Snow job

  • 04/07/1999

Clean solution to sewage? : Sewage into snow - in a nutshell. The cleanest sewage treatment ever invented for cold climates. A revolutionary no-discharge technology that saved the lake, gave small-town politicians a big lesson in resistance to change, and transformed a hard-nosed engineer into a born-again environmentalist. The Snowfluent system kills bacteria and environmental hazards in raw sewage by blowing the waste into cold winter air from special nozzles mounted on high towers. The crystallizing droplets squeeze out gases, the bacteria is killed by rapid freezing and white snow falls to the ground. When the snow piles melt in the spring, the runoff water is free of the phosphates found in most other treatment systems, which cause algae blooms that can kill oxygen in lakes and rivers. Jeff White, the inventor of the Snowfluent process, said it treats sewage to a higher level than even the wealthiest municipality can afford in traditional systems.