WATER TREATMENT

A little history...
The need for a water treatment plant to handle non-hazardous liquids stemmed from the expulsion of liquid waste from California's landfills. Prior to 1988, most non-hazardous liquid waste was simply dumped into large lagoons dug into a portion of a landfill. These wastes were too difficult to control, and contributed to the leachate problem, so landfills prohibited further liquids from entering their sites. Treatment facilities for hazardous industrial wastes were common at the time, but there wasn't an outlet available to handle other types of waste. Southwest Treatment was the first facility built solely for the treatment of these non-hazardous liquids.

Most of the liquids that enter our plant contain approximately 15% dirt and 85% water. After weighing and sampling, the waste is screened and the dirt is removed from the water by a process we call "chemical separation." Once screened, the dirt content of this water is less than 100 parts per million (1%=10,000 parts per million). The water can then be safely disposed of directly into the sewage systems without worry of contamination. We call the dirt that has been separated from the liquid "solids." The solids that have been extracted are pressed into "dirt cakes," which can be safely disposed of in the landfills. The landfills can now be assured that once the water has been removed from the waste products, the solids are easy to handle, and the material they are accepting has been proven non-hazardous through our continuous laboratory analysis.

Since our beginnings, business has encompassed jobs beyond even our imagination. The need for the safe disposal of wastes will always be with us as we strive to preserve our natural resources -- and whether we are on call to clean up a tanker spill on the freeway, or pump fake "blood" from a movie studio lot, Southwest Treatment Systems continues to expand and improve our service.

View of the water treatment plant	On-site Laboratory