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They Are Giant Steel ‘Digester Eggs’…And You’ll Never Guess What They Eat
Flush a toilet in Brooklyn, Queens, or lower Manhattan, and what goes down the hole generally comes to the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant. The facility, spreading over several large blocks in the industrial district of the North Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint, is the largest of the 14 wastewater treatment plants in the Big Apple, treating 310 million gallons* of wastewater every single day. For the curious, the New York Department of Environmental Protection offers monthly tours to give New Yorkers a glimpse of the fascinating, sometimes fragrant science of sewage processing. So we decided to take the plunge. Here’s what we learned on a recent visit. Every job has its own delicate euphemisms and jargon; for a dirty job like sewage treatment, it seems only natural. But it’s still kind of weird that none of the officials on the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant tour will once utter any of the customary words for human waste (not even “feces”), instead relying on terms like: The principal steps in dealing with sewage are: screening, settling, digesting, and dewatering. First, incoming wastewater flows through screens made of bars placed a couple inches apart to filter out all the non-crap crap that gets …
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