Down Chicago’s Drain

As reported in today's Tribune, the Water Reclamation District just completed a study which concludes that fully cleaning the wastewater from the city's sewage plants would increase their carbon footprint and therefore be bad for the environment. So the Chicago River must be degraded in order to save the entire Earth.

Chicago is one of the few large cities in the U.S. that does not send its wastewater through a final disinfectant processing, either using chlorination or UV treatment. This requires electricity, so that adding this step to the treatment process would increase the Water Reclamation District carbon footprint if it was used. That is the basis of the argument that not treating the water is better for global warming. By that logic, they should turn off the electricity for the treatment plants entirely.

For years the Water Reclamation District has resisted disinfecting its wastewater. They claim that the Chicago River is only used by a handful of recreational boaters, so there is no need to increase costs to benefit a narrow special interest. As long as Chicago is allowed to flush its waste downstream and out of its sight, the waste will be ignored. If the recent lawsuit by the State of Michigan had succeeded in closing off the Shipping Channel which drains our sewage, the Water Reclamation District would have to reconsider its position.

On Tuesday the Supreme Court refused to hear Michigan's case against Illinois which sought to close the waterway connecting to the Great Lakes to block passage of Asian Carp into Lake Michigan.

Also on Tuesday the Army Corps of Engineers announced that carp DNA has been found in Calumet harbor. No carp have yet been found, but DNA evidence seems to indicate at least one fish has made it into the Great Lakes. If a breeding population can get established Lake Michigan, the natural ecosystem and fishing industry will be devastated.

On Saturday I attended a screening of the film Garbage Dreams at the Chicago Cultural Center. The film is a gentle portrait of three young men who are learning the traditional garbage collecting trade of the Zaballeen, the waste collecting caste of Cairo.

A city of 18 million, Cairo has no formal garbage collection service, just the diligent efforts of the Zaballeen, who haul the refuse back to their homes to sort out the food waste, rags, and recyclables. With these lo-tech methods, they are able to boast recycling rates near 80% and earn a small income.

But Cairo dreams of entering the modern world, with a modern trash handling system. Multi-national waste hauling companies are winning contracts to whisk the city's garbage away to new landfills. How will the Zaballeen survive without their traditional business? Can they compete with the modern throwaway world? You will have to see the film to find out.

Garbage Dreams will be shown on PBS in April. Check your local station for times.

A Washington Post article details the lawsuit filed by the State of Michigan against Illinois to close off the water connection of the Chicago and Calumet Rivers to Lake Michigan.

The lawsuit also challenges Chicago's exemption from the Great Lakes Compact which allows the city to draw as much as 2 billion gallons of water from Lake Michigan, which then leaves the Great Lakes basin into the Mississippi River.

If Michigan is successful in its suit, it could possibly force not only the closure of the shipping channels and the end of barge traffic through the Cal-Sag channel, but could also force the city to re-reverse the direction of the Chicago River back toward Lake Michigan, entirely changing the water infrastructure of Chicago and nearby cities.

The poisoning of the Sanitary & Shipping Canal continues today, with thousands of fish popping up dead, and only one specimen of the notorious Asian Carp. Yesterday 2200 gallons of the pesticide Rotenone were dumped into the canal near the electric fence just above the Lockport Dam, to make sure none of the invasive fish swam upstream while the Army Corps of Engineers made repairs and upgrades to the electric barrier.

Photos in the Tribune

Those evil invader fish are on the move again! This week the Sanitary & Ship Canal will be closed to boat traffic as the Illinois DNR begins poisoning all fish in a six-mile stretch of the canal near the electric fence above the Lockport Dam.

Recently, DNA evidence of Asian Carp was discovered upstream of the electric barricade in several Lake Michigan harbors. The voracious eating habits of these invasive fish threatens other fish and the balance of the entire Great Lakes ecosystem.

Read Toxic Waters a great series of articles in the New York Times about water pollution in America.

The most recent article is about how pollutants cleaned from coal-fired power plants ends up in local waterways.

Last week a decomposed body was found by cleanup crews along the Illinois River near Channahon, setting off a storm of armchair speculation that it might be famous missing Stacy Peterson, the most recent victim of alleged ladykiller Drew Peterson.

Cleanup master Chad Pegracke of the group Living Lands and Waters found the partial skeleton among debris washed up on the forested banks by last years floods.

But alas, DNA tests have proved the bones to be from a male. The amateur CSI detectives can all go back to their tabloids without satisfaction.

The Chicago Tribune reports today that a new machine at the Stickney sewage treatment plant is scheduled to go online soon, despite years of cost overruns, mechanical problems, missed deadlines and admissions by officials that the plant is no longer necessary.

When we toured the Stickney plant in 2008, our tour guides talked about the new plant as the future of waste treatment. Though we were not allowed to see the inner workings of the machine, the idea is that the wet sludge that is removed from the last settling ponds is pumped to this building, where intense heat kills bacteria and pathogens, cooking the sludge into small pellets which can then be used as fertilizer.

Since the contract was awarded for construction of the $217 million plant in 2000, the biosolids produced at the sewage plant have been spread on open air fields in nearby Hodgkins, where sunlight dries and sterilizes the sludge. In 2007 the Tribune ran an investigative article about the insider deals and failures of the company which built the pelletizer plant.

Yet another study has found pharmaceuticals in the tissues of fish caught in the Chicago River near the outlet of the North Side sewage treatment plant, according to a Tribune article.

The new research has shown the presence of pharmaceuticals in sewage effluent in several cities across the country, which are then absorbed by fish downstream. Sewage treatment plants are not usually equipped to remove waterborne drugs from the waste stream, and few rivers have been tested for their presence until recently.

What effect these low-level pharmaceuticals will have on anyone who drinks the water or eats the fish farther downstream remains to be seen.