Recovering Resources, Transforming Water

[mucifer]

The MWRD (Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago) is building on a history of innovation. Our efforts to reduce energy use and our evolution into a resource recovery agency will directly benefit residents here in Chicago and Cook County. We’re working to reduce greenhouse gases, produce valuable products, promote a cleaner and more sustainable environment, and provide a return on investment that will benefit taxpayers.

[hunter]

1. That was interesting.

It's always fascinated that Chicago's original solution to it's sewage problem was to build the Ship and Sanitary Canal so they could dump it into the Des Plaines River, making it someone else's problem.

In those days many people thought rivers had some magical ability to cleanse themselves and even wrote fanciful guidelines for how many miles of river it would take to clean the effluent of a city based on its population.

By the early twentieth century (at the latest!) it was abundantly clear this theory was bullshit. By the 1950s many U.S. rivers were open sewers carrying cursorily treated domestic sewage, street drainage, and industrial toxins.

The Clean Water Act of 1972 began to address these problems.

[mucifer]

2. The rivers around and in Chicago are so much cleaner now from all the work they are doing. Yeah, the

past was pretty ugly.