Versatile Water Treatment Garden Inspired by Wetlands

Innovation: Industry

Floating Islands West

2005

Image: Svetlana Makarova / Wikimedia Commons / 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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Capture, Absorb, or Filter Liquids

The most common liquid used by living systems is water, which they require to survive. But there are many other liquids that provide nourishment, play a role in defense mechanisms, or serve other purposes. Water varies in its availability; it is sometimes plentiful and sometimes very scarce or only available as fog or mist. To minimize the energy required to capture, absorb, or filter liquids, living systems have strategies that take advantage of the unique properties of the given liquid. For example, water moves from a gaseous to liquid state when it encounters a surface colder than the air. Plants in forests that experience fog and clouds more than rain have strategies that condense liquid water from moist air.

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Capture, Absorb, or Filter Solids

Some living systems must secure solid particles such as sediment, usually to keep the particles from hindering their health or activity. The most common way in which they do this is through filtering. To be effective, a filtering system must be appropriate to the sizes of solid particles to be captured and must capture only what is needed. It must also be effective in the appropriate media–air, water, or sometimes solids like soil. An example is mangroves, which are trees that grow along ocean coasts. Their root system slows down and settles sediment out of the water, building up soil to support the mangrove ecosystem.

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Brochures

Floating Islands West LLC Information
1.2 MB PDF

Patents

BioHaven Floating Island from Floating Island West is a floating garden that naturally cleans water and improves habitats.

Benefits

Increased biodiversity
Improved water quality
Sustainable

Applications

Industrial and residential water treatment
Shoreline protection
Coastal restoration

UN Sustainable Development Goals Addressed

Goal 6: Clean Water & Sanitation
Goal 11: Sustainable Cities & Communities
Goal 14: Life Below Water

Bioutilization

Native plants and microbes

The Challenge

Water is essential for human survival, and access to clean drinking water is critical for good health. Contaminated drinking water can cause numerous health concerns, including exposure to viruses. As the world population continues to grow, traditional wastewater treatment will quickly reach capacity. The machines will not be able to remove additional contaminants, and there will not be enough land to build more facilities.

Innovation Details

The BioHaven® Floating Island concentrates wetland plants and microbes on a fibrous matrix made of recycled material. The high surface area in the matrix promotes a large amount of growth of biofilms that filter contaminants such as phosphorus, copper, zinc, nitrogen, and ammonia out of the water. Additionally, the matrix acts as a filter for larger particles and an optimal location for plant roots and shoots to grow. All together, these features create a multi-purpose product that improves water quality in man-made and naturally occurring bodies of water.

Illustration of the different components of the Biohaven® Floating Island.

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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