By Michael Shaw, Executive Director of Ocean Arks International, Burlington, VA, USA. More information and pictures of Living Machines® >>

Michael Shaw

We call it a living machine as opposed to a dead machine because all the parts are alive. What happens under the water surface is more important than above. The roots of the plants are the lungs and cover substantial areas. We have a whole systems approach and do not know what is going on under the surface. In many ways we do not try to understand because these systems are so complex, that they self-manage by themselves.

I want to talk about one particular plant that we have in Australia. The M&M Mars factory, a company called Master Foods, taking in 1300 different ingredients and producing about 300-350 grocery products. One of the most difficult to treat is the mayonnaise for Kentucky Fried Chicken throughout the Far East. It is difficult but luckily it is mixed with cranberry juice that is bottled there. So there is lots of sugary water that is very easy to treat. Input into the system is about 400 m³ per day, this will increase to 800 m³, it is about 6000 BOD (Biological Oxygene Demand).

The first part of the system is a dissolved aero flotation (DAF) which floats off the grease, mainly from the mayonnaise plant. That goes to an upflow sludge branket anaerobic digester that generates the methane and gives the BOD a good treatment with really low energy input. From there it goes on to a living machines train which are these tanks out in the open. Which are plants, fish, snails and the whole of these engineered ecologies.

One of the interesting things is that there is some sludge generated in the system and is collected in 1 m³ canvas bags called coffee filters. All of the bags go to a worm factory used mainly for land restoration, some of the worms go to aquaculture and is very good for fish farming. The UESB produces gas which currently flared up as it is not yet quite economical take it back into the plant for steam production. But with the new double sized factory, built within a few years, it will be economical and will generate gas worth AUS$100,000 per year.

The last tank has a TSS (solid waste) of less than 5 and a BOD of less than 10 (6000 BOD coming into the system in the beginning). Nitrogen is not very significant and virtually undetectable here.

A pond at the end of the system takes effluents and some of that goes to a fishpond where the fish is grown entirely on solids (the sludge generated from system).

The system produces methane gas and a biofilter takes the smell away from the anaerobic digester. The open aerobic digester produces a lot of cut flowers. The water coming out of the system is used for cleaning pallets, trucks etc. and for fish. Mars is one of the leading producers of pet food in the world with the brand SHIBA. Fish in the system is experimentally grown for SHIBA pet food.

One of the other technologies we have been working is a floating technology. This is a floating version of the system described above. This is a very efficient system and has worked well in restoring polluted waters. The floating systems are powered small wind turbines and PDS.

This system is now applied in the Chinese city Fuzhou for 800 people living in the city center. The city has no sewage system, it all floats into the surrounding waters. The city is beautiful but the smell from the polluted water is absolutely incredible. With our floating systems we can treat the water for US$10 per person per year. In the USA we do the capital investments for a sewage plant from US$80 per person. Financed over 20 years, the cost would be about US$25 per person per year for sewage treatment.

The last example is another industrial application where the waste is from a chicken processing plant from a company called Tyson, one of the biggest chicken producers in the US. What we are doing here is an application of the bioremediation technologies to treatment. In this system we are using floaters and wetlands.

The reactor for treating the waste has three areas of planted reactors with a very high surface area. Under walkways are reactors made out of polypropylene cloth with a very high surface area. This type of system is very effective at treating both industrial and municipal waste. This plant has an output of 4000 m³/day and the cost of the restorer installation is about US$750,000, the final wetland will take the cost to about US$1,000,000. Also, the existing system uses 500 Hp of kinetic energy, this system only uses 50 Hp.

I believe this system offers great potential. Over lunch we talked about how to transfer these technologies to the developing world. All the materials in the system could be made locally with local materials and plants. This is very important as the systems are tremendous at reducing fecal matters and viruses in waste water. Since I began talking, if you believe the UN figures, 1400 children have died, 45,000 children die per day from preventable disease. 300 of these are dying from water born diseases. So it is very important that we think of transferring this technology to places where it could really make a huge difference. Sure, we can treat Tyson's waste and do a great job, but how can we use that same technology in places like China. One of the big difficulties is financing as they can not even afford US$10 per person per year. In some of the poorest countries in the world they are down to US$0.5-1 to do anything about their environment at all.

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