Wastewater and Sewage problem?

Question

Without electricity in contaminated zones of the US, could wastewater be cleaned properly by sewage plants and dumped into any type of body of water (lakes, rivers, beaches, oceans, etc.) being clean?

Answer 1

As a designer of wastewater treatment plants, I can not imagine building one sufficiently sophisticated to clean up "contaminated" areas without electricity to power the pumps, aerators, monitoring instruments and other power-consuming components.

There are stringent limits imposed by both the federal government and the various states on just how "clean" the effluent of a treatment plant must be before it can be discharged into any body of water.  

Answer 2

Yes it can, if the sewage treatment plant has a toxic removal plant too!

Answer 3

If there was nothing but human waste and you could design a gravity plant from scratch, it would be theoretically possible, but very impractical and it could not work in the time frame or the efficiency modern plants work.  As the engineer stated in another answer, any non-simple contaminants would be a very big problem.  I would be finding a source of electricity, even if it was only solar panels.