Albuquerque Water Reclaimation Tour

I found the tour to be really fascinating. I did see a TV program on the waste water treatment plant for Los Angeles county in California on the Discovery Channel before the tour, so I had somewhat of an idea of what to expect. What I found really interesting was the smell and how the foulness didn't last very long. At the beginning of the tour the smell was really bad and I expected the smell to linger longer than it did. After the first two stops the air was breathable (at the first stop it was really hard to breath), and by the end of the tour I felt like it would be safe to swim in the water being put back into the river. I think it's great that the technologies are available to us where we can treat water that is useless and put it back into the river without the water destroying the animal and plant life that surrounds it. There were a few things that I was a bit curious about though. Our guide explained to us that the plant, which uses mother nature to do all of the work, is very bad at cleaning out chemicals. Metals like mercury and substances found in birth control pills and other medicines aren't effectively filtered out. I believe he even mentioned that a study was done on the reproductive ability on fish was taken after being exposed to the treated waste water and it was shown that it had lowered. I think this is a small issue compared to what things would be like with no water treatment, but research should be going on (if it's not already). Prior to the tour I never really thought about waste water and how it was treated in depth. I assumed it was filtered somehow, but I never thought about where the water went after it was treated. I'm happy I went on the trip.