From keithdj@mindspring.com Tue Aug 24 23:40:24 1999 Date: Tue, 24 Aug 1999 22:49:34 -0400 From: Keith Johnson To: Andrew Goodheart Brown Subject: [Fwd: REALLY traditional sewage treatment] [ Part 2: "Included Message" ] Date: Sat, 31 Jul 1999 20:00:49 -0700 From: janesway@pacbell.net To: FILE Subject: REALLY traditional sewage treatment 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 =====================================