permaculture

[Keith Johnson <keithdj@mindspring.com>]

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• From: janesway@pacbell.net
• To: FILE <janesway@pacbell.net>
• Subject: REALLY traditional sewage treatment
• Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 20:00:49 -0700

Wall Street Journal
Andrew C. Revkin

Our Towns

LLOYD, N.Y.

In his 28 years working at sewage treatment plants, John L.
Jankiewicz has not known much excitement. You watch gauges, check
the
bacteria that digest waste, find cheap ways to dispose of sludge,
keep
turning gray water into clear water.

Once, he found a quarter-carat diamond in a grit-collecting
grate.
His mother-in-law now wears it, Mr. Jankiewicz said. "She knows
where
it came from, " he said. "She doesn't mind."

But one day last year, he said, while attending one of an
endlessly
boring series of conferences that are required to keep his license

current, he found himself energized by one speaker's message:
simple
beds of marsh grass can clean waste water as effectively as costly

assemblages of concrete tanks, steel pipes and electricity-hungry
oxygen pumps.

In essence, the speaker was saying that "everything I've been
doing
for 28 years is a stupid waste," Mr. Jankiewicz recalled. The talk

described a "reed bed" treatment system in a small town in the
Ecuadorean rain forest that used no electricity and required
hardly
any maintenance. It was even capable of turning rivulets of offal
from
a slaughterhouse into drinkable water. All with beds of tall
grass.

"It sounded far too good to be true, " Mr. Jankiewicz said. So he

began tossing questions at the speaker, Dr. Ronald L. Lavigne, an
environmental technology expert from the University of
Massachusetts,
and each one was answered.

Mr. Jankiewicz, 49, the water and sewer administrator for Lloyd,
NY,
population 9,000, persuaded the town supervisor to send him 3,300
miles south to Shushufindi, a similar sized oil-prospecting town
deep
in the Ecuadorean jungle, to check out the idea. A few months
later,
Mr. Jankiewicz, who had never traveled abroad, was in a tropical
version of the Wild West, witnessing a near lynching as a mob
tackled
a man with a machete who had attacked a woman.

But he also saw the treatment system work. Last summer, he built
a
pilot-sized version back at the sewage plant in this sleepy Ulster

County town of cider mills, orchards and scattered industrial
parks.

Now Mr. Jankiewicz stood next to the 30-by-50-foot patch of
eye-high
phragmites reeds that he planted last year and described how the
reeds
suck water from tons of sludge and pump oxygen through mats of
roots
to buried bacteria, which break down noxious materials in the
waste.
No need for machines to do the same thing.

Maintenance? He won't have to clean out the bed for eight or nine

years. And the plants do their job winter or summer.

Dr. Lavigne was in Lloyd to check up on the project. He said
different versions of the system are used elsewhere in the
Northeast.
A fish farm in Massachusetts uses beds of basil to treat waste.

Lloyd's man-made marsh sits next to a building housing the
energy-guzzling press that is the standard way of squeezing water
from
sludge. The marsh is doing the same job for about half the cost,
Mr.
Jankiewicz said.

Artificial marshes may not only save money at the treatment
plant,
but also keep 300 jobs in Lloyd that might have shifted to New
Jersey.
A German-owned company that makes light fixtures four miles from
the
sewage plant had a failed septic system. Building a sewer line was
too
costly, so the company was considering moving out. Now, though,
the
company, Zumtobel Staff Lighting, is going to use an artificial
marsh
beyond its parking lot to treat its waste water, Mr. Jankiewicz
said.

Spurred by Mr. Jankiewicz, two cider mills in the area are
building
artificial wetlands to treat their annual autumn flood of unusable

juice and other waste.

In each case, costly, energy-guzzling equipment is being replaced
by
nothing but plants Mr. Jankiewicz said he has been reading lots of

books on global environmental issues lately. It's nice to do
something
in Lloyd that might, in a small way, reduce the town's impact on
the
planet, he said.

Back at the sewage plant, Mr. Jankiewicz pointed to an adjacent
house
lot the town just bought so he can expand to a full-sized
sludge-treating marsh, bypassing one step in the process. "This is
not
a delicate experiment," he said. "I've flooded it with sludge,
drowned
the plants. And it just keeps on ticking. "

end

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