Good morning!

On Friday we completed a site visit to the Sugarland Water Treatment plant. This is my 4th water treatment plant visit but this is the first plant that I have visited that is not a traditional plant. Here they use membranes to clean the water. They have about 65000 tubes within a single cartridge and no matter over 6 microns can enter or the tubes will become clogged. Due to this they can also not use polymers in any of the treatment as it will also clog the system. Something different they also do is that instead of using chlorine gas they use bleach; even though it is less effective and degrades more rapidly. This is because they are located right next to high school and they thought it would be nice to NOT poison the children. They recently entered the “best tasting water” competition and won runner up! They still claim they have the best tasting water in the country because the water treatment plant that won is actually located in Ontario, Canada. They are consistently checking their water quality at every step of the process and are below the national maximum  standards for coli forms, nitrates, and phosphates. They will be doubling the capacity of their plant in the next few years and are looking forward to producing 100% of their water from surface water. They are currently running ahead of schedule as they currently use 60% surface water; which is a standard they did not need to meet until 2025. While the plant manager ( who gave the tour) spoke an excessive amount of jargon it was a great field trip! If I was allowed to take field trips at my school I would definitely bring my students here.