to see a difference. The rivers seemed cleaner. But these improvements actually illuminated a problem that was there all along.

Sebastian: Philadelphia, like most old cities, has a combined sewage system. The pipe for stormwater is the same one as sewage, and when it rains a lot, the mix of sewage and stormwater gets dumped right back into the rivers. Lisa: There is an old joke: What do you get when you combine one gallon of stormwater and one gallon of sewage?

Two gallons of sewage. So now cities have to pay more attention to their stormwater. Stormwater picks up all kinds of stuff along the way, including animal waste and dangerous heavy metals. This creates problems like algae blooms that suck up the oxygen, kill fish. Alexis Schulman: Turned out this was a pretty big problem. This is so much water. So how can we ask a municipality to treat this? And what they came up with was a requirement that cities had to have a stormwater management plan.

Lisa: The gray system creates two sets of pipes, one for sewage and one for stormwater. Sullivan: So all along your rivers and creeks, they would build these underground tunnels. So rather than that water flowing into the creek and river, it flows into this tunnel that really just holds the water and then slowly releases it after the storm to the treatment plant.

Sebastian: Chicago was one of the cities that opted for the huge pipes. For them, the pollution was in the Chicago River, which was reaching Lake Michigan. Lisa: Chicago started building their giant tunnels in the s. Alexis Schulman: These things are insanely expensive. Howard Neukrug: We wanted to capture the rainwater before it becomes sewage. By capturing it we were able to reuse it, recycle it, infiltrate it into the ground, plant trees, and water trees with this water. Lisa: This is a big deal.

Remember in the beginning we told you that Philadelphia was going to come out of this story as an innovator? This is the idea. Howard Neukrug: This was a new concept to EPA, and they did not, they fought us on it for about a decade.

But they understood green infrastructure in and of itself, but there was nothing like gray infrastructure building a pipe. Because everyone knows what a pipe can do and how much water it can hold.