The idea of turning wastewater into drinking water might make your stomach churn, but for the dry American southwest, it’s a smart, economic reality.
As the Associated Press reports, 2,000 acres of man-made wetlands in Fairfield, Texas are naturally filtering out the pollutants from the area’s treated wastewater, slowly converting the muck into 65,000 gallons of drinking water per day.
This system — which, since beginning operations in 2002, consists of a series of sedimentation ponds and wetland cells — is part of the George W. Shannon Wetland Water Reuse project and is the first of its kind in the country.
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It takes about a week for the vegetation, soils and microbes residing in the wetlands to filter out the phosphorous and nitrates in the water that’s been diverted from the Trinity River (which mostly contains treated wastewater). This naturally-cleaned H2O is then pumped into the Richland-Chambers Reservoir for future use.
The AP notes that at $75 million, it’s far cheaper to build wetlands over traditional filtering infrastructure. (It’s also a win for the area’s wildlife which have taken habitat on the grounds.) According to the report, the George Shannon wetland has already provided about 30 percent more water to the reservoir than it would normally hold. This is only good news for the drought-stricken state and the 1.5 million local Texans that the reservoir serves.
“This is stepping back from dependence on rainfall,” David Marshall, head of engineering services for Tarrant Regional Water District, which operates the wetlands, tells the news organization. “With potential climate change or long-term droughts, we’re at risk, whereas these wetlands firm up a tremendous amount of water supply for us.”
Encouragingly, a similar wetlands project will be built at Cedar Creek Reservoir in the near future.
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Tag: wetlands
Can Wetland Restoration Be Good for Business?
If you can’t beat ’em, sell to ’em.
For years now, big businesses and big utilities have been viewed as Public Enemy #1 of the environment — hurting much more than helping. But one Louisiana firm, Tierra Resources, has found a way to turn energy companies’ needs into a possible win for Mother Earth: By making the preservation of precious coastal wetlands financially worthwhile, according to Next City.
The key? Carbon offsets.
Wetlands protect coastal development, provide homes for wildlife, and drink up the carbons in the atmosphere linked to global warming. In many areas, unfortunately, wetlands have disappeared, being drained for development or eroded by storms. While many argue that wetland restoration is necessary, the work could cost billions.
But there’s where the idea of carbon offsets (where a firm purchases the rights to create more carbon from another firm that can mitigate carbon) enter the equation.
If, say, Entergy, a Louisiana utility firm, can restore more wetlands on company-owned real estate, that ground could offset some of Entergy’s carbon emissions. And it could reduce the $50 billion-plus projected price tag for rebuilding an ecosystem so vital to the state and to the world.
Tierra Resources helps make this possible by developing a detailed system of scientifically tracking and verifying the carbon offsets the wetlands provide. While the science is fairly convoluted, it’s promising enough that Entergy has sunk $150,000 into a pilot program, Tierra reports.
The Ecosystem Marketplace reports that energy giant ConocoPhillips is also considering investing in wetlands reclamation. That might be a drop in the multinational firm’s budget, but it’s potentially a big deal for the environment, as the company owns 640,000 acres of wetlands — making it one of the biggest single owners of such land in the United States.
Perhaps this will ultimately be the key to turning the tide of wetlands, and the environment. If doing the earth-friendly thing isn’t inspiration enough, making responsible environmental stewardship a savvy business decision has to spur change, right?
Think You Can Build an App That Saves the World From Asteroids?
If you’ve ever dreamed of saving the world from an impending asteroid collision, and you’ve got a better solution than hiring Bruce Willis to bomb the asteroid to smithereens, we’ve got the competition for you.
On April 12 and 13, during NASA’s third annual Space Apps Challenge, hundreds of scientists and software engineers joined together in a 48-hour hackathon to come up with solutions to vexing global and interstellar problems. NASA comes up with the puzzlers for the event, and anybody with the engineering chops to work on them is invited to try. Teams on six continents and at over a hundred locations work on the problems.
In total, there were 40 challenges, such as this one in the category of asteroids: “Create an open source network of quick-response robotic telescopes that would enable fast follow-up observations of potentially-threatening asteroids.” Other tasks included trying to make a “Track that Wetland” app — allowing citizen scientists to record observations and data on the wetlands in their communities — and creating a design for a greenhouse that NASA could use to keep visitors on the moon or Mars stocked with fresh produce.
Each year, the challenges result in the creation of useful apps. Last year, software engineer James Wanga’s team won the Best Hardware Prize for building the prototype of an asteroid mapper. Wanga told Denise Chow of Space.com, “There’s a spirit that infects everyone when we realize all these people around the world are working on the same thing.”
After participating in the NASA Challenge, Wanga and three colleagues started the company Go Lab, which builds tiny satellites for all sorts of uses. Wanga and Co. were at it again this year, coding all weekend long at the Manhattan NASA Space Apps Challenge location in an effort to build a network that could one day allow far-flung astronauts to communicate in space.
“We all understand here that we’re trying to change the world,” Wanga told Chow. “This is the beginning of the space tech boom, and the people here right now are the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of space tech start-ups.”
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