Prevention of sewage pollution by stabilization ponds.

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".