Wastewater goes through four or five stages of treatment before it can be released into the environment. Tertiary treatment involves improving water quality through processes such as filtration, lagooning, nutrient removal, and disinfection. Different contaminants from homes, businesses, and industries are removed in each stage. Chlorination is a common form of disinfection.
Tertiary treatment is part of the treatment process that wastewater has to go through before it can be discharged into the environment. The process includes four or five stages. These are preliminary, primary, secondary and tertiary wastewater treatment; sometimes, this is followed by an extra step. There are different types of tertiary treatment, all of which involve improving the quality of waste to reduce its impact on the environment where it is released.
Extensive wastewater treatment is required due to the vast number of different contaminants that can be present in wastewater. Wastewater is generated by homes, businesses and public buildings such as schools and hospitals and, in some areas, also by industrial plants. Wastewater contains contaminants from all of these places, as well as environmental wastes from soil, rainwater, animal waste, and other wastes that enter stormwater systems.
The wastewater treatment process is lengthy. The pretreatment stage involves the removal of large pieces of debris by filtration. In primary treatment, water is driven into large tanks and allowed to settle to remove particulate solids. Secondary treatment uses microorganisms to remove more solid contaminants. Subsequently, the wastewater goes through a tertiary treatment and finally, it can go through a second sedimentation process to remove any residual particles.
Tertiary treatment, also known as effluent polishing, is done to improve water quality. Most wastewater treatment plants use at least one tertiary water treatment process, and some use two or more to decontaminate wastewater. Tertiary processes include filtration, lagooning, nutrient removal and disinfection.
Filtration is a common method of tertiary treatment, with sand or activated carbon used to filter wastewater. The water is passed through a bed of sand or carbon, allowing the particulate matter in the water to adhere to the filter media, removing them from the water. Lagoon is a method where water is stored for some time in artificial ponds. During this process, water-dwelling plants and invertebrates improve water quality by ingesting residual particulate matter.
In some locations, high levels of nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen need to be removed from wastewater before they can be released into the environment. This is important because if these nutrients are not removed from the water, they can lead to large-scale algae growth, causing an ecosystem imbalance. Nutrient removal is done by bacteria in the wastewater, which convert the nutrients into forms that can be removed from the water.
The last tertiary process to be performed is disinfection, which is typically done by adding chlorine to the wastewater. This process is used to kill the microorganisms present in the water, to reduce the environmental impact of waste. Chlorination of water is one of the most common forms of disinfection, as it is a relatively simple and inexpensive process.
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