11/28/2011
I was asked for some more details. Hopefully this answers some of the questions.
While conventional engineering sees sewage as a waste product we need to dispose of, nature sees it as a resource in a never-ending cyclical processes. The "waste" from one organism is the food for the next. There is no garbage in nature.
Humans are an integral part of the natural web. Our natural "waste" has a function in our ecosystem. So back in the 1980s a biologist looked at ecosystems that were very efficient at cleaning sewage and utilizing these nutrients and he found that wetland biology was among the most efficient (largely due to the immense diversity of organism.) So the challenge was to build a natural system that could utilize the biology of a natural wetland system to clean sewage to make it safe to reintroduce the water back in to the environment. The Solar Aquatics System was born.
From there we took it to the next level. Next few levels actually. We recognized that clean water is a scarce resource, in fact one of the most valuable we have. So, rather than just discarding the water, we wanted to develop water re-use strategies. We don't just clean the water "good-enough", we clean the water to such a degree that you can safely spray irrigate a golf course, or drip irrigate food crops with it!
But water re-use is only feasible if the sewage (and the reclaimed water) don't need to be pumped over long distances. The stink from standard sewage treatment necessitates that sewage treatment needs to be done far outside of town. Right-of-ways, setbacks, and sewer mains can incur huge capital costs and ongoing bills such as electricity for pumping can be a heavy burden.
So we promote a decentralized treatment system. Building water reclamation systems based on the demand of reclaimed water means that every neighborhood with a park, golf course, cement factory, etc could be reclaiming its own water and diverting their demand away from drinking water taken from the local aquifer, river, or lake.
But if we want to place these systems in neighborhoods they need to be compact and aesthetically pleasing. So instead of constructed wetlands we use large aerated tanks.
Also, we don't try to cover the foul odor (as some systems do) we prevent it from happening from the outset. Even inside of our systems it smells like a greenhouse, not a sewage plant.
And the visual esthetics? Well, it can look industrial or it can look like an indoor tropical jungle, that's up to the client.
So at UBC CIRS our Solar Aquatics is located in a Solarium beside the front door. Sewage is taken from CIRS and parts of campus upstream, and reclaimed for toilet flushing and irrigation. Once enough documentation is together we expect to start "exporting" the reclaimed water to the Horticulture department for use in their greenhouses (just across the road.)
So, that's the short version.
