Don’t look down on your toilet: Treated effluent can help the San Antonio River
Treated effluent makes up 90 percent of the flow in the river. It keeps aquatic plants and animals alive. It cools generators at CPS Energy power plants. Some of it makes it all the way down to the coast, filling areas of the river along the way and nurturing fragile estuaries that depend on fresh water.That effluent, however, is not purely beneficial, even after everything from typical toilet fare to plastic chip bags is removed.
At a facility stretching across 514 acres of land just south of San Antonio, about 90 million gallons of sewage passes through two massive pipes into a concrete pit every day. It twists through a web of tubes under the city to get to the Steven M. Clouse Water Recycling Center, which processes and cleans it, before it eventually flows into the San Antonio River.
Firstly, bar screens and grit chambers remove a large portion of the nasty solids and garbage and whatever other sandy dirt can be found. These piles of trash contain anything from bags of chips and cloth rags to crushed cans and stuffed animals — all filtering through the San Antonio sewage system after someone flushes it down the toilet. All this winds up in the landfill soon after.
“The first part of treatment is physical,” Eckhardt said. “The system is actually removing the solids. The second part is biological, where we take advantage of bacterial microorganisms that consume organic matter.” “There’s always this thing you hear about that people say, ‘What if you fall into the River Walk? You should go straight to the hospital.’ That’s not true at all,” said Shaun Donovan, manager of environmental sciences at SARA. “We don’t have toxic water. E. coli and nitrates are natural pollutants that get exacerbated by human activity. It’s not like we have nuclear waste in there.”