THE IMPORTANCE OF WASTEWATER TREATMENT

Water is essential to life. However, as we place more and more demands on our local water supplies, it becomes vital to ensure that wastewater treatment procedures are put in place to avoid problems with contamination, pollution, spreading disease and poisoning. What should you know about wastewater treatment?

Your Water Doesn’t Stop with You

In smaller communities, water is pumped from aquifers or harvested from rainfall. It’s used in bathing, for drinking, for cleaning and doing laundry. It’s used in industrial processes and more. Then it goes down the drain. However, that’s not the end of the story – that water has to go somewhere. If you don’t have a wastewater treatment facility, your wastewater could be leaching back into the ground and contaminating your own drinking water, or it could be flowing downstream and poisoning others.

Wastewater Treatment Offers Safety

With wastewater treatment systems in place, the water used within a community can be disinfected, cleaned and then returned to the environment if it is not reused within the same community (most large urban areas reuse the water). For instance, after the water has been cleaned and treated by a wastewater treatment facility, it can be discharged into the local watershed, where it will eventually make its way to the sea to start the evaporative cycle over again.

Along the way to the ocean, that water will be used by other people within other communities. However, if you do not have wastewater treatment facilities in place, you could be putting poisons in their water, adding toxins to the local environment and causing irreparable harm to humans, animals and plants.
Water is infinitely usable, but only if you properly treat your wastewater and ensure that you are putting it back into the world as clean as it came to you.