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Career profile
Meet Charlotte, a process optimisation manager.
Charlotte is a sludge scientist, or process optimisation manager, and leads a team who turn sewage into a useful renewable energy source.
Find out about Charlotte's career and how she considers the environment in what she does.
Charlotte: My name's Charlotte, and I'm a sludge scientist at a sewage treatment works and here's why I love my green career.
So most people have a joke about us treating poo, it's actually a really vital role. I manage a team of process scientists and together we make sure all the sewage treatment works, sludge processing facilities are working correctly.
That means we take your raw sludge as it comes into the sewage treatment works to produce a renewable energy source, what we call methane bio gas. We can create electricity and put that back into the grid or power our sites, or we can scrub it and put it back into the gas grid and you can use that in your homes to power your cookers.
The other product that comes out, once we've treated the sludge, is a solid material that can react as a natural fertiliser and we spread onto farmers' fields and help grow crops by providing the nutrients needed in the soils.
So what we do here is take your waste product and convert it into something useful. If this process didn't happen, there is such a detrimental impact to our environment because other routes would be landfill, which is not a sustainable option.
There's a risk to human health. I don't think life would be as we know it now.
So the qualifications I had for this role was a bachelor's degree in environmental management and a master's degree in environmental technology.
From an early age I always had an interest in the environment and saving the planet. So I'm here to support the community where I lived. Everything I do in my role is going to impact the people around me, my friends, my family, and I really find it interesting. So no day is ever the same.
There is other routes into this type of work. So there's the apprenticeship schemes where you can learn on the job and gain qualifications as you go. There's also graduate schemes so you can still get your qualifications and then come into the world of work.
So my top tip to students is to go after your passion. Find something you really enjoy, and that's the most important thing in a job.
I wanted to support the community where I lived. Everything I do in my role is going to impact the people around me - my friends, my family - and I really find it interesting.
Charlotte, sludge scientist
- Charlotte was interested in Science at school, studying Biology, Physics and Chemistry at A-level. She wanted to continue with Science at university, so completed an undergraduate degree in Environmental Management, before going on to study a master's degree in Environmental Technology.
- Methane biogas can be used as a renewable energy source to produce electricity or it can be fed into the gas network to heat our homes.
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