Cool water treatment application.

[F8L]

Ocean Arks International


“We treat wastewater in a way that makes it look pretty,” says Ramin Abrishamian, CEO of Living Technologies, which was incorporated in 1993. “It’s a natural way of treating sewage and industrial waste. Treating wastewater in a biological vs. chemical way has been taking place ever since there were plants and organic materials. We’re using this natural system in a commercial application.”


Good things are growing at Living Technologies Inc. The Burlington business harnesses the power of nature to purify wastewater

Pretty cool stuff. I hope we will continue to see development in this area. A few of the universities are working on solutions like these.

We seem to post a lot of the bad stuff. Here are some of the good things.

[SSimon]

It's a neat idea. It's very similar to the function of a rain garden. I've introduced a thread concerning rain gardens some time ago and it didn't receive much interest here. The basic theory is that while the rain garden filters all of the storm water run off from your roof, it also returns this water back into the ground. It thereby reduces an equivalent load of polluted water from the storm sewer. You're reducing our use of some nasty chemicals too. There are some studies that indicate up to 70% of pollutants in our streams, rivers, etc. comes from polluted storm water run off. That's the positive degree to which rain gardens function.

The process in the link seems to be far less energy intensive than traditional treatments. But I can't say that for sure as I think we're missing some of the steps of their treatment process. For instance, there's no mention of what they do with the solids and if they process these solids for other fuel use.

[F8L]

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(SSimon @ Feb 16 2007, 04:34 PM) [snapback]391792[/snapback]</div>

It's a neat idea. It's very similar to the function of a rain garden. I've introduced a thread concerning rain gardens some time ago and it didn't receive much interest here. The basic theory is that while the rain garden filters all of the storm water run off from your roof, it also returns this water back into the ground. It thereby reduces an equivalent load of polluted water from the storm sewer. You're reducing our use of some nasty chemicals too. There are some studies that indicate up to 70% of pollutants in our streams, rivers, etc. comes from polluted storm water run off. That's the positive degree to which rain gardens function.

The process in the link seems to be far less energy intensive than traditional treatments. But I can't say that for sure as I think we're missing some of the steps of their treatment process. For instance, there's no mention of what they do with the solids and if they process these solids for other fuel use.
[/b]

It seems that most of the truely unique biological systems threads don't recieve much interest. When I get home tonight I'm going to look for your thread. I work with our city's storm water/flood control dept. from time to time and I also work with our county's main watershed conservation organization so raingardens could be very helpful.

The article says they use the solids as a mulch but didn't go into too much detail. In a speech given by John Todd for the Bioneers he went over the process completely and there were I htink 6 stages just in the mulching process where other crops were grown off of it prior to it being returned as soil. IE they grew oyster mushrooms, earthworms which were then ground up with pruned vegetable material to feed the fish growing in the tanks, etc. I will listen to the program again and write it down for you.

The entire process is run off solar energy and helping to offset costs they can sell the grown plants and fish because everything grows so fast.

[tripp]

In Marlborough, NZ there is a project underway to produce a decent amount of biodiesel from algae that are being used to treat the regions municipal waste water. Somewhat different idea but same principal... using biological processes to treat waste, and in this case make about 1 million litres of biodiesel each year. Not bad for a region of 43K.

[SSimon]

F8L,

Link to rain gardens on EPA website. Plenty of resources with a quick google.

http://www.epa.gov/reg3esd1/garden/stormwater.htm