It didn’t smell as bad as I thought it would. Sort of like going-bad ocean water but without the salt. It doesn’t look as nasty as I thought, either, but it’s important to maintain a sense of professional clinical distance even though I’m seeing and smelling the sewage of half a million people.

Here’s how this works: Every night in Chester, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb, an operator dons a white hard hat, heads outside, climbs a flight of metal stairs, and walks across a bridge above a tank of dirty, gurgling water. They enter a small shed-like structure and retrieve a large plastic jug from a refrigerated cabinet. The jug is filled with sandy brown untreated wastewater freckled with tiny, dark brown lumps that sink to the bottom.

Wastewater flows toward treatment tanks at a facili

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