CLARET SCHOOL of Quezon City (CSQC) broke new ground with its recent Extended Aeration Sewage Treatment Plant installation. This particular system is the first of its kind in the country, and provides a canny twist of Filipino creativity : water cleaned by the system will not only be used to irrigate the school’s football field, but through the 20,000-gallon cistern will provide water for the school’s installed firefighting systems for use in an emergency.
As water quality standards are increasingly enforced and lowered, this Extended Aeration (EA) system serves as a showcase of water quality and environmental sustainability, producing high quality water and no sludge.
Even though the earth is covered by water, very little of it is actually drinkable freshwater. Even as the supply is decreasing, the demand for freshwater is increasing. In natural systems, microbes decompose organic matter, but when too much waste is added to a water system such as a lake or stream, these processes use up too much of the dissolved oxygen in the water, often killing other aquatic or marine life. Treating and reusing water allows us to conserve our natural drinking water supply.
The EA system uses air diffusers to blow in a large volume of air to mix and aerate the water in several chambers, allowing for a long retention period and therefore longer aerobic processing, from which the “extended aeration” process got its name. This non-toxic increase in bio-oxidation of wastewater combined with organic matter and bacteria creates an active “wet-burn” process, which is monitored to optimize the conditions for aerobic bacteria to break down organic waste.
The modular EA system is particularly compact and self-contained, requiring little maintenance and power compared to the more conventional Sequential Batch Reactor (SBR) systems common in the country, while the aerobic nature of the EA system means there is little smell compared to septic tanks.
Claret’s Sewage Treatment Plant (STP) was commissioned by TBS Industrial Services, Inc., using a technology brought by Jet Inc., USA. The completed system was inaugurated last September 2, 2011.
For information about Claret School of Quezon City’s extended aeration wastewater treatment plant, contact Engineer Ericson Maquinto of TBS Industrial Services Inc. at 4531482 or 453-5859.
Source: Philippine daily inquirer, September 19, 2011, Page H3