ExplainerOctober 6, 2026
Taro roots and a zig-zag channel: how a farm wetland is supposed to work
Longer contact with roots and biofilms can help treatment, but flow, land area and pathogen data are still needed.
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Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
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ExplainerSeptember 21, 2026
Glue and elevators: how two sizes of bubble pull 90% of microplastics out of wastewater
RMIT researchers upgraded a 1960s treatment step — dissolved air flotation — by pairing microbubbles with nanobubbles. Lab results top 90% microplastic removal. Here is the mechanism and the caveats.
ExplainerSeptember 18, 2026
A Wastewater Cell That Powers Itself and Pulls Fertiliser Out of the Stream
Temple and NJIT researchers built a treatment cell that generates seven times more electricity than it consumes while recovering struvite. At bench scale.
ExplainerSeptember 16, 2026
What Drips Out of a Landfill, and New York's Plan to Treat It
Rain moves through buried waste and comes out carrying PFAS. Municipal wastewater plants were never designed to remove it. New York proposes making landfills do it on site.
ExplainerSeptember 8, 2026
Sewage plants are quietly mining fertiliser out of your wastewater
Three ions that a treatment plant desperately wants gone will, under the right conditions, snap together into a crystal worth selling. The same crystal also destroys the pipes. Here is the mechanism.
ExplainerAugust 31, 2026
A raft of reeds cut a lagoon's methane by up to two-thirds
Wastewater treatment lagoons are cheap, common, and quietly among the largest methane sources in the water sector. A four-year Australian trial floated plants on one and measured what happened.
ExplainerAugust 19, 2026
The sunlight-and-catalyst filter that attacks wastewater pollutants
Photocatalysis usually arrives as a powder you then have to fish back out of the water. Fixing the catalyst to a resin bed turns it into something closer to a treatment step: water in one end, oxidised organics out the other.
ExplainerAugust 17, 2026
Can wastewater be a mine? The coagulant loop, explained
A UK startup just raised £700,000 to pull aluminium and iron treatment chemicals back out of water-plant sludge. It is a good excuse to explain a circular loop most people never see: the chemicals that clean water can themselves be recovered.
ExplainerAugust 12, 2026
Can a wetland be a wastewater treatment plant? The Fe-Mn biochar upgrade
A planted gravel bed is a reactor, not a garden. A new study swaps the gravel for iron-manganese modified rice-husk biochar - and reports strong nitrogen and phosphorus removal on wastewater too carbon-poor for conventional denitrification.
ExplainerAugust 11, 2026
The sewage lagoon that still leaks methane
A lagoon treatment train can strip pollution out of sewage and still push methane into the air. A paper published on 10 August measured one facility at roughly 2.0-2.3 times its reported estimate. Here is where the gas escapes.
ExplainerAugust 5, 2026
Turn phenols into a solid: the wastewater electrode that recovers pollution
Most advanced oxidation burns a pollutant down to CO2. A new iodine-shuttling anode does the opposite: it stitches phenols together into an insoluble solid you can filter out.
ExplainerAugust 1, 2026
Electric Pulses, Bacteria, Biogas: A Three-Stage Loop for Biopharma Wastewater
A BITS Pilani system disinfects pharmaceutical wastewater with electric pulses, digests the organics biologically, and turns the leftover sludge into methane. Here is the logic of each stage.