Anyone who’s living in a part of the country that’s been slammed by a torrent of rain recently (ahem, Florida) will appreciate this. There’s a new green buzzword that, as climate change forecasts much more severe weather to come, we need to add to our vocabulary: Bioswales.
In New York City, a coastal metropolis that still has images of Hurricane Sandy flooding its streets on its mind, thousands of these bioswales are popping up across the city. The most interesting part? New Yorkers probably won’t even notice them because they just look like any other curbside garden.
So what are these things exactly? Like a giant sponge, bioswales are designed to sop up rainwater or sewer runoff that floods and pollutes the city’s waterways. The water that’s soaked up from the soil in the bioswale is stored into the earth below and nourishes the plants on top. As Fast Company reports, the bioswales in New York are about five-feet deep and can suck up as much as 2,000 gallons of water.
MORE: How the Oyster is Cleaning Up the Chesapeake Bay
But not only are the plants and trees sitting on top of the bioswales literally turning the city streets greener (hello, increase in property values!), but the bioswales themselves are saving the Big Apple a whole lot of money. Bioswale installation, which is part of the city’s $10 billion green infrastructure overhaul of its wastewater system, is much cheaper than putting in new piping systems into the concrete.
“The savings are in the billions because we’re deferring building massive treatment tunnels,” Margot Walker, the director of green infrastructure partnerships at the Department of Environmental Protection, told Fast Company.
For concrete jungles like New York City that do not have a lot of top soil to soak up rainwater, these bioswales are a smart additional defense system for extreme weather patterns to come.
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Tag: rainwater
Inside ‘Tank Town’ Could Lie a Solution to the Country’s Worst Drought in Decades
The town of Dripping Springs, Texas, is not living up to its name. In the last five years Dripping Springs, along with most of Texas, has been experiencing its worst drought in decades. But inside Dripping Springs lies an oasis of water — 250,000 gallons of it to be exact.
The area is called Tank Town. Twenty years ago Richard Heinichen grew sick of the water he was getting from his well. “I took my first shower, and I almost threw up because of the sulfur smell,” he says. He built a system in his backyard to collect, store and pump rainwater through his house.
Since that fateful shower, Heinichen has installed about 1,300 tanks, including 16 on his own property. He collects so much water, in fact, that he now bottles and sells his own Cloud Juice. People around the country — many of whom have to contend with the effects of drought — are turning to Tank Town to find solutions to their water woes.