Constructed Wetlands for Wastewater Treatment

I am writing this blog a bit later than I had originally planned. Last past week has pushed me to my limits both physically and mentally. They were not understating how much work went into classes. I'll give a semi-quick breakdown of the class to help both myself process it all and to help you easily follow my last week.

Sunday

This class was the second class in a series on water held at Yestermorrow. Due to funds and timing, I was only able to take the Constructed Wetlands class, which turned out to be a more detail oriented class than the other two offered.

We spent Sunday reviewing some of the concepts covered in the previous class, Redesigning Wastewater, which was helpful for me seeing as I was the only one in the class that had not taken it. Much of the review was on basic water chemistry, so I felt pretty at home with the stuff we were covering. After the review, we went into a discussion over the history of wetlands followed by a discussion on nitrification and denitrificaiton.

 The two hours I spent in the classroom were very information heavy.

Monday

I ended up reviewing my notes again Monday morning before class to make sure that I had completely followed everything that was thrown at me. This ended up being to my benefit because we dove into more information on wasterwater the following morning. I learned about the different types of wasterwater, its components (chemical, energy, pathogens, etc.), and basic wetland construction all before lunch.

Immediately after lunch, we took a tour of the Yestermorrow septic system to better understand it and understand what needed to be set in place to make it better. Seeing as Yestermorrow's main building is a repurposed motel, there are many design difficulties. One of these design difficulties is the septic system, which was not designed for its current purpose and there are several different drainage problems existing with it. This and many other reasons are the reasoning as to why Yestermorrow is currently developing a new campus plan.

Tuesday

Yestermorrow is currently working on a twenty-five-year design and development plan for their new campus. While the current campus is charming and still inhabitable, the current design of the building prevents it from functioning at the level it could work at. There is limited classroom studio space, sleeping space, and working space for the students. Yestermorrow also wishes to open its doors to more students, and they cannot do that at this moment due to these limits.

Several of the most recent classes have been involved with working on this master plan. Yestermorrow would like for its students, who are the main users of this facility, to be an integral part in the design and function of its future campus; hence, the intense amount of focus on it in the classes.

Our class spent a great deal of time developing the wastewater treatment for the campus. We started off sizing the system based on the estimate of people that would be using it. This involved a quick introduction to Excel and a late-night calculus lesson that helped us size for the different water quality parameters.

We spent the late afternoon portion of Tuesday learning how to survey a site. It was quite a unique and informative experience. I have a whole new appreciation for the people who did the original surveying of this area.

This photo is just a glimpse of one of our late night site planning session.

Funny enough, one of the instructors, Barton Kirk, told me on day one that he was involved in the planning of the Ecovillage living machine. He had heard it had been switched over to an aquaculture facility, but had wanted to hear more up-to-date information on the program. This led to an impromptu presentation on our aquaponics facility complete with pictures, diagrams, and a system history since its switchover from a wastewater treatment facility.

Wednesday

We dedicated all of Wednesday morning and afternoon to field trips of wetland treatment systems. I got a firsthand look at how these systems functioned in working environments. Both systems had been put into place by the instructors of the class, so they were able to give us a full report on how each system functioned as well as some of the design challenges they faced during construction.

We did have a brief late night session that focused more on sizing for chemical parameters since we were not able to cover all of that information the night before. At this point, we were all beginning to feel the mental stress and made the executive session to remove designing individual wastewater treatment systems from our list of things to do. While it was hard to cut out that portion of our syllabus, we all felt it necessary because keeping our focus and sanity was more important to our overall goals of understanding these systems.

Thursday

We began the morning with a lecture on rethinking wastewater. This lecture covered many of the projects that one of our instructors, Pete Munoz, had worked on. He has worked on well-known wastewater treatment systems at the Omega Institure, Chahtam University, Sidwell Friends Middle School, Baltimore Healthy Harbor Initiative, and many more institutions. This led into a discussion on the individual components of a wastewater treatment system, which led to us developing the ideal treatment system for Yestermorrow's new campus.

(Note: I'll have more photos of the field trip, the design processes, and our system design soon. I'm waiting on my instructor to send them to me.)

Friday

Our final day of class took place almost entirely outside of the  classroom. Here we put all of our theory and knowledge into practice by building a small model of a constructed wetland. Previous Constructed Wetland classes had the opportunity to build an actual functioning system, but there were not any construction projects set up, so we built a demonstration model.

First we cleaned up some different sized media. Our media consisted of pea gravel, gravel, and light-weight clay pellets mixed with a different type of pea gravel.

Gravel needed to be washed three times over before it could be put in the wetland.

After that, we worked on lining our "wetland." Our "wetland" was a box that had three wooden sides and one glass viewing side. We worked the lining so that it would allow for visibility on the clear side, and we sealed the glass side with silicone and bolts to prevent it from leaking.

Lining this wetland wasn't much different from lining a hydroponic unit.

After the construction of our base, we assembled a level control that would allow us to control the level of water in the wetland at any given time. After we had all of our pieces and parts glued and put in place, we were then able to fill the wetland with rocks, plants, and water.

The final product!

We finished the construction of the demonstration model just as the class finished. We celebrated our victory and then we all went off to rest after a hard week of work. This system is pretty low-maintenance, but it does need a few more days of observation before we can call it usable. It has been left to my care for the next few days to make sure its roots establish and to make sure it does not leak all over its new home in the Yestermorrow library.

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After a long week of work, I spent the weekend with Finn and his family up at their farm. It was a nice break, and I was able to rest up plenty before entering another week of classes. I started Regenerative Design and Development on Sunday night. I'll be writing another blog to cover all of the happenings in that class. After one day, I know I'll have plenty to talk about then!

In other news, it seems Yestermorrow has taken a break from its rainy summer. The past few days have been full of sunshine, swimming, ice cream eating, and late night gatherings under the stars. It feels weird to think that I just started my sixth week here. Time is ticking away on my internship, but I know that I can still expect to learn a lot with the 17 days I have left.