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The treatment of municipal sewage is one of the few processes in commercial life where the managers of the appropriate processing plant have little or no control over the quality of the material coming to the process. The treatment plant must therefore be able to cope with a wide range of flows, containing a wide range of impurities. These impurities will be both suspended and dissolved, organic and inorganic, benign and toxic, and the treatment works must have in place decontamination processes that can reduce all of these impurities to below a set of limits defined by national and local regulatory bodies. These limits will vary according to the nature of the recipient body of water. If this is large, fully oxygenated and fast moving, then less purification is necessary than where the recipient is an important local amenity, or supports a fish farm, or where the discharge point is upstream of a major water abstraction point.

In addition, of course, to the purification role, the treatment plant is producing a valuable product: clean water, as well as a solid by-product that, by proper processing, can also be made to yield usable products, even if only as the energy recovered
from its incineration. Almost all of the fresh water, drawn in to the domestic, commercial and industrial processes from which the waste comes, is rejected by these processes to the local sewer, and is there supplemented by the rainwater running off from the neighbourhood.

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