A really beautiful imagery and story about purifying water by nurturing local biosystems in series. Instead of describing that, I’ll just plain copy a post by ellie (dyke arc) - I hope she’s ok with that.
just learned about this really cool thing:
“Hidden away from the picturesque beaches was the town landfill, including lagoons of toxic waste from septic tanks, which was being left to seep into the groundwater below. So Todd, then a 45-year-old biologist, decided to design a solution. […] Next to the lagoons, he assembled a line of 15 clear-sided fiberglass tanks, each about the height of a person, and filled them with water containing all the different life forms he could find from local ponds, marshes and streams – plants, bugs, bacteria, fungi, general gunk. The water could be pumped from one tank to the next, and the living matter inside them soon organised itself into a series of different ecosystems. Todd found that he could put in polluted water from the lagoons at one end of the line of tanks and by the time it came out the other end, 10 days later, it was clean enough to drink. Todd didn’t know exactly what was going on in those tanks – he would later discover that various microorganisms were finding uses for the toxins and heavy metals.”
[…]
“Todd’s latest proposal is his most ambitious yet, something he calls “the Fleet”. The idea is very simple, he says: a fleet of sailing vessels, each containing one of his eco-machines. These could be deployed to clean up coastal environmental disasters on site, wherever they are needed. Each sailing eco-machine, Todd says, is “an incubator of beneficial organisms into the environment surrounding it”. Each vessel would take polluted sea water and not only clean it but add helpful organisms and nutrients to it, such as diatoms, which he calls the “baby milk” of the marine food chain.”
[…]
"It is not just Todd who can vouch for their efficacy. Three years ago, under Todd’s guidance, the Dutch environmental restoration company the Weather Makers built their own eco-machine in Den Bosch, in the Netherlands, with 12 water tanks housed under a 50ft-diameter geodesic dome. They were seeking to process local water polluted by intensive farming into fertile, nutrient-rich water, and to desalinate marine sediments to use in their ecosystem regeneration projects in places such as the Sinai desert.
Just as Todd did in Harwich, the Weather Makers’ co-founder Ties van der Hoeven found the results were “amazing”. “Everything he said was just spot on, and certain things really overtook our expectations,” says van der Hoeven. “Everything is growing like crazy.” Tomato plants growing inside the dome with the treated water are 20-30% bigger than ones grown with groundwater, he says."