Conference Agenda

The world of wastewater treatment can be intimidating at first – it’s so much more complicated than it seems from the outside. If you’re new to wastewater and working at a wastewater or water reclamation facility you are probably familiar with the treatment that your facility does. But what about all the other facilities? Are they all using the same system that you know (and love)? Probably not, each facility is a little different so that they can efficiently and successfully treat the influent they receive. This talk will discuss some basic types of treatment systems so that you can breakdown and categorize a new, unfamiliar facility.

Using examples of facilities here in the Pacific Northwest, we’ll cover some of the common wastewater treatment systems, including the Activated Sludge Process (ASP), Membrane Bioreactors (MBR), Moving Bio Bed Reactor (MBBR), and Lagoon Treatment. The components of each treatment type will be described so that you can easily identity a system. Then the different systems will be compared in terms of cost, flow capacity, energy use, footprint size, and nutrient removal. This will allow you to not only identify a facility type but understand why that system was selected. Learning about different treatment systems is a great way to ease into wastewater (not literally) and to understand which technologies could be added to your facility efficiently and economically.