Chocolate fountain

Started the morning at the sewage treatments works! Perhaps not most people's idea of a fun Saturday morning but I was glad to go first thing thinking that with the warm weather forecast for the day that it would only get worse. The reality was that it wasn't actually that smelly at all. More impressive architecture just like the reservoirs last week, where the sewage flows in from Bradford (all gravity fed).

Richard, Helena and Andrew were the team from Yorkshire water charged with showing us round and it was actually fantastic.  As well as the main flows in from Bradford the works also receive sewage pumped in from outlying regions and Helena took great pleasure in surprising us with its arrival as the 'chocolate fountain'

The team took us round an huge site though all the processes right from sieving out large items right through to treating the sludge and actually managed to teach us some really interesting chemistry about what happens to the 'sludge' that is left when the water has been extracted.  Friendly bacteria are the key and the site is just about to start using some new infrastructure which will heat and compress this sludge before the bacteria get at it which will make the process much more effective.   What impressed me was the work being put in to try to make the site self sufficient in terms of energy use, using the flow of water through the site and the by products of the bacteria (methane) to fuel the plant. We have plenty of methane at home.............!

julie