There are wastewater treatment plants in every major city designed to filter out some of the chemicals and drugs that end up going down our drains.
But there’s another way this kind of treatment takes place, and it’s all natural: rivers like the one that flows through Boise have microorganisms and bacteria that break down contaminants by eating them.
That’s great for the rivers, but after the bacteria "digest" nasty chemicals like nitrates, it can sometimes "breathe out" even worse stuff like greenhouse gases.
Kevin Roche is the director of the Hydrologic Interfaces and Processes Laboratory in the Department of Civil Engineering at Boise State University, and he’s been studying all of this, and he joined Idaho Matters to tell us more.
