How to Get Your Home Off the Water "Grid"

By Jo-Shing Yang, AlterNet. Posted February 9, 2009.

This type of conventional water infrastructure is unsustainable in the long term, as it relies completely on energy- and raw-materials delivery and complex networks of manufacturing and transportation (and delivery) infrastructure in its daily operations and maintenance. So our water infrastructure is dependent on shipping tankers and barges, trucks, rail and highway systems, power plants, electricity grid, chemical manufacturers, and disposal places (e.g., landfills, incinerators, farms that accept "biosolids"). It is both a heavy consumer of resources and a significant producer of pollutants in the treatment processes. As a result of this total dependence on fossil fuel, chemicals, and replacement parts, conventional water facilities are defenseless against power outages and delivery interruptions.

Hence, these conventional facilities are only as robust and secure as the manufacturing infrastructure and the delivery system networks that support them. For example, when power outage occurred in one Ohio power plant on August 14, 2003, the electricity grid supplying electricity to the northeastern United States and parts of southeastern Canada crashed, causing sewage- and water-treatment plants in many cities to fail. Large metropolitan areas such as Detroit and Cleveland went without drinking water for several days, while New York's sewage-treatment plants spewed raw sewage into rivers and oceans, forcing public health officials to close several public beaches in the state.

Countries or communities adopting and relying solely on conventional water systems are especially vulnerable to chemicals and fossil-fuel supply disruptions. The good case study is Iraq which suffered a total collapse of its conventional water infrastructure during UN sanctions from 1991 to 2003.

The control of water resources has been politicized and used as a figurative weapon of war at the international level --- as illustrated by the withholding of water-treatment resources and technologies under the United Nations trade embargo against Iraq in the 1990s. This control has been used already by the Untied States and the United Kingdom as a means to weaken Saddam Hussein and Iraq. Under UN sanctions, 1.5 million Iraqis (including approximately 565,000 children) had died as a result of the embargo by the mid-1990s, which included withholding "vital goods" such as chemicals and equipment to purify drinking water and to treat sewage, according to UN aid agencies UNICEF and UN FAO.

Today in the post-invasion Iraq now being occupied by the United States, the water infrastructure has not been rebuilt. Many communities are still without clean drinking water and sewage treatment. Raw sewage still flows in the streets of many cities, and large segments of the population rely on water trucks to procure clean drinking water.

Why was Iraq so vulnerable to UN sanctions? It turns out that Iraq's water-purification and sewage-treatment infrastructures are conventional: they use chemical- and fossil-fuel-guzzling technologies similar to those used in the United States and other industrialized countries. If Iraqis had built their water systems using ecological and natural designs and principles and technologies, then they could have become independent of imported chemicals and parts --- and consequently prevented the deaths of 1.5 million children and adults from otherwise easily preventable waterborne diseases.

Why Natural, Small, and Decentralized Systems?

The lessons of Iraq are valuable for many communities and nations: Despite its oil wealth (second only to Saudi Arabia in underground reserves), Iraq could not import the necessary replacement parts and chemicals for its water treatment plants because of the economic and trade sanctions. Indeed, conventional water systems are only as strong as the weakest link in the overall raw-materials-sourcing, manufacturing, transportation, and delivery infrastructure.

The case for small, decentralized, and natural water systems is the same as that for the food system: many experts have advised us to go back to local farms, to be self-sufficient on a local level. These natural systems use local materials and resources, local labor, and local expertise, thereby making them independent of costly and highly toxic synthetic chemicals and fossil fuels in their operation.

Conventional Systems v. Natural, Ecological Water Systems

In general, ecological treatment systems are land- (or space-) intensive and more time-consuming, while conventional systems are energy-demanding and resource-intensive. Conventionally engineered and resource-intensive water-treatment systems are almost useless when lacking key chemicals and fossil fuel.

These systems are small, low-cost, decentralized, energy-efficient (and can be operated independent of fossil fuel), and community self-sufficient; they can be built, operated, and maintained using local labor and resources in the communities.

Many natural systems are widely in use, including the following:

• Ponds (e.g., aerobic, anaerobic, aerated, facultative, waste-stabilize, primary, secondary, tertiary, maturation or polishing, algal, duckweed, and macrophyte ponds, etc.)
• Constructed wetlands (e.g., subsurface, surface flow, vertical flow) and reed beds
• Anaerobic digesters
• Aquaculture and aquatic-macrophyte pond system
• Sand filters (slow sand filters, fast sand filters)
• Low-cost sorbents and filters (e.g., coconut shell, peanut hull, risk husk, peat moss, iron-oxide-coated sand, old clothing, clay, zeolite, etc.)
• Integrated, combined systems (a full system with many components discussed here)

As there are many other types of experimental systems being tested by researchers around the world, we will only focus on ponds, the lowest cost and easiest to construct of all natural systems, in this essay.

See more stories tagged with: water, wastewater, sewage, water systems

Jo-Shing Yang is the author of "Ecological Planning, Design, and Engineering. Solving Global Water Crises: New Paradigms in Wastewater and Water Treatment. Small and On-Site Systems for Community Water Self-Sufficiency and Sustainability."

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