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  • From: Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network <lakinroe@silcom.com>
  • To: scpg@arashi.com, sdpg@arashi.com, ccpg@arashi.com, lakinroe@silcom.com, permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: [permaculture] Innovator Finds Clever Way to Wash Water, Dean Cameron, (Australia Permie)
  • Date: Wed, 14 Nov 2007 23:58:27 -0800

Innovator Finds Clever Way to Wash Water
Cameron Stumbles
On Organic Method
To Treat Solid Waste

By JEREMY WAGSTAFF
SPECIAL TO THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
November 14, 2007

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB119498201350991670.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Like many innovators, Dean Cameron has an eclectic background, a desire to prove the experts wrong and, most importantly, a readiness to see that when experiments go awry, you may be staring innovation in the face.

In the case of Mr. Cameron, winner of this year's Asian Innovation Awards for his Biowater water-treatment system, what was staring back was a flush toilet. Trying to produce methane by leeching organic acids from human waste, he couldn't understand why the process wasn't working. The process is anaerobic, meaning it excludes oxygen, and Mr. Cameron thought his system was airtight. The container was welded down; there was no oxygen leaking in as far as he could see; but there wasn't enough methane being produced to even combust.READ MORE




When he looked more closely, he found enough air embedded in the waste to keep the system partially aerobic. And while that prevented methane from being produced, Mr. Cameron says his interest was piqued by the aerobic organisms like beetles and fly larvae he observed.

"Whenever you find something surprising like that," he says, "it's worth thinking it over, because it's outside your expectation and therefore [there is] something really important you might learn from it."

Mr. Cameron, in his words, was ready for this moment. His father had been a civil engineer and earth mover, and Mr. Cameron had memories of his father putting in sewage and water systems. After leaving school, Mr. Cameron dabbled in theology before moving on to horticulture, botany and ecology and then environmental science. At one job, he realized he needed to study more about making things, and in the 1980s he says he invented a flashing LED bicycle light (though he didn't patent it).

After that, he developed an interest in permaculture -- artificial ecosystems aimed at satisfying the requirements of inhabitants through renewable resources -- and bought a place in Queensland where he could experiment. From there, he says, "evolved a chain of events, some of which were fortuitous." When the problem of methane production hit, he says, it was a matter of "chance favoring the prepared mind."

Instead of being discouraged, Mr. Cameron started asking himself what would happen if he went in the other direction, if he made the process even more aerobic by introducing worms and air. "The very first experiment I did along those lines worked brilliantly," he says, "and it was completely against the conventional wisdom that worms won't handle high moisture content." Mr. Cameron was on his way to creating "Biowater."

Mr. Cameron's water-treatment system moves human and other waste through a multilayered tank in a composting
process that uses worms, beetles and billions of microscopic organisms to break up the material naturally until water emerges at the bottom, ready to be used for irrigation. The system, Mr. Cameron says, uses 90% less energy than conventional sewage systems and costs half as much to run.

His company, Biolytix Water Pty. Ltd., has installed Biowater tanks in nearly 3,000 homes, projects and businesses across the Pacific and plans to launch in Asia, the U.S. and Europe next year.

The key to the system is the worms. What Mr. Cameron realized from his failed methane experiment was that the fastest decomposition was occurring not in water, as may be found in most conventional systems such as septic tanks, but in the moist world where soil meets water. He realized this breakdown happens much more quickly in the presence of air and soil organisms.

These organisms digest the waste that is pumped into the top of the tank and create humus, a living, self-regenerating matrix that looks like soil but is 90% water and serves as a filter. The treated water isn't suitable for drinking, but is good for soil since it contains "organic material that actually enhances the growth of the plant," Mr. Cameron says.

What is clever about this is that it turns a problem -- waste -- into a solution, by creating out of the waste a living organic filter that cleans the water. This organic mass is the "densest population of critters on the planet," Mr. Cameron says. "There are one billion organisms in one gram of humus. It's a staggering number."

These organisms vary little in type whether in the Scottish Highlands or the tropics. Some establish themselves naturally; others are introduced deliberately; but each serves a purpose: Creatures that have adapted to feeding on litter break up the larger material, dramatically increasing the waste's surface area and speeding decomposition. The worms, beetles and mites, meanwhile, drill tiny channels through the humus, allowing air to diffuse into the filter and preventing water from getting blocked.

Millions of tiny Proturans, Collembolans and beetle mites graze over the wet surface and suck or scrape up what Mr. Cameron calls "the microbial biofilm soup." This teeming mass continuously consumes and digests matter, which is eroded by the flowing waste water. Tiny organisms called rotifers and copepods, meanwhile, consume bacteria, cleaning out pathogens like salmonella. All this activity reduces the size of particles until it creates a humus.

The beauty is that all this can work on a very small scale, and cheaply. Mr. Cameron's company has developed a proof-of-concept version of the system that could cost as little as A$200 (US$175) for four people. And the system uses little or no energy: The Biolytix BF6 model uses a five-watt air pump. That is less than it takes to pump out a septic tank once every five years. And some models require no power at all.

"The end point of what we're trying to do is to break down the material," Mr. Cameron says. "If you can avoid putting a whole lot of energy in, then that's what you should do."

Mr. Cameron sees waste treatment as historically flawed, almost from the start. "The way evolution of technology takes place," he says, "people look at what's happening and make incremental improvements."

Things started to go wrong, he says, during the Industrial Revolution. People early on realized that contact with sewage produced diseases, so they put drains underground. This, he says, was "the first step where engineers went wrong." Doing this deprived the waste of the oxygen that would break it down quickly -- 20% of air is oxygen, but there are only seven parts per million in water. When the volume got too big, it was too much for nature to replenish the oxygen in the water. "They never thought" about what they were doing, he says. "Their first step was just to take it away."

Ever since then, he says, incremental improvements have focused on better ways to pump oxygen into the water, a wasteful process that accounts for much of the 5% of a grid's electricity that is used to treat waste.

"It's completely unnecessary if you do what we've done," he says. "We've developed [the system] so [the aerobic process] works completely passively. The only energy needed is to pump out to irrigate." Mr. Cameron says it has been hard to convince an industry so entrenched in its methods and to capture the imagination of investors. But with 2.5 billion people without proper sanitation, he believes his vision, which began at the bottom of a toilet bowl, is coming true.

"Our technology," he says, "is the most adaptable technology to provide for that massive need."
* * *

THE AWARDS, IN THEIR 10TH YEAR
Gold : Innovator Finds Clever Way to Wash Water
• Silver Winner: Creating Empowerment Through Cow Dung
• Bronze Winner: Rickshaws Drive Entrepreneurship
• GES Winner Stifles Bollywood Piracy
• The Awards, in Their 10th Year

This year's winners of the Asian Innovation Awards are improving people's lives and the environment.

From a system for converting wastewater into clean water for irrigating fruit trees, to a microcredit program that starts with cow manure and uses small generators to help families preserve fruits and vegetables, to one that finances rickshaw pullers in India, this year's winners represent the spirit of Asian innovation and creativity.

The Wall Street Journal Asia presents the awards in association with Global Entrepolis@Singapore. The international networking event is taking place in Singapore this week, with more than 10,000 participants expected to attend 40 business conferences, industry seminars and entrepreneur workshops.

The Asian Innovation Awards, now in their 10th year, honor individuals or companies that improve the quality of life or the environment, or boost productivity. This year, the Journal received a record 265 entries from 16 countries and territories, an increase of 18% over last year. They came from fields including medicine, biotechnology, transport, logistics, engineering, information technology and waste management. With so many strong entries, we decided this year to also give two honorable mentions.

The Journal also presents the Global Entrepolis@Singapore award, which honors an emerging company on the basis of innovation, technology and the commercial potential of its proposal. The Journal presents the GES Award in association with Singapore's Economic Development Board.

The Journal selected 12 finalists for the AIA awards and six for the single GES award. It then presented them to an independent panel of judges for selection of the winners. The winners were profiled in The Wall Street Journal Asia on Nov. 5.

The judges for the awards were:

Steven J. DeKrey, associate dean of the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology Business School and founding director of the Kellogg-HKUST Executive M.B.A. program.

Anil K. Gupta, Kasturbhai Lalbhai Chair professor of entrepreneurship at the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad.

Rosemary Tan, chief executive officer of Veredus Laboratories Pte. Ltd. in Singapore, and winner of last year's Asian Innovation Awards Gold medal.

Kenny Tang, founder and chief executive officer of Oxbridge Capital Ltd., London.




  • [permaculture] Innovator Finds Clever Way to Wash Water, Dean Cameron, (Australia Permie), Wesley Roe and Santa Barbara Permaculture Network, 11/15/2007

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