WATERLOO REGION - The hot, dry weather may be scorching lawns and wearing out people, but for the bugs charged with cleaning up what residents send into the sewers the weather couldn't be better.

With names like ciliates, rotifers, flagellates and nematodes, the bugs break down the organics - human waste - in wastewater as part of the cleaning process before the water is sent back into the Grand River.

"They're hungrier, they grow faster, they grow bigger, they absorb things more quickly," Thomas Schmidt, Waterloo Region's commissioner of transportation and environmental services, said of the heat's impact.

The bugs are a key part of the local wastewater treatment process.

Nancy Kodousek, director of water services, said the first step is a screening process to separate large material such as sticks and human waste from the water.

The next step is where the bugs come in.

Air is added to the system and that creates an environment that allows the bugs to grow from the organic waste.

"Normally, the parameter that is most affected by warmer temperatures is the removal of ammonia from the water so we see improved performance in wastewater treatment with plants that do treat for ammonia . in the summer months," Kodousek said.

The bugs aren't what one thinks of when hearing the word bug. These are no mosquitoes.

Rather they're microscopic bugs, like the kind that would be found in a home composter to make that process work.

They eat up the nasty stuff and eventually settle to the bottom of the system. That settled material is removed - and will become what's known as biosolids.

"They live, the reproduce, they die, bodies settle out, we scrape them up and call them biosolids," Schmidt said.

The region is currently crafting a plan and consulting the public about what to do with biosolids here after the first attempt ended in controversy in 2013.

The equivalent of about 18 Olympic-sized swimming pools of the stuff is produced monthly in Waterloo Region.

Currently, the waste is trucked out of the region by a private contractor to landfills or farmers' fields in neighbouring municipalities. In 2014, that came at a cost of about $4.7 million.

At some of the region's 13 wastewater treatment plants, there's a third treatment step where the water goes through a filter and often a disinfectant is added, Kodousek said.

Aside from the bugs being happier there is also less wastewater coming into local treatment plants in the summer.

That means the water stays in the treatment process longer, which helps it come out cleaner.

It's good news for the Grand River.

The dry weather also means the river can get low and with less water to dilute the treated wastewater coming out of treatment plants the rules for the quality of that treated water often change.

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"In our wastewater treatment plants, we have a licence of what quality can go back out into the river and that quality sometimes changes for the summer months and is what I'd call more stringent . they want us to have really high quality wastewater going back into the river or into the creeks," Kodousek said.

While the bugs are getting hot with human waste, Kodousek said it's up for debate whether the heat means there is more odour coming from the plants this time of year.

"It's questionable whether there's more odours, but because people are normally outside in the summer, you're walking and you're enjoying your backyard more than say, in the winter, there's a potential for people to notice odours more," she said.