Four people with fishing nets in the South Platte River
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What’s in the Water? Check out Our Report and Infographic

To clean water and recover resources from 2.2 million people is a tricky business that takes a lot of technology. Metro’s technology is timed, designed, and built to meet environmental regulations for water quality downstream of our treatment facilities.

Founded to protect waterways in the Denver region, Metro sends water quality scientists and other volunteers into the South Platte River, Barr Lake, and Milton Reservoir to make sure our technology and our improvements in the waterways are working.

2021 Water Quality Report

For 10 years, Metro’s water quality scientists have generated an annual report that shares the results of our extensive monitoring. Whether you’re a citizen scientist, student, teacher, or curious reader, our 2021 Water Quality Report has interesting data and trends (Click here to link to report on this website).

The good news is an infrastructure success story, as extensive treatment upgrades and river and lake enhancements started in the last 10 years appear to be working.

For the more casual reader, Metro created our first infographic to summarize high-level results from the report (see image below this story).

Backstory

Metro communicates with the Colorado Department of Public Health and the Environment (CDPHE) to know what new regulations are coming. At the same time, we work with universities and industry to find and develop the best technology to meet the new regulations.

CDPHE creates regulations as chemicals and factors like temperature are identified by scientists to be harmful to the environment. Technology takes time to identify and develop. Having treatment in place on the date the regulation takes effect is one of the tricky parts of our business. Making sure it works for the environment is one of the fun parts, as it takes us into the waters we protect.

Check out how our technology works on our How We Transform Wastewater web page.

Learn more about our river improvements for aquatic life on our South Platte River Improvements web page.

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