Water Passages

[Announcer] This program produced in part by a grant from the United States Environmental Protection Agency. From the Oregon network. [Interviewee] One of our problems in the United States is that we have been taught that think negatively about waste. Whenever we talk of sewage in a public body, there's snickers and bad humor. Anybody can make a bad joke about waste. Our literature talks of waste as negative. You know, 'down in the dumps,' 'white trash' and 'all that garbage' and these four letter words. People like to flush the toilet and forget about it. [Interviewee] Ivory soap used to be advertised as 99.44/100ths percent pure. The sewage that comes into our sewage treatment plant is 99.98% pure water.

And the trick is to get that 2 hundredths of 1 percent that little bit out before you let the water go someplace else. We never get rid of water. The water that we have is all used water. It goes through the system, it goes down into the ground and out into the surface waters and then comes up and goes all around again. As rain fall. The first thing that you have to do in looking at a community is say 'what are the alternative ways of getting this water back into the system?' We can't just hold it, you know, forever. [Host] A decade of struggle for clean water has already cost the American people nearly 40 billion dollars. Part of that 40 billion was spent on construction of giant sewage treatment plants across the nation. These citadels of concrete and steel meant more to we Americans and clean water.

They were symbolic of our determination to make good for 200 years of environmental abuse. They were examples of lasting faith in technological solutions. But the machinery of advanced waste treatment, AWT for short, came at a high price. The plants were costly to build and operate. They devoured large amounts of precious energy. They generated oceans of sludge that had to be dumped somewhere else. These and other drawbacks of AWT plants have compelled many communities to shop around for simpler clean water ideas, including land treatment. [Interviewee] The public has a bias against sewage treatment. Because they've had experience with sewage treatment plants and they know they stink, because they malfunction. But the beauty of a land treatment system is it has such a volume, it protects itself against malfunction.

Land application of community waste water has been in scattered use in the United States for more than 70 years. And in other parts of the world for much longer. Until recently, however, it got little attention in the national clean water crusade. Now land treatment is being rediscovered. A recent federal law provides special financial aid for use of the system, where feasible. It also derives momentum from the growing need for water conservation, recycling and reuse. Land treatment is both a technical and a philosophical departure from AWT. The genius of the system resides not in machines, but in the earth itself. Solids are dissolved and disease causing bacteria neutralized. In simple lagoons and aeration farms. The water is then applied to the land.

There its nitrogen and phosphorus load contributes directly to the growth of crops. Land treatment is not suitable for every community. In deciding whether to choose a traditional wastewater treatment facility, or a land system, each community must consider land costs and availability, as well as climate and soil type. Pollutants of concern in all waste waters include trace metals, trace organics, nitrogen and pathogens. These must be taken into account in the planning for any system. A land treatment's system properly designed and operated can eliminate or control adverse environmental and health effects from these materials. With a population equivalent of half a million people, Muskegon Michigan is the largest urban area in the nation using the land alternative. In choosing the system, Muskegon relied heavily on the wisdom of the land treatment pioneer Dr. Jack Schaefer. [Jack] Well we

began with the concept that pollutants are resources out of place. As we reasoned through what was happening to our water quality in the United States, we found that the nutrients that made plants grow in streams, which led to some of our severe pollution, are the same nutrients that we were buying, or manufacturing, from oil and using to grow corn. So, what was a pollutant, really, if it was out of the water and on the land was a resource. And a very valuable resource. You know a million gallons of sewage, in today's fertilizer market, would bring $150, and it's rising. And that's just for the primary nutrients. You take the micronutrients, the organic matter, the value of irrigation. I mean, some big cities, the most they have going for them is their sewage, and they don't realize it.

The Muskegon system is what I refer to as the classical land treatment system. It involves six basic components. First of all, we collect the sewage in the city and transport to the site. Then we give the waste a degree of pretreatment, to avoid nuisance problems in the land treatment system. If we're going to use a waste water as a resource, we have to store it during the non-growing season. So these large storage lagoons are an example of the third step in the system. And the fourth step is the delivery of the waste water to the fields to be irrigated. This involves pumping stations and irrigation rakes. And the fifth step in the system is the a actual living filter. A growing crop and a soil system, which has a myriad of processes going on which recycle nutrients, filter the water and

purify it. And then the sixth step is a network of pipes or under-drains, or natural under-drainage, which brings a purified wastewater to a stream or to a canal. In Muskegon it flows into these lakes which have now become large recreational lakes. [Host] Ten years ago Muskegon was in galloping decay, both economic and social. Much of the blight was due to the county's inability to meet federal and state waste water treatment standards. Industrial and municipal sewage was choking Muskegon Lake, which in turn was polluting Lake Michigan, source of the county's fresh water. The waste was especially difficult to handle because of effluent from paper mills and chemical plants. [Interviewee] Muskegon had a history of a boom or bust town, and we were faced with declining manufacturing, we had a very low agricultural

economy in the county and we also were trying to increase our tourism, but our lakes were pretty polluted. [Interviewee] And it was causing us not to get tourists, it was causing existing industries to move away, and certainly was impeding the movement of new industry into Muskegon County. This lake used to be so green from the different companies putting their waste in here that we couldn't see our torpedoes that we use for going down to desired depths for fishing, we couldn't see them two inches below the water. I can drop now, and even in Muskegon lake, with this being cleaned up, I can show you torpedoes down three foot. Now, right now, I'm still looking at it down in the clear water and the calculator says 16 feet below the top. So you're seeing a 16 foot more clear water than you did in the old days. [Interviewee] If Muskegon would have built an advanced waste treatment plant, rather than a land treatment system, a number of things would have occurred. Number one,

the cost of treatment would be dramatically higher, perhaps four to six times higher, which would have a severe impact on the ability of householders to pay their sewage bills, and a severe impact on the industry that are located here. [Host] Muskegon's dream of renewal has largely come true. Its symbol is a new mall downtown. The tourists have returned in larger numbers than before. New industries are eager to move in to take advantage of the new economical land treatment system for waste. Even the most visionary of men a decade ago would not have forecast such a renaissance from Muskegon, Michigan. Experimental work at Penn State University has played a crucial role in giving land treatment credibility. And has set many design standards for the systems. The studies have focused on crop land, forest and strip mine reclamation.

And more recently, on the rapid growth of wood as a fuel source. [Interviewee] We found out very quickly that one irrigated a forest, one could stimulate the tree growth tremendously and increase wood fiber production. We also found that there is another great opportunity now with the energy crisis, and that is actually growing short rotation woody species, similar to corn, by irrigating them with wastewater. Well if one can take a waste product, like in a simple wastewater, irrigate these trees, you can quadruple, or sometimes increase wood fiber production by five times. For instance, here are two poplar trees that were the same size, as shown by these circles, were about 1/2 inch in size about 10 years ago. Now here's a normal growth over a 10 year period without any waste water irrigation. And here is a 10 year growth with some irrigation of waste water. There is a tremendous increase in wood fiber production, and we feel that perhaps by the year 2000, 5% of the

nation's energy might be met from a woody biomass. [Interviewee] Our fertilizers are derived, either from energy, or require an enormous amount of energy to produce. The phosphate industry and Florida uses half of the power in Florida. So to produce phosphate fertilizer is related to energy. Anhydrous ammonia, which we use to fertilize our corn fields, comes from natural gas, or derived from crude oil. So that, wastewater treatment is very directly related to the energy crisis. And we can learn from wastewater treatment in arriving at solutions in the energy. Which is let's start working with nature. [Host] Georgians call it the Athens of America. And Peachtree Plaza is the grandest of its commercial temples. Much of Atlanta's

prosperity is created by a suburban army of workers who come and go with the sun. Crowded freeways bring the legions in from surrounding counties, in particular from Clayton County to the south. Clayton saw its share of fighting during the Civil War. The old Jonesboro railway station served as the model for a scene of agony and defeat in Gone With The Wind. [crowd cheering] The county today is prosperous and still expanding economically. There are new jobs, new families and new homes, all needing water. [Interviewee] This is the Flint River. As you can see it's a slow, sluggish muddy small southern stream. But this is only the resource that we have to carry away our waste, other than land treatment. We started a number of different alternatives for the abatement of

pollution within the Flint River. Included in these alternatives was the construction of advanced waste treatment plants, at at least two points, and possibly three, along the river. The difficulty with going to advanced waste treatment at this point in time was that even with the best of advanced waste treatment plants, the discharge would be limited to 13 million gallons per day because the river simply did not have the capacity to assimilate any more pollution than that. So we determined that that could not be a viable alternative, since it would put us in virtually a no growth situation. Our discharge, at that point in time, being almost half 13 million gallons per day. Even when we considered the cost of the real estate, it was considerably more cost effective to go with the land treatment system, as opposed to advanced waste treatment.

And we are now in the midst of construction of a rather large land treatment system, in Clayton county. [Host] The county's water supply is limited because of its location at the high end of a watershed. The new treatment system will allow the county to cleanse recycle and use this water more than once. After filtrating through the soil it will flow underground to a creek which empties into Clayton's reservoir. When completed in 1981, this system will employ several hundred miles of pipe and thousands of sprinkler heads to irrigate twenty four hundred acres of forest land. [Interviewee] One of the things I feel very strongly about in land waste treatment, is the fact that we can make use of wastewater as a

fertilizer, and as an irrigant, to stimulate growth of products, whether it be forest products, or forage, or field products. I believe very firmly that if we in the United States don't get out of this notion that we've got everything in the world and we can use it once and throw it away, that we ought to be bankrupt. [Host] While Clayton County is an older community with only seasonal water shortages, Irvine California is a new planned community in an area where most water must be imported. Irvine's growth rate is meteoric. Incorporated less than 20 years ago, the city has already attracted a branch of the University of California, and several large corporations. [Interviewee] I would describe Irvine as having the opportunity for a great deal of variety of lifestyles, to have the opportunity to participate in an exciting potential future for kids, for a way of

life which probably is unmatched anywhere else, for sharing in a planning and development effort of a town that probably is going to be the hallmark of success of new town development anywhere in the country. We decided to try an experiment here. And that experiment was to reclaim the water and redistribute it for agricultural purposes and irrigation of greenbelts and parks. After partial cleansing in a secondary treatment plant, Irvine waste is sprayed directly on lawns golf courses and park areas. For a land system the level of treatment is higher than normal. The precaution is taken because people may have direct contact with the water before it enters the soil. [Interviewee] Well land treatment produces synergistic benefits, because with $1 spent you get recreation, you get clean water, you get open space, you get agricultural production. The point is we have to begin to look at sewage as a means to an end,

not an end in itself. We don't build the world's best sewage treatment plant. What we do is come up with a waste water management system which will help a community meet its goals and aspirations. [Interviewee] Water is a very precious commodity in Southern California, and it should be used more than once. Most communities across this country use very highly treated water, very suitable for drinking, to do their own landscaping around the house. It is not necessary to have highly disinfected water for the watering of crops and normal agriculture. So we are able to take advantage of a double use of water where it can be used as a potable water supply, and then that same water be re-used again for crop irrigation. [Interviewee] We have about thirty three hundred acres of Valencia oranges, almost a thousand acres of avocados, 700 acres of lemons, 600-700 acres of sweet corn and of various other crops.

[Interviewee] Every land treatment system that's properly designed will function with a minimum amount of operating input. In fact this what is one of the big economic advantages of land treatment: low operation and maintenance costs. Because what you're doing is you're using the forces of nature to help you, and that's the traditional definition of engineering: using the forces in nature for the benefit of mankind. [Host] Each land treatment system must be different because each must be compatible with its location. Houghton Lake Michigan found that it could use a large marshland south west of the community for final disposition of its sewage. [Interviewee] We're standing in the middle of a two thousand acre peat land, located near Houghton Lake Michigan, which is the site of a tertiary wastewater treatment project.

The balance of this system is located about a mile and a half away and looks very conventional. This system is here to protect Houghton Lake itself from the waste products of the Houghton Lake community, which is a resort community that exists in a band of cottages around Houghton Lake, which is Michigan's largest inland lake. This is a very low technology approach to wastewater treatment, in contrast to the various pieces of chemical processing equipment that could be used in its place. Those are expensive to build, they're expensive to run, they require large amounts of energy compared to this place. Really, all we're doing is bringing the water to this wetland and letting its buffer capacity absorb those things that are in the water. And it does this by itself without a lot of maintenance. Houghton Lake pays for seasonal studies of the waste water's impact on animal life in the marsh.

The studies are conducted by a college student, Mary Lou Raibe. [Mary] They are interested in looking at different animal populations, and they will keep a record of that from each year, with the hope that maybe they can say 'look, now we have this animal, five years ago and we didn't have this animal, maybe that's significant.' It seems that sometimes the answer is less technology instead of more technology. Or maybe we need to be more subtle with our technology. [Interviewee] The people that are out there in the swamp land, measuring and sampling, and trying to find out what's happening down there in that peat, they would not agree that that is a low technology. On the other hand, there is a tendency, I think, to call the brick and mortar electronic

computer chemical precipitation facilities a high technology. [Interviewee] When we discuss high technology, or low technology, I think we're mislabeling. What we should be talking about is appropriate technology. A land treatment system is classically simple. But to build one is extremely complex. And you can't build it just with engineers. You need soil scientists, you need agronomists, you need geologists, you need irrigation specialists. And it becomes an extremely complex system to take waste water from a city, and transport it to a selected site. To pretreat it so it's not a nuisance. To store it as a large reservoir like this shows the problems of storing it. To then take it and distribute it to land. And then to collect it all after it's filtered through the soil and bring it

back as pure water. The scientist, he develops the concepts of scientific laws that that govern. The engineer then takes that science and applies it. So it's appropriate technology, what we're talking about. [circus music playing] [Host] Providing waste disposal, energy and other needs for the thousands of people who flock to Disney World in Florida is a challenge equal to that of any small American city. To meet the challenge day in and day out, Disney employs an array of new

technologies. Among them, solar electric cooling and heating, the use of garbage as fuel, and recovery of the heat radiated by turbine generators. The water hyacinth, a plant long considered an aquatic pest in the south, is used to purify a part of Disney World's wastewater. The Disney system was developed by NASA to treat both human and toxic chemical wastes at the National Space Technology laboratories in Mississippi. [Interviewee] NASA is interested in aquaculture for waste treatment for two reasons. One is we have waste at our facilities that we need to treat, and we would like to treat them in the most advanced economical way. Two, we hope one day to put deep space stations, similar to this, out in space. Using aquaculture, we're looking towards the future of recycling all of our waste in a space station through a higher plant growth system.

[Interviewee] The Disney organization is not so much in the research and development business as we are in the prototype business. Walt used to have to have a saying 'off the drawing boards of industry.' Take those and have enough determination to make them work, put them in a real life system and make them work. And that's really the business we're in. [Interviewee] The highly prolific water hyacinth is the major component in this system. It's a beautiful plant, and can purify this water to any state we so desire. [Background plowing noise] We partially harvest these plants about once a year, take the plants that's contaminated and let them decompose. It's like one took a sponge just sponged up all the pollutants in water and put it in a sealed system. Now what we hope to do with this new concept is to recycle all these toxic chemicals, like particulate silver, where we put it in here and over the years we will fill this pit up with a highly concentrated residue of silver and other elements. And when we reach a certain point where that, the volume is large enough,

hopefully some firm will be willing to come in and re-use it as a mine, silver mine. Now this may be true not only of silver, but other elements. So this system that cost us five years ago $10,000, is treating a class of chemical waste now, if one were to use physo-chemical or the conventional methods to treat all of this different type of chemical waste, I daresay you'd be hard pressed to do it for a million dollars. [Interviewee] It's within the ability of the normal small plant operators to operate these systems, plus the fact they are low in first capital cost. The piece of swamp, properly used as an affluent reduction, is certainly a lot cheaper than to build a chemical plant to do the same thing. The way we treat our sewage affects our quality of life in that it takes what is frequent viewed as a cost, and turns it

into a resource producing new wealth. And the more wealth we have, the better able we are to enjoy a better quality of life. But also land treatment does not produce secondary problems. It doesn't add to air pollution. It doesn't add to secondary water pollution. It doesn't have a sludge disposal problem. It solves the problem of water quality.