Sewage

Philadelphia is embarking on a $2 billion, 25-year project to improve the way it absorbs and processes stormwater.

A new sewage plant has opened in New York that hopes to reduce the amount of sewage overflow when storms overwhelm the city's combined sewage and stormwater system.

The city of Seattle is taking on a $500 million project to update its storm drains to reduce the amount of untreated sewage that overflows into waterways during storm events.

In many cities, stormwater and sewage water are collected in the same sewer. As a result, good rainwater is combined with dirty sewage water. Overflows can create major problems for cities. But avoiding those problems is not exactly easy.

Portland's "Green Streets" program is becoming a new tourist attraction in the city, which officials from other cities are visiting to learn from the Pacific Northwest's model water treatment infrastructure.

This post from IBM's A Smarter Planet blog looks at how advanced monitoring techniques and analytics are helping to improve the management of sewage and wastewater in cities like Sacramento and Dubuque.

As cities grow, aging sewer systems are having trouble keeping up with increasing amounts of waste. Often, the result is sewer system overflows that end up directly in waterways.

In this travelogue, Dwell tours the often-overlooked infrastructure that keeps the metropolis of Los Angeles running.

How does a rapidly changing news media affect big city planning? Badly, according to this post from Next American City.