Wastewater Pretreatment in Ponds for Constructed Wetlands

Constructed wetlands provide a low cost and effective means of treating wastewater. When dealing with large flows the land requirements for constructed wetlands become very high, thus limiting their use for treating large flows of wastewaters. Deep wastewater treatment ponds can be used in conjunction with constructed wetlands to handle medium to large sized wastewater flows. In this manner a low cost and efficient natural wastewater treatment system is obtained. In this paper the role of wastewater pretreatment ponds is examined by studying the behavior of key hydrometeorological variables in the waste stabilization pond at Boxelder Sanitation District which is located 5 miles east of Fort Collins, Colorado, 40° N, at an elevation of about 4980 ft. An attempt has been made to identify causal relationships among the various hydrometeorological variables by time series modeling.