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Podcast: Engineering Matters
Episode: #356 Making Space for Wastewater Treatment
Description: Wastewater treatment is an overlooked lifesaver. While the medical advances of the last 100 years—penicillin, chemotherapy, and, more recently, mRNA vaccines—have transformed healthcare, keeping our water supplies free from pathogens like cholera and dysentery, has saved many more lives. The systems developed to treat wastewater are so successful that we can afford to flush and forget.
But this is infrastructure we must not overlook. Growing populations, increased use by industry, and regulations that get tighter as we learn of new threats to human life and the environment, are putting wastewater treatment facilities under strain. Existing plants are...