How do we do it?

Before the treatment of wastewater became a standard practice, the amount of waste being released into the environment was a real hazard – the source of many life threatening diseases and the cause of dangerous pollution.

Today thanks to modern methods of collection and treatment practiced by facilities like Pine Bluff Wastewater Utility, we can all enjoy clean water and better health than ever before.

Collection of Wastewater

Wastewater runs from home and industries in Pine Bluff into our wastewater system. As the name implies, it is mostly water; only about .06% is waste material.

It is carried by the wastewater system to the wastewater treatment facility. Here it is cleaned in much the same way as nature cleans water. Pine Bluff Wastewater just speeds up the process so that water can be purified in about 100 days instead of months to years.

Our treatment plant uses a series of treatment stages to clean up water so that it can be safely released into the Arkansas River. There are two major steps:

Primary Treatment

First, debris such as tires, 2x4’s, cans, etc., are separated from the water, using screens. This primary treatment removes a portion of the pollutants.

Secondary Treatment

After primary treatment, wastewater still contains solid materials and waste dissolved in the water. Under natural conditions, these substances would provide food for microscopic organisms – fungi, algae, and bacteria – that are an important part of life in a stream or lake.

Pine Bluff Wastewater Utility steps up this process in the secondary stage. Air is supplied to stimulate the growth of bacteria and other organisms that consume most of the waste material, up to 85 or 90 percent.

Towards the end of the treatment process the organisms start to consume one another due to the lack of food. This is called endogenous respiration. The clean water is the disinfected to kill any remaining harmful bacteria, and released in the Arkansas River.

From here it will evaporate into the air, and then condense into rain – then it will fall to earth, starting the water cycle all over again.