Tagged with 'cellulose'

The Curious Case of the Smelly Blob

I’m not fond of unsolved mysteries. When a service contractor stumped us with a problem in the late 1990s, the issue nagged at me.

The contractor told us about gelatinous masses building up in a handful of grease separators. The masses smelled terrible, he said, and the separators had surprisingly low water input flows.

We tried figuring out what the gel was. We ran tests in our lab. We looked online. We consulted wastewater treatment professionals and scientists. We couldn’t come up with anything.

Whenever I thought about the gel, I kept picturing the monster from the 1958 cinematic classic, The Blob.

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