Refined Wastewater Treatment System Inspired by Aquatic Ecosystems

Innovation: Industry

John Todd Ecological Design

1993

Image: Skeeze / Pixabay / CC BY - Creative Commons Attribution alone

Maintain Biodiversity

The greater the amount of genetic and species variation in an ecosystem, the more resilient that ecosystem is to disturbances. Variation in ecosystems across the Earth also contributes to the Earth’s resilience to unpredictable changes. This variation is called biodiversity. Because living systems compete with each other for scarce resources, maintaining biodiversity involves creating conditions for a large variety of species to successfully co-occur and reproduce. For example, within a wetland, there are different vegetation types. This diversity results in a complex mosaic of microenvironments as the vegetation types alter air flows, light regimes, and water temperatures and chemistry. Because organisms vary in their ideal environmental conditions, these micro-environments increase the diversity of plants in the wetland. In turn, having a wetland in an otherwise dry area increases biodiversity at an even larger scale.

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Detoxification/Purification of Air/Water/Waste

Ecosystems must be effective at cleaning air, water, and waste because so much of what is in the air, water, and waste is valuable to organisms as resources. In contrast to functions that detoxify or purify at the organism level, this is at a larger scale. To be effective at the ecosystem level, it isn’t the individual efforts of a few organisms that detoxifies and purifies, but the actions of a wide diversity of organisms each contributing to the whole. For example, as water flows through an ecosystem, either aboveground or in the soil, a diversity of organisms take different actions to slow it down, capture excess nutrients from it, and break down harmful chemicals into more benign ones.

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Cycle Nutrients

In ecosystems, there is no such thing as waste. Instead, one organism’s waste can be considered as another organism’s resource, and the cycling of nutrients may be the most important form of recycling in living systems. But sometimes those nutrients are transformed by one organism into a form that isn’t readily used by other organisms. For example, lignin is a complex organic molecule found in the cell walls of plants. In a forest, it’s one of the hardest molecules to break down in woody vegetation. Therefore, ecosystems include organisms that are particularly well-adapted to break down different types of nutrients. In the case of lignin, some fungi and bacteria release lignin-modifying enzymes that can break down the lignin to form carbohydrates and other life-supporting chemicals.

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Chemically Break Down Organic Compounds

The vast majority of biochemical assembly and breakdown processes–even by the most complex organisms–occur within cells. In fact, cells are able to perform hundreds, even thousands of chemical transformations at the same time under life-friendly conditions (ambient temperature and pressure in an aqueous environment). Part of the reason that decomposition reactions (chemical breakdown) can occur under such mild conditions is because most often, they occur in a stepwise, enzyme-mediated fashion, sipping or releasing small amounts of energy at each step. For example, the breakdown of glucose to pyruvate–and the release of energy–occurs in the 10-step enzyme catalyzed process of glycolysis.

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Brochures

Patents

The Eco-Machine from John Todd Ecological Design is a custom-built wastewater treatment system that purifies water without chemicals.

Benefits

Chemical-free
Sustainable

Applications

Municipal and industrial wastewater treatment
Treatment of impaired waters

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 3: Good Health & Wellbeing
Goal 6: Clean Water & Sanitation
Goal 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities

Bioutilization

Native plants and organisms
Bacteria

The Challenge

More than 80% of waste waters (some 1,500 billion tons every year) flow untreated into rivers, lakes, and coastal zones, threatening health, food security, and access to safe drinking and bathing water. Traditional wastewater treatments require the use of hazardous chemicals and large amounts of energy.

Innovation Details

Eco-machines use sunlight, and natural processes to create clean water with the byproducts of natural gases and biological material. They also use naturally occurring organisms to break down waste and organic materials, which are then used by other organisms in the machine. This can jumpstart the ecology of a water body, digest sediments and reduce nutrient levels, bringing the water body back into ecological health. They can also serve as a habitat for wildlife and as a recreational amenity within a community.

Tour of the eco-machine at the George D. Aiken Center of the Rubenstein School of Environment and Natural Resources, University of Vermont, Burlington, VT, USA.

Biological Model

Healthy wetland ecosystems are commonly seen as natural water filtration systems because they can remove sediments and nutrients from the surrounding soil or water. Nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous are taken from the water by bacteria and wetland plants that consume these nutrients as they grow. Physical processes like filtering and sedimentation can also remove nutrients and particles from the water. These biological and physical processes interact with many other factors, such as temperature and land structure, to affect a wetland’s overall function.

See Related Strategy

Biological Strategy

Interacting Organisms Filter Water

Wetland ecosystems

Wetland plants, bacteria, and the physical environment work together to remove particles and pollutants

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