• Highly effective at wastewater treatment, removing BOD and fecal coliform. Also effective in removing nitrogen and phosphorous
• Aesthetically pleasing- Wetland vegetation consists of flowers and other plants that look very beautiful
• Provides natural habitat- Birds and other forms of wildlife can live in these wetlands

Sewage as a Fertilizer

All of incoming wastewater is 99.9% liquid and .1% solid. We know what happens to the liquid (it gets treated at a wastewater treatment facility and put back into the water flow), but what happens to the solids? Normally the solids get dried up and put into a landfill, but this is a waste of valuable material. Why not use the solid as some sort of fertilizer?

This is exactly what the city of Milwaukee and its wastewater treatment plant has done. They reuse the once unusable solid material by way of a heating process and the end product is a fertilizer called Milorganite. Milorganite is very useful for lawns, flowers, and other beneficial uses. With the production of Milorganite, the city of Milwaukee has saved over 200,000,000 cubic feet of landfill space and it has saved the taxpayers $250-$300 million dollars. Milorganite is the world’s largest recycling effort.

Composting Toilets

Positive aspects

Negitive aspects

Global Perspective

Water that is not safe for human consumption can spread disease. In many third world countries, this results in half of the children dying before the age of five. The poor suffer the most from absence of safe water and sanitation because they lack the means to provide such facilities. Also, these people do not have the information on how to treat the unsanitary conditions in which they live. Industrialized countries use water born sewage for sanitary disposal of human excretion, but many countries can’t afford this: only one third of third-world countries have adequate sanitation services.

The 1980’s were declared to be the International Drinking Water Supply and Sanitation Decade by the United Nations. The UN’s goal was to provide all people in the world safe drinking water and adequate sanitation facilities by 1990. They failed. 87% of the worlds’ rural population had no sanitation services and needed help. The project, whose cost was estimated at $300 billion, received financial aid from the World Bank, Bilateral Aid, OPEC, UNICEF, UNCP, and voluntary organizations. As the UN realized that it could not reach it’s goal, it changed the priorities of the program. Although they did not reach their goal, 500 million people were served safe drinking water, and 100 million were supplied with adequate sanitation facilities. People’s eyes were finally opened to the huge crisis that water sanitation posed to the world.

Summary

The possibilities for improving the environmental conditions are endless. In order to do this, one should consider that humanity should act as stewards of God. We need to repair all of the damage that we have done in the past and start doing constructive things to further our environment. Calvin College should consider improving the environmental aspects on campus and in the city of Grand Rapids. If we all do our part in cleaning things up then the future will look more promising.