Lakshminarayana J S
Environ Lett. 1975;8(2):121-34. doi: 10.1080/00139307509437426.
Water is polluted when it constitutes a health hazard or when its usefulness is impaired. The major sources of water pollution are municipal, manufacturing, mining, steam, electric power, cooling and agricultural. Municipal or sewage pollution forms a greater part of the man's activity and it is the immediate need of even smaller communities of today to combat sewage pollution. It is needless to stress that if an economic balance of the many varied services which a stream or a body of water is called upon to render is balanced and taken into consideration one could think of ending up in a wise management programme. In order to eliminate the existing water pollutional levels of the natural water one has to think of preventive and treatment methods. Of the various conventional and non-conventional methods of sewage treatment known today, in India, where the economic problems are complex, the waste stabilization ponds have become popular over the last two decades to let Public Health Engineers use them with confidence as a simple and reliable means of treatment of sewage and certain industrial wastes, at a fraction of the cost of conventional waste treatment plants used hitherto. A waste stabilization pond makes use of natural purification processes involved in an ecosystem through the regulating of such processes. The term "waste stabilization pond" in its simplest form is applied to a body of water, artificial or natural, employed with the intention of retaining sewage or organic waste waters until the wastes are rendered stable and inoffensive for discharge into receiving waters or on land, through physical, chemical and biological processes commonly referred to as "self-purification" and involving the symbiotic action of algae and bacteria under the influence of sunlight and air. Organic matter contained in the waste is stabilized and converted in the pond into more stable matter in the form of algal cells which find their way into the effluent and hence the term "stabilization pond".
当水构成健康危害或其用途受损时，水就被污染了。水污染的主要来源是市政、制造业、采矿业、蒸汽、电力、冷却和农业。市政或污水污染在人类活动中占比更大，即使是当今较小的社区也迫切需要应对污水污染。毋庸强调，如果能平衡并考虑到河流或水体所提供的多种不同服务的经济平衡，就可以制定出明智的管理方案。为了消除天然水体现有的水污染水平，必须考虑预防和处理方法。在印度，经济问题复杂，在当今已知的各种传统和非传统污水处理方法中，过去二十年来，废水稳定塘已广受欢迎，让公共卫生工程师能够放心地将其作为处理污水和某些工业废水的简单可靠方法使用，成本仅为迄今使用的传统废水处理厂的一小部分。废水稳定塘通过调节生态系统中涉及的自然净化过程来发挥作用。“废水稳定塘”这个术语最基本的形式是指人工或天然的水体，其用途是保留污水或有机废水，直到废物通过通常称为“自我净化”的物理、化学和生物过程变得稳定且无害，以便排入接纳水体或土地，这些过程涉及在阳光和空气影响下藻类和细菌的共生作用。废物中所含的有机物在池塘中得到稳定，并转化为更稳定的物质，以藻类细胞的形式进入流出物，因此称为“稳定塘”。
