A few miles north of Berlin, the Schönerlinde wastewater treatment plant hums with quiet urgency. Dark brown water flows through a series of concrete tanks, alive with microorganisms breaking down almost everything that’s flushed away in the northeastern parts of the nearby German capital.
A few miles north of Berlin, the Schönerlinde wastewater treatment plant hums with quiet urgency. Dark brown water flows through a series of concrete tanks, alive with microorganisms breaking down almost everything that’s flushed away in the northeastern parts of the nearby German capital. The plant serves 850,000 people, in addition to many businesses, making it one of the largest among the roughly 20,000 sewage plants in the European Union.
By the time treated water leaves the Schönerlinde facility, it has been purified enough — according to current European standards — to be allowed to flow into Tegel Lake, where Berliners swim and sail. But increasingly, experts at Berliner Wasserbetriebe, the state-owned utility responsible for supplying drinking water to nearly 4 million people in the Berlin region, are worried about rising levels of micropollutants — most of them from pharmaceutical and cosmetics waste — that flow into treatment systems and which the plants’ microorganisms are unable to metabolize and break down.
As a result, many micropollutants leave today’s sewage plants mostly unchanged. “We find substances for lowering blood pressure, fighting depression, painkillers — in small quantities, but as one big cocktail,” says Gerhard Mauer, who oversees all the city’s water treatment plants.
Read more at: Yale Environment 360
Photo Credit: kubinger via Pixabay
