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| We here at Mainland High School chose our National Critical Technology to
be Environmental Quality, with a technical application on Pollution Control. The
environmental impact of our project is more fully realized when directed into the area of
Wastewater Management. The global crisis, the geometric growth of human population, has placed severe limitations on the ability for expansion. This has caused most major hubs of civilization to reach to the skies, constructing towering buildings to enclose offices and housing. With this increase of customers, and a stagnation of the land area to grow into, a stress is placed upon wastewater treatment plants attempting to accommodate the massive flow. For safety and health reasons, regulations require that the average daily amount of sewage to treat must be below 50% of the plants maximum capacity. If the plant is operating above 50%, then plans for upgrading must be drawn. What is done when there is no more land in which the new tanks must reside? The current method is to sprawl these plants over a great many acres, wasting valuble land which could otherwise be productively exploited. Our solution is to combine all of the components of a wastewater treatment plant into a single structure. This building would house all of the tanks, pumps, pipes, and chambers needed to handle a certain percentage of the influx. With a vertical combination of the requisite elements, the amount of land area needed for the percentage of the flow which each stack can process will be around that of the size of one of the tanks. As an added benefit, the culmination of a regular water treatment plant and a sludge digester makes for in house production of methane. This volatile gas is useful as a renewable fuel source. The remaining sludge, minus the what went into production of methane, is lower in volume than the non-digested sludge; this means that less is regulated to a landfill. The ease which a building would allow for the capture of methane is a benefit from two angles. Primarily, the methane is a very deleterious greenhouse gas and strict regulations are in place to cease its release; in addition, as mentioned above, the methane could be used as an energy source to provide power for each unit. In the near future, when this technology is better realized, educated people will occupy all of the careers related to this solution since knowledge of chemistry, biology, and physics are all requirements for maintaining a biomass facility. Engineering such facilities will also provide a field of scientific study, since each system must be scaled to the specific location for maximum efficiency. The demand for these professions will increase significantly along with increase need for smarter, more learned employees. The Administration of Mainland High School has given its permission for our project's homepage to be hosted at the address http://167.93.12.30/istf2000 for the duration of this competition until the end of March 2000. |