[HN Gopher] Scientists Use Recycled Sewage Water to Grow 500-Acr...
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Scientists Use Recycled Sewage Water to Grow 500-Acre Forest in the
Desert
Author : ph0rque
Score : 117 points
Date : 2020-01-11 14:12 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.goodnewsnetwork.org)
| weberc2 wrote:
| > The federal effort, called the National Program for the Safe
| Use of Treated Sewage Water for Afforestation is going a long way
| towards achieving the country's commendable ambitions voiced in
| the 1992 UN Rio conference on climate change--because so many
| trees can soak up hundreds of tons of CO2.
|
| My understanding is that commercial forests like these don't
| generally capture the carbon, depending on how the harvested wood
| is used.
| samatman wrote:
| A forest will be carbon negative regardless of how the
| harvested wood is used. Forests increase soil depth through
| dropping leaves or needles, and by light-starving prior growth.
| The trees also leave behind roots, a substantial fraction of
| the total organism weight.
|
| The vast majority of carbon in a tree is from the air, so the
| sum is a net win. Most wood is also put to long-lasting uses,
| or made into paper which is eventually buried.
|
| But even burning trees for power, while short-sighted, is net
| carbon negative, due to the first set of reasons I've
| mentioned.
| thdrdt wrote:
| If you like this you might also like Groasis, a company that
| produces boxes that can be placed around young trees so they can
| grow from condensation the first years. They also have a lot of
| success in deserts and mountain areas.
|
| https://www.groasis.com/
| wjnc wrote:
| Funny that Groasis was founded in '03 while Tree T-PEE of Shark
| Tank fame was founded in '05. Similar inventions popping up at
| the same time is always fun to see in action.
| avip wrote:
| The concept of collecting moisture from air is somewhere
| between decades-old (the modern plastic version) and
| centuries old.
| jacobwilliamroy wrote:
| Which plants are they using?
| jagger27 wrote:
| Second paragraph:
|
| > 10 miles west of the Suez Canal--you would see bountiful
| forests of eucalyptus, teak, and mahogany trees limned against
| the orange sand and blue sky of the Sahara?
|
| I see no reason to use anything but native plants.
| pacaro wrote:
| Which makes eucalyptus problematic. Its introduction to
| California has done an incredible amount of damage,
| especially because the ecosystem can't process it, the bugs
| etc that can eat eucalyptus leaves and wood don't exist
| outside of Australia
| RenRav wrote:
| How exactly is wastewater distributed throughout the 500 acres?
| Article says a system of pipes. Is it percolating throughout the
| entirety of the pipes or are there just a few endpoints with
| massive ponds? Really interesting read.
| hyperpallium wrote:
| > Although desertification is sometimes thought of as the
| swallowing of lands adjacent to deserts, it is actually a process
| whereby land that was once fertile or semi-arable becomes desert
| as a result of things like unsustainable agricultural practices,
| or long-lasting drought.
|
| So, desert doesn't encroach. Does this imply that de-
| desertification also doesn't encroach?
|
| I'd like to think that a green vanguard paves the way for further
| colonizatiin, including by better water retention than sand; and
| capturing morning dew.
| jobseeker990 wrote:
| So you can find me a large barren field in a rainy region that
| was created by unsustainable agriculture?
|
| On the contrary, life finds a way. unless an area is nearly
| 100% devoid of water you're going to find some life there, and
| if it's rainy, something will certainly be growing.
| CalRobert wrote:
| Yes, I have one. Just monoculture grass and dandelions. Not
| "nothing" but very little diversity.
| close04 wrote:
| Unsustainable agriculture is one of the reasons for
| desertification. Deforestation, sedentary cultivation of
| lands that normally only support pastoralism, groundwater
| depletion, these can trigger desertification. The most
| affected are indeed the areas that have a more precarious
| balance like drylands. But this comprises almost half of the
| Earth's freely accessible land surface. Being in a rainy
| region covers up for the issue, gives you a wider margin for
| error.
|
| > life finds a way
|
| That's not a good reason to screw with it wherever and
| whenever we can. This is more appropriate to say in the
| context of humans being gone because otherwise we have so
| many ways to let life only find the way to extinction.
| thatcat wrote:
| Soil moisture retention is determined by soil structure and
| composition.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| Think there's more layers to the desertification problem.
|
| Desertification also can be linked to activities impacting
| climate - One paper talks about aerosols (likely via coal use
| in europe in the early 1900's) as a driver to droughts in
| Sahelian Africa and the Amazon:
| http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.652...
| carapace wrote:
| This is awesome! See also "Greening the Desert" [1] about
| integrated systems ("Permaculture" is a school of applied
| ecology.)
|
| These systems, properly designed, create the materials needed to
| build new copies of themselves. They're (potentially) self-
| replicating. A bit of labor and a lot of intelligence and we can
| convert deserts into gardens and food forests. And, given time,
| they will alter the (micro- then macro-) climate.
|
| (I feel like we have all the technology we need to solve our
| problems now, but we are distracted and incoherent.)
|
| [1] https://greeningthedesertproject.org/about-us/
|
| https://greeningthedesertproject.org/celebrating-10-years-at...
|
| > The Greening the Desert Project started with the purchase of
| land about ten years ago, and it expanded slowly until that
| mounted into exponential growth. Things started at the top,
| literally, with a large water tank that feeds a shower/toilet
| block just downhill. The toilets are dry composting, supplying
| fertilizer for plants on site, and the greywater from the showers
| and sinks goes to a nearby reed bed. The reed bed, still high in
| the landscape, is then able to send gravity-fed irrigation to
| many trees throughout the site. It's all used onsite for
| beneficial biological cleaning.
|
| > The food forest with stone walls and earth-backed swales moves
| through the landscape to rabbit and chicken houses, which combine
| manures in a system that creates a cubic meter of compost every
| five weeks. That goes to the main crop garden, a shade-covered
| kitchen garden. The surplus fertilizer (compost) goes to food
| forest trees and the nursery. The runoff from the nursery goes
| through to the kitchen garden. The accommodation building has an
| office, a classroom, and eight bedrooms. It's two stories high
| and made with earth brick and straw bale. The roof has a
| beautiful garden made up of wicking beds.
| ph0rque wrote:
| Yes! I am hoping and planning to get my PDC (Permaculture
| Design Certificate) this year.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| I think this is a great idea! Does anyone from Egypt have an
| opinion of how far along this is? I ask because I thought "Cool,
| let's check that out on Google maps." and got this
| :https://www.google.com/maps/place/Serapium+Forest/@30.486290...
| Which shows a fairly aspirational project rather than a forest.
| spitfire wrote:
| Cyprus has been using sewage to irrigate crops for ages. What's
| different here is they're using to build greenways to stop desert
| creep. Very cool.
|
| It used to be that you couldn't even flush toilet paper in Cyprus
| - you had to use a separate bin to this side. I expect more
| sewage reuse in the future. Expect in ~50years time for it to be
| exceptional to release any sewage into nature.
|
| Apart from sewage being useful for irrigation, it's also a
| goldmine of minerals, and drugs to reclaim. I expect the same to
| happen with garbage dumps slowly. We already divert aluminum cans
| and paper, slowly the rest will be reclaimed too.
| the8472 wrote:
| Is this it? https://goo.gl/maps/mqtoyiSgzFbU8xkA6 Why would one
| call it 500 mile forest?
| SECProto wrote:
| The title and one place in the body call it 500 acre, while one
| other place calls it 500 mile.
|
| 500 square miles is 320,000 acres. (500 miles) squared is
| 160,000,000 acres.
|
| One other place in the body refers to 1,600,000 acres being
| viable to reforest.
|
| I think it was just a typo for 500 acre.
| WaitWaitWha wrote:
| And, the narrator, in the video at 5:49, calls it 240
| hectares, which is 593.0524 acres.
| johncalvinyoung wrote:
| 500 acres isn't very large.
| ThomasBHickey wrote:
| 640 acres/square mile
| whyenot wrote:
| Sewage water tends to be high in salt. Especially in a desert
| where there is high evaporation and low rainfall, irrigating with
| this type of water increases soil salinity, eventually to the
| point where it is toxic to native plants and most crop plants.
| They will get greenery and good growth for a while, and then as
| salt accumulates over the years, the plants will start dying and
| they will have poisoned the soil to the point where almost
| nothing will grow on it anymore.
|
| Great PR, but in the long term, it's a lousy idea. We have many
| decades of knowledge on how salination plays out in desert
| agriculture.
| reaperducer wrote:
| A lot of people eat food grown with recycled sewage and don't
| even know it.
|
| Every excretion flushed in the city of Chicago ends up as
| fertilizer on midwest farms. Mostly soybeans, IIRC.
|
| A lot of zoos sell their surplus animal dung in big bags called
| "zoo poo." It's used in home gardens and small scale community
| farms.
| userbinator wrote:
| When I was growing up, it was not uncommon for urine to be
| added to watering the plants as a fertilizer, but not feces; I
| believe the latter creates a significant problem of bacterial
| contamination.
| edflsafoiewq wrote:
| You can use nightsoil safely as long as you compost it long
| enough for pathogens to die off (2 years is good I think?).
| adrr wrote:
| Orange County, CA has a toilet to tap program that turns sewage
| water back into drinking water.
|
| https://www.ocregister.com/2015/02/24/yes-you-can-drink-it-a...
| weberc2 wrote:
| > Every excretion flushed in the city of Chicago ends up as
| fertilizer on midwest farms. Mostly soybeans, IIRC.
|
| Is this meaningfully true? My understanding is that the
| wastewater is treated and emptied into the Chicago river where
| it flows toward Missouri. Insofar as that water is rich in
| organic compounds, it "fertilizes" the fields that draw from
| that river and its distributaries; however, this model is
| different than the picture you paint, which sounds more like
| dumping more-or-less raw sewage directly on fields. If the
| latter is indeed the case, it's news to me, especially since I
| understand human sewage fertilizer to be prohibited as a health
| risk.
| reaperducer wrote:
| _Is this meaningfully true?_
|
| Yes.
|
| _My understanding is that the wastewater is treated and
| emptied into the Chicago river where it flows toward
| Missouri._
|
| The clean water goes into the Sanitary and Ship Canal. The
| solids fertilize fields.
|
| https://mwrd.org/mwrd-biosolids-compost-help-energize-
| ford-h...
| newnewpdro wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metropolitan_Water_Reclamation.
| ..
| lallysingh wrote:
| No parts of the sewage are filtered out and turned into
| fertilizer. At least that's how it works in ny.
| reaperducer wrote:
| Chicago is not in New York.
|
| https://news.wttw.com/2016/05/24/turning-wastewater-
| fertiliz...
|
| "What it does is essentially recovers the phosphorous and
| the nitrogen in the wastewater at the Stickney plant and
| coverts that into a high-grade, slow-release fertilizer
| that can be used for all sorts of agricultural
| applications."
| nielsbjerg wrote:
| What a brilliant idea. I wonder if the same method would be
| applicable for growing rice in dry areas?
| foxhop wrote:
| Great question!
|
| It's not safe to grow veggies and grains with human manures.
|
| For safety, the human manure should be used as an input
| feedstock for growing and expanding forest.
|
| Then we use the forest's outputs as feed stock for grains and
| veggies and fruits and trees.
|
| The forest outputs are leaves and wood, both of which may be
| processed into composts, or used as mulches for veggies,
| orchards, and grains.
|
| This is what I practice.
| fastbeef wrote:
| > It's not safe to grow veggies and grains with human
| manures.
|
| Not true. My wife does research on this and post-sewage
| treatment dried sludge actually has better values than some
| of the food the used as reference samples.
| ultimape wrote:
| Have you explored humaneur production? It strikes me that
| properly composting the waste ought to be enough to destroy
| any problematic bacteria. Would love to know what you ran
| into that may have prevented doing that. Been thinking about
| incorporating regenerative systems to build a food forest and
| trying to figure out safely handling biowaste. Even goose
| poop is potentially toxic.
| carapace wrote:
| Prions.
|
| It's just a superstition but I wouldn't eat veggies grown
| directly in human manure (although the guy has done and
| hasn't gotten the sponge-brain:
| https://humanurehandbook.com/ )
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prion
| foxhop wrote:
| Yes you can properly compost human manure, to make it
| safe... But the process is more complicated and involves
| processes which cannot be skipped. I would rather do less
| work and be safer.
|
| This means I simply don't use human manure on my
| agriculture crops, I use it in my forested areas.
|
| That said, I do use urine in my grass/leaf compost, and
| recently I started charging biochar with human urine. Urine
| is much safer that feces.
| Avamander wrote:
| There's not only problematic bacteria, there's parasites
| and pharmaceutical remnants.
| 6510 wrote:
| Being unfit for human consumption is actually a feature not a
| draw back. We need to trigger growth and get humans off the
| sand so that nature can do her thing.
|
| I met someone once who after sinking tons of his own money
| into projects argued you need poop and some kind of toxins to
| keep people and their goats away for at least 30-50 years.
| His experience was that people destroying everything scales
| much faster than constructive effort. You turn your back and
| everything is gone.
|
| Of course something is to be said for economically viable
| greening but if you just want to restore nature you should
| aim to do just that.
|
| I don't have the numbers here but I found calculating how
| many large trees you need to sustain 1 human vs how much
| electrolysis it would take pretty mind boggling.
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(page generated 2020-01-11 23:00 UTC)