Poo-Gloos: Cleaning wastewater on the cheap

This story was originally covered by PRI’s Living on Earth. For more, listen to the audio above.

Getting rid of wastewater is a dirty job, especially in cold weather. In the Gresham, Wisconsin, sewage is normally piped into a wastewater lagoon, where bacteria eats the waste and turns it into oxygen. In the middle of a cold, Midwestern winter, that process is more difficult. Art Bahr, the Administrator of Gresham, told PRI’s Living on Earth, “in the cold the bugs slow down and don’t like to do their job quite as well.”

So Gresham has turned to a device nicknamed a “Poo-Gloo” to clean up the situation. Though, Bahr says, “they’re starting to rename them right now – they’re starting to call them biodomes. They wanted to go with a little better terminology for ’em.”

The devices work like a Russian Nesting doll, according to Bahr. There is one big dome that looks like an igloo. Then there are seven smaller domes inside with plastic material in between each layer. “The bacteria live on it, and what we do is we just supply air to them,” Bahr explained, “and the air circulates the water throughout it so the bacteria can eat away at the solids that are in it.”

The Poo-Gloos are expensive at about $5,000 a piece, but Bahr believes they could save municipal governments quite a bit of money. He says the town is the first in the Midwest to pilot such a program, and the Department of Natural Resources is watching very closely.

“It’s pretty neat that a small town such as ours has a project that could set a trend for a lot of mid-western cold-weather lagoon systems,” Bahr says. It could inspire other towns to clean up their acts, too.

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