Beckton_STP,_Activated_Sludge_Tank_-_geograph

Beckton Sewage Treatment Works, formerly known as Barking Sewage Works, is a large

sewage treatment Sewage treatment (or domestic wastewater treatment, municipal wastewater treatment) is a type of wastewater treatment which aims to remove contaminants from sewage to produce an effluent that is suitable for discharge to the surrounding envir ...

plant in

Beckton Beckton is a suburb in east London, England, located east of Charing Cross and part of the London Borough of Newham. Adjacent to the River Thames, the area consisted of unpopulated marshland known as the East Ham Levels in the parishes of Barki ...

in the east London Borough of

Newham The London Borough of Newham is a London borough created in 1965 by the London Government Act 1963. It covers an area previously administered by the Essex county boroughs of West Ham and East Ham, authorities that were both abolished by the s ...

, operated by

Thames Water Thames Water Utilities Ltd, known as Thames Water, is a large private utility company responsible for the public water supply and waste water treatment in most of Greater London, Luton, the Thames Valley, Surrey, Gloucestershire, north Wiltshir ...

. Since construction first began in 1864, the plant has been extended numerous times and now covers over 100 hectares (250 acres) - the largest sewage treatment works in Europe. It treats waste water arriving from the

Northern Outfall Sewer The Northern Outfall Sewer (NOS) is a major gravity sewer which runs from Wick Lane in Hackney to Beckton sewage treatment works in east London; most of it was designed by Joseph Bazalgette after an outbreak of cholera in 1853 and the "Great ...

and the

Lee Tunnel The Lee Tunnel, also known as the Stratford to East Ham deep tunnel, is a paradigm overflow sewer in East London for storage and conveyance of foul sewage mixed with rainwater. It was built as part of the Thames Tideway Scheme and runs from ...

, serving a large portion of London north of the River Thames. The treated effluent from the plant is discharged into the

Thames The River Thames ( ), known alternatively in parts as the River Isis, is a river that flows through southern England including London. At , it is the longest river entirely in England and the second-longest in the United Kingdom, after the R ...

at the south-east corner of the site, adjacent to

Barking Creek Barking Creek joins the River Roding to the River Thames. It is fully tidal up to the Barking Barrage (a weir), which impounds a minimum water level through Barking. In the 1850s, the creek was home to England's largest fishing fleet and a Vic ...

History

Sewage treatment works were first established at Beckton in 1864 as part of

Joseph Bazalgette Sir Joseph William Bazalgette CB (; 28 March 181915 March 1891) was a 19th-century English civil engineer. As chief engineer of London's Metropolitan Board of Works, his major achievement was the creation (in response to the Great Stink of 1 ...

's scheme to remove sewage (and hence reduce disease) from London by creating two large sewers from the capital, one on each side of the Thames and known as the Southern and Northern Outfall Sewers. In addition to the sewage from the Northern Outfall sewer the Becton treatment works also received sewage from a pumping station at North Woolwich. As originally conceived in 1864, the works comprised reservoirs covering 3.8 hectares designed to retain six hours’ flow of sewage. No

was provided and the sewage was discharged on the

ebb tide Tides are the rise and fall of sea levels caused by the combined effects of the gravitational forces exerted by the Moon (and to a much lesser extent, the Sun) and are also caused by the Earth and Moon orbiting one another. Tide tabl ...

. The presence of raw sewage contributed to the high death toll in the 1878 ''Princess Alice'' disaster, when over 600 died in Britain's worst inshore shipping tragedy. Following the disaster a Royal Commission was appointed in 1882 to examine Metropolitan Sewage Disposal. It recommended that a precipitation process should be deployed to separate solids from liquid and that the solids should be burned, applied to land or dumped at sea. A precipitation works using lime and

iron sulphate Iron sulfate may refer to: * Ferrous sulfate, Iron(II) sulfate Iron(II) sulfate (British English: iron(II) sulphate) or ferrous sulfate denotes a range of salts with the formula Fe SO4·''x''H2O. These compounds exist most commonly as the hept ...

was installed at Beckton in 1887–89. Sludge was disposed of in the Barrow Deep and later in the

Black Deep The Black Deep is in the outer Thames Estuary. It is the greatest of three mainly natural shipping channels linking the Tideway to central zones of the North Sea without shoals, the others being the Barrow Deep and Princes Channel. Between thes ...

in the outer

Thames estuary The Thames Estuary is where the River Thames meets the waters of the North Sea, in the south-east of Great Britain. Limits An estuary can be defined according to different criteria (e.g. tidal, geographical, navigational or in terms of salini ...

. In the year 1912/3 1,704,000 tons of sludge was sent to sea, by 1919/20 1.223 million tons of sludge were sent to sea, entailing 1,223 sludge vessel voyages. In the year 1912/13 the total volume of sewage received at Beckton was 59,067 million gallons (268 million m³). In the year 1919/20 the volume was 59,667 million gallons (271 million m³). The costs of treating the sewage at Beckton was £73,698 or £1 4s 11d per million gallons (£1.246 per 4546.1 m³) in 1912/13; by 1919/20 the cost had increased to £79,074 or £1 6s 6d. (£1.325) per million gallons.

Advanced treatment

In 1932–5 an

activated sludge The activated sludge process is a type of biological wastewater treatment process for treating sewage or industrial wastewaters using aeration and a biological floc composed of bacteria and protozoa. It uses air (or oxygen) and microorganisms ...

plant was installed which relied on surface aeration of the sewage by mechanical paddles. In 1959 a £7.5 million extension () was completed. This comprised detritus removal, a screen house, primary sedimentation tanks, a diffused air activated sludge plant and sludge digestion. The works were extended in 1967 to treat 1.14 million cubic metres per day of sewage, although they were capable of accepting a flow of 2.6 million cubic metres per day. These works cost £21 million (). The Beckton plant comprised:

Sewage sludge Sewage sludge is the residual, semi-solid material that is produced as a by-product during sewage treatment of industrial or municipal wastewater. The term "septage" also refers to sludge from simple wastewater treatment but is connected to si ...

was disposed of by dumping at sea in the outer Thames estuary until this practice was banned in 1998. In that year a sludge incineration plant was commissioned, which provides 11.4 MW of power for use at the treatment works.

New processes

In 2014 an upgrade to the Beckton works included a new

process stream designed to treat 30 percent of the 27 cubic metres per second maximum flow to the works; three new odour control plants installed across the existing works to address planning conditions imposed on the upgrade project; replacement of 48 existing final settlement tank scrapers; and upgrades to a further 24 final settlement tanks.

Thames Tideway Scheme

Wastewater collected by the Thames Tideway Scheme will be transferred to Beckton for treatment, via the

from

Abbey Mills Pumping Station Abbey Mills Pumping Station is a sewage pumping station in Mill Meads, East London, operated by Thames Water. The pumping station lifts sewage from the London sewerage system into the Northern Outfall Sewer and the Lee Tunnel, which both run to ...

. In 2020, a new three-year, £123 million upgrade project was started to increase capacity at Beckton to allow it to process the increased flow of sewage. This included building a completely new inlet works, and extending aeration lanes and settlement tanks.

Desalination Plant

The Beckton site was proposed in 2005 as the location for a

desalination Desalination is a process that takes away mineral components from saline water. More generally, desalination refers to the removal of salts and minerals from a target substance, as in Soil salinity control, soil desalination, which is an issue f ...

plant, but the proposal was rejected by Mayor

Ken Livingstone Kenneth Robert Livingstone (born 17 June 1945) is an English politician who served as the Leader of the Greater London Council (GLC) from 1981 until the council was abolished in 1986, and as Mayor of London from the creation of the office i ...

as environmentally unacceptable. The scheme was resurrected by the successive mayor,

Boris Johnson Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson (; born 19 June 1964) is a British politician, writer and journalist who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 2019 to 2022. He previously served as F ...

, as part of a deal with Thames Water to reduce delays in fixing roadworks throughout London.. Construction commenced in 2008 and the desalination plant was completed in June 2010. The desalination plant collects

brackish Brackish water, sometimes termed brack water, is water occurring in a natural environment that has more salinity than freshwater, but not as much as seawater. It may result from mixing seawater (salt water) and fresh water together, as in estuari ...

water from the river Thames while the tide is flowing out, treating it through a four-stage

reverse osmosis Reverse osmosis (RO) is a water purification process that uses a partially permeable membrane to separate ions, unwanted molecules and larger particles from drinking water. In reverse osmosis, an applied pressure is used to overcome osmotic pre ...

process before re-adding minerals and sending it on to the freshwater distribution system. The plant can produce approximately 150 million litres of water per day - enough to supply 400,000 houses in North London.

References