From waste treatment to resource recovery: A Chicago sustainability story
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REVIEW From waste treatment to resource recovery: A Chicago sustainability story
Debra Shore, Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago, 100 E. Erie, Chicago, Illinois 60611-3154, USA Address all correspondence to Debra Shore at [email protected] (Received 9 January 2017; accepted 24 May 2017)
ABSTRACT The development of Chicago and northeastern Illinois has been intimately tied to water, particularly Lake Michigan and the Chicago Area Waterways. The wastewater treatment plants of the past will become the power centers of the future by harnessing resources—including nutrients, energy, solids, and water itself—to bolster the economy and ensure regional sustainability. The story of Chicago’s development is inextricably linked to its relationship with the natural environment, beginning 16,000 years ago when the land was covered and compressed by an enormous glacier. Ever since, urban planners and policymakers have grappled with how to manage a city built on flat, swampy land, and what to do with the animal and human waste that accumulates in urban environments. During the 19th and 20th centuries, the solution was to move waste as far away from the area as possible. The Chicago River, which originally flowed into Lake Michigan, was converted into an open sewer and reversed, sending the flow—and all the wastes dumped into it—downstream. Over the 20th century, sewage treatment plants were constructed to minimize the potential for harm to humans and the environment. Now, however, our thinking is changing. Rather than discarding waste products, wastewater treatment plants are beginning to recover the resources that flow through them—including nutrients, energy, solids, and water—and transform them into assets that generate revenue and protect the environment. This potential for resource recovery means that the sewage treatment plants of the past will become the power centers of the future. Keywords: waste management; water; sustainability; energy generation
DISCUSSION POINTS • If, as Shore writes, “all problems started out as solutions,” how might resource recovery at wastewater treatment plants create problems in the future? • Other than wastewater, what sectors have the most potential for adopting resource recovery technology and processes? • What are the most salient lessons to be learned from Chicago’s management of waste during the 19th and 20th centuries, and what could have been done differently to avoid some of the problems those management strategies created?
Part one: Retreat of the glacier, reversal of the river, and a great metropolis grows on a soggy, mucky land Chicago’s water story begins with ice. Roughly 16,000 years ago, the last glacier—known as the Wisconsonian—extended as far as Shelbyville, 200 miles south of Chicago, and not much further. Imagine a sheet of ice a half-mile or more in height crushing the landscape, pressing and grinding, moving at a
glacial pace. Based on the estimated volume of the ice sheet, if we consider just the load on Cook County’s 946 square miles, that comes to
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