Team:RHIT/integrated human practice
Integrated Human Practice
Contacting with EPA and USDA officers
At the beginning of the research, we contacted EPA office about the new standards upon the concentration of heavy metals in soil and water. Mario Mangino, the toxicologist at U.S. Environmental Protection Agency replied us the methods used for determining the heavy metals levels in soil and water, which are Atomic Emission Spectroscopy (ICP-AE) and Atomic Absorption (AA) Spectroscopy. He also provided background information on methodologies of metal remediation that are most frequently applied.
After reviewing information and documents provided by Mario Mangino, we emailed him back with questions we were curious about, and got replies from him. From this interaction, we got information about Bioremediation Guidance from Indiana DEM, the EPA Superfund site cleanup goals for cobalt and arsenic in soil and groundwater, and bio-related methods used for detection of water quality.
Moreover, contacting these officials also helped our project a lot as we were given specific data and government-regulated goals for heavy metals. These data and goals included the maximum allowed contamination levels, remediation targets, and information about remediation techniques and applications. We chose these two organizations because they would be the most concerned with environmental health and contamination in rural areas. Industrial facilities are not uncommon in rural areas, and industrial facilities are a major contributor to heavy metals being released into the environment, which could then affect nearby crops and livestock. The spillage can also impact nearby undomesticated ecosystems, decreasing the health of all living organisms in the wild.
DuPont Industrial Facilities
We contacted Jennifer Dodds, the supervisor for the cleanup for the former East Chicago DuPont industrial facility. This was a cleanup started in the late ‘90s, and the bulk of the work was only finished last year (2018). The site was of interest to us because they industrial facility was polluting groundwater and soil with heavy metals, especially arsenic. We were able to ask Ms. Dodds several questions, though because there is so much variation in each cleanup project, some answers were general.
City of Terre Haute Wastewater Treatment Plant
On August 1st, four of the teammates took a tour to the City of Terre Haute Wastewater Utility Plant, a facility that helps to remove a number of contaminants like heavy metals, dirt and bacteria in the wastewater received from a network of drains, sewers, clay tile and pumping stations. The system founded in 1963 can deal with more than 500 miles of sewer line and over 8000 storm structures [1].
The purpose of the visit is to see how the wastewater utility plant purifies water, especially how they remove metals from water. The whole process can be categorized into two main parts, separation of insolubles and purification. The product water leaving the facility goes into the Wabash River.
For the first part, separation of insolubles, the incoming water is first filtered with an iron mesh to get rid of trash that should not be in the wastewater stream, such as tree branches and tampons. The water will then be treated with flocculation, the process by which small particles clump together through chemicals so they can later be filtered out, using a rolling canvas. The centrifuge process is followed to remove those glued particles that cannot be filtered out before the process. To remove the phosphorus in water, a couple anaerobic and aerobic sequencing batch reactors were set up to do it.
The second part is mainly using UV light to sterilize the E. coli in the water. UV light does not directly kill them all but sterilization makes them unable to grow and die out soon. The plant manager also mentioned that the amount of metals in water is growing over the years due to pharmaceutical industry, people tend to flush down the leftovers of their prescription into the toilet.
