TeardownOctober 6, 2026
A MOF can catch metals. Can it keep working in a treatment column?
High batch adsorption capacity is a starting point, not a specification for continuous wastewater treatment or rare-earth products.
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Explainers, teardowns, and myth-busting on waste management systems and green engineering.
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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.
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.
TeardownAugust 28, 2026
99.9% pure CO2 from sewage sludge — reading Rhinoflux's proof-of-concept closely
A Kyoto University spinout says its aqueous chemical looping process turns wet sewage sludge into power at 2–4× biomass efficiency with near-pure CO2 capture. The target problem is real. The disclosed evidence is a feasibility study and a set of conditional verbs.
Myth-BustingAugust 24, 2026
"Treated wastewater is automatically safe to drink"
"Treated" describes a process, not a permitted end use. Between sewage effluent and drinking water sit three distinct categories, each with its own treatment train, monitoring regime and regulator.
TeardownAugust 23, 2026
SiTration and BHP want to mine copper out of mine wastewater
A one-month pilot at a historic Arizona copper site aims to plate saleable copper out of legacy mine water using filtration plus electro-extraction. The bench numbers are strong. The scale numbers do not exist yet.
Myth-BustingAugust 20, 2026
“Flush unused medicines — the sewage works removes them anyway”
Conventional wastewater plants were built to remove suspended solids and biodegradable organic matter. Pharmaceutical compounds were never part of the design brief. The FDA's flush list exists precisely because flushing is the exception, not the default.
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.
TeardownAugust 1, 2026
Reading the BITS Pilani Wastewater Claim Line by Line
Six nines of disinfection, 90% organics removal, reusable water and biogas — announced without an energy balance, a cost figure, or a recovery yield. A teardown of what the numbers do and do not say.
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.