Benefits
- Up to 30,600 gallons of wastewater treated daily.
- $4.5 million in infrastructure cost savings.
- 5 million gallons of water re-use annually.
- Free water for on-site irrigation.
- Clean water returned to the aquifer instead of being piped miles away for treatment.
- Jealous neighbors, since the schools’ athletic fields are green even during a drought.
When Guilford County needed a new high school and middle school they had a big, potentially costly, challenge: connecting to existing sewer system would have cost $5 million. But the school board and taxpayers of Guilford County were already taking the long view, investing in green design that would make their new schools a showcase of sustainable practices.
So instead of connecting to (and paying for) miles of new pipeline, they chose to connect to the future. They installed a Living Machine® wastewater treatment system, the only proven ecological system for treating wastewater. As a result, they’re now reaping benefits in the environment, in the classroom, and in the school system’s bottom line.
The Hybrid Wetland Living Machine® we designed for them uses a series of wetland installations to naturally cleanse the school’s wastewater. That water then goes right back into use irrigating three athletic fields and re-charging their aquifer.
For a fraction of the cost of sewer lines, the schools get added green space; they get a living laboratory to use in their studies of the environment; they get 5 million gallons of recycled water every year; and (here’s what’s got the other schools in the area envious), they’ve got the greenest athletic fields around, even during a drought.
The Guilford Northern Schools wastewater treatment system uses our patented Hybrid Wetland Living Machine®, which features two separate types of wetland in a single installation. The system produces pure, disinfected water ready for re-use, and perfectly safe for return directly to the aquifer.
After passing through two buried settling tanks, the wastewater from the schools enters a Horizontal Subsurface Flow Wetland. This first wetland planting serves to remove solids and to begin the biological processes for removing dangerous nitrogen-bearing compounds from the water.
The partially cleansed water then moves through three Tidal Flow Wetland plantings. These Tidal Flow cells, developed and patented by Worrell Water Technologies, fill and drain in cycles several times each day. The process mimics the natural process of the tides, bringing oxygen to the beneficial microorganisms and plants that do the bulk of the work.
The processed water flows into a storage tank, where it is disinfected using ultraviolet light. From there, the cleansed water passes to a 25,000 gallon holding tank, where it is stored prior to re-use irrigating three sports fields.
The Hybrid Wetland Living Machine® generates water treated to a higher quality than competing on-site treatment technologies. It does this at a fraction of the energy costs to operate. The complexity of its biosystem makes it much more resistant to toxic chemicals than competitors. The system produces a small amount of dry residual matter that is easy to handle, and can be disposed of in a landfill or in an energy-from-waste generating plant.