Transcript: Liberty Lands

Host 1: Liberty Lands is a place where kids in northeast Philadelphia can get together and hang out.

Host 2: It’s an urban oasis.

Host 1: These are some of the parents who put a lot of work into this park. That’s right neighborhood people planted all these flowers and fresh fruit and veggies.

Nina Sostre: Everything comes out larger than what you buy at the store. It comes out sweeter.

Host 2: Would you believe that just four years ago, this...looked like this?

Brian Mitchell: Before this was a park, this was an old abandoned building. And I used to be scared to walk by here sometimes.

Luther Wayman: We wanted to build something available for children and for the community. And we started from scratch. There was an old tannery here, and it was torn down.

Host 1: A tannery is a factory that makes leather from animal skins. It requires a process that uses chemicals that can be dangerous.

Ken Pantuck: There were thousands of drums of hazardous waste and transformers that were buried here at this site. EPA, in 1987 and 1990, undertook a clean-up project removing the contamination of these sites and improving the health of this area.

Dennis Haugh: More and more cities are finding open empty space and trying to find a reuse for what was industrial.

Samantha: We have our grandma’s garden growing lettuce, tomatoes, squash, hot peppers.

Host 2: OK, the federal government cleaned up the pollution from the tannery, but how do you get a vacant lot to grow grass and trees? They improved the soil with something called biosolids.

Host 1: See, this stuff that looks like soil is actually biosolid. It's a byproduct of wastewater treatment. At Liberty Lands, they used it as lawn fertilizer. First, what is wastewater anyway?

Host 2: Wastewater comes from our homes and offices – our sinks, toilets, washing machines, dishwashers. In some cities, it also comes from the storm drains on our streets. The dirt in wastewater consists of all kinds of stuff. Wastewater treatment plants are designed to get those out before the water is discharged back into our rivers.

Host 1: A big challenge they face is what to do with the solids that come out of the water. Usually, they end up being dumped in landfills.

Host 2: Landfill space is starting to run out. We recycle paper, not only to save trees, but also to save landfill space. So, what if we could recycle the solids that come from wastewater treatment?

Host 1: Well, sure, we can. Liberty Lands is one example. For us to get an idea of how this works, let’s visit one of the most advanced wastewater treatment plants in the world.

Jerry Johnson: We treat 370 million gallons of sewage a year on a daily basis, and from that we generate two products. We generate a very clean effluent and we then discharge that into the Potomac River. The other product that we produce is a biosolid – used to be known as sludge, more politically correct now is biosolids because they’re reusable.

Host 2: Water that comes into the Blue Plains plant goes through a variety of processes to separate out contaminants, water, and recyclable solids.

Mike Marcotte: This is part of our primary treatment train here at the plant. Some of the oldest buildings, some of the smelliest buildings because we’re dealing with the sewage as it comes in from the two million plus people in the area.

Host 1: That's gross, that's going to a landfill. Those plastics and garbage aren't reusable. Once all that's gone it's time to get the good stuff out of the water.

Mike Marcotte: These aeration basins are really the heart and soul of our treatment process. What goes on out here is that these bugs, these bacteria, in the presence of oxygen, chew on the dissolved organics. It’s a real soup of what’s washed off of your dinner plate, what’s washed off of your body in the shower or bathtub. Once the bugs have eaten on the waste and gotten fat and happy and removed substantially all the dissolved organics, those bug bodies basically, become the very core of our biosolids.

This is one of several points in the plant where we actually add chemicals, which involves the addition of iron salts to remove the phosphorus. We actually use a biological process for the nitrogen removal, using bacteria. The two nutrients of nitrogen and phosphorus then also become part of our biosolids and allow those to be more valuable as a fertilizer.

Host 2: Like we saw in the Everglades we want nitrogen and phosphorus in our fertilizer, but not in our waterways.

Host 1: What you see here at Liberty Lands is mostly the result of hard work by the local community. But it also took the efforts of environmental engineers, biologists and chemists, some of whom work at Philadelphia’s wastewater treatment plant.

Brian Mitchell: When we come together and play football, we have so much fun, now that there’s a place where we can hang out, like, this park.