It’s no accident that the City of Chicago’s department responsible for treating wastewater has “reclamation” in the title. The Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago is responsible for serving over 10 million people in a growing region, and they have turned to new approaches for managing essential water supplies, including capturing and reusing stormwater. While the state has traditionally diverted water from Lake Michigan, the district’s new strategic plan focuses on water and resource recovery where possible.
The plan also includes designing and building a nutrient recovery system at the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, which is the largest facility of its kind in the world. The system will extract nitrogen and phosphorous from water streams and convert them to fertilizer, cleaning the water in the process.
Learn more at www.mwrd.org
