Wastewater Is for Lovers

Love stinks.

For the second year, New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection is offering Valentine’s Day tours of the Newtown Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

“I have to say we didn’t exactly predict the tour would catch fire the way it did,” said Carter Strickland, the department’s commissioner.

To meet popular demand, Newtown Creek will be offering three tours on Thursday rather than the two originally planned. Last year, around 220 visitors showed up for romantic strolls past the liquid refuse of around one million New Yorkers, and the city expects to top that number this time.

“This is an opportunity for couples to go and see something unusual together and share that experience together,” Mr. Strickland said.

Newtown Creek, the largest of New York’s 14 treatment plants, went into operation in 1967. It is undergoing a $5 billion upgrade to increase its capacity for processing wastewater, especially runoff from storms, by more than twofold.

Just as romances come and go, so does the sewage, albeit in reverse. Today’s reeking slurry becomes tomorrow’s sweetly recycled water through processes that mimic the ways that wetlands and rivers naturally purify. “Nature does break everything down, it just takes a long time,” Mr. Strickland said. “We speed up the process.”

At Newtown Creek, more than 300 million gallons of wastewater from toilets, tubs, sinks and storm drains throughout parts of Manhattan, western Queens and northern Brooklyn undergo treatment in five basic steps. After initial preparations, primary and secondary treatments remove around 90 percent of pollutants from the water to bring it up to the standards set by the Clean Water Act.

Then, it undergoes a final round of disinfection, just to be safe. Six hours after the wastewater entered the plant, the cleaned liquid is then discharged back into local waterways.

But like emotional baggage, sludge — the semisolids separated from the wastewater — remains behind. The plant subjects it to a process known as digestion in which microbes eat their way through the goopy byproduct, destroying pathogens and stabilizing the material.

The remaining sludge is then dewatered, or run through machines that remove excess liquids to make the stuff easier to handle. The resulting product, known as biosolid, can be reused for land reclamation after this 15-day process is complete.

Newtown Creek’s eight sludge digesters, or “digester eggs,” each about 100 feet high, sit atop the plant like domes on a Russian Orthodox church. Visitors can tour the top of the eggs, enjoying unbroken views of Williamsburg and the Manhattan skyline.

“A lot of people probably found the tour ironic or whatnot at first, but when they get up there and see the views, they say, ‘Wow, this is a special experience,’ and that’s what this day is all about,” Mr. Strickland said. “Even if Valentine’s Day haters come on the tour, they wind up being lovers by the end.”

For those who miss out on the excursion or prefer to avoid the flocks of lovebirds, Newtown Creek runs the same tours once a month throughout the year.