Growing up in East Chicago, Ind., Pete Baranyai sometimes saw snow tinted orange or blackened with soot from particulate matter released by the area’s steel mills and oil refineries. Water resources were no better: The Grand Calumet River flowed heavily polluted through the city. And toxic waste products fouled the industrial sites.
Today, Baranyai is director of operations at East Chicago Sanitary District Wastewater Treatment Plant, which for 22 years has helped the river recover. The plant’s tertiary-treated water runs so clean that each fall, spawning chinook from Lake Michigan swim up the earthen effluent channel and all the way into
