New wastewater treatment plant

[projekktor id=’25985′]

After a $158 million upgrade, a wastewater treatment plant in Burlington says it’s now helping to clean up the water in the Hamilton harbour. The cleaned up water would be dumped back into our lakes at other water waste water treatment facility but the Skyway Wastewater treatment plant is taking it a step further by adding and additional sand filtering process to its treatment.

“We added the extra level of treatment here because of the special needs of the Hamilton harbour. It not only has to be very good effluent, it has to be better so we can improve the overall quality of the harbour. ” David Andrews, Halton Wastewater.

Just like at any other plant, the water has already gone through a primary treatment stage where the larger materials are removed. The heavy grit is filtered out and then the remainder of the solids are eliminated. Then through a secondary process, natural bacteria is used to break down organic material into carbon dioxide and water. Then the water goes through a clarifier.

The Federal and Ontario governments each put over $51 million into the project and the Halton region covered the reaming. The upgrade to the plant also includes a whole new building helping Burlington keep up with a growing population. They are now able to pump the equivalent of 56 Olympic sized swimming pools worth of clean water into the Hamilton harbour every single day before they could only handle the equivalent of 46.