Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

This was worked out ages ago by John Todd in his work on what he calls "Living Machines"

> Over the past 27 years, John Todd Ecological Design has completed projects on five continents dealing with waterborne waste streams ranging from domestic sewage to industrial wastes.

https://www.toddecological.com/about

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    John Todd Living Machines Lecture
    Ecological Treatment Of Sewage
    Nov. 7, 2002, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA
    sponsored by Sustainable Pittsburgh

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wojrOpH5O7M

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John Todd, Living Machines

Carnegie Mellon University Robotics Institute

> John Todd is a pioneer in ecological design. He is an Emeritus Research Professor at the University of Vermont, and a Fellow at the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics. He is founder and chief scientist for JTED. John is well known for his design of closed loop, self-sustaining systems of waste water filtration based on real world ecological models.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hb5YZXYojSU

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John Todd - The Ecological Design Revolution

Bioneers

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LFXMH5ZbNK8

Very interesting - thank you for sharing his work. From my very cursory glance at Todd Ecological's homepage, their projects look scaled to individual residential and commercial wastewater filtration applications. I was hoping to see examples of filtration systems that would scale to entire regional watersheds, such as urban lakes.

In fact, this is something the [Beemats website](www.beemats.com] lacked as well: basic calculations to right-size their solution for a given body of water, flow rate, and nitrogen/phosphorous PPM. With that, you would know that so many square meters of plantings of X plant species would remove enough water pollution.

I would assume that these methods, based as they are on living ecosystems (which are all about scaling: every species is capable of exponential growth), that these scale well.

In any event, you might like this paper: "Ecological design applied"

John Todd, Erica J.G. Brown, Erik Wells

> The five case studies presented here represent applications of ecological design in five areas: sewage treatment, the restoration of a polluted body of water, the treatment of high strength industrial waste in lagoons, the integration of ecological systems with architecture, and an agriculturally based Eco-Park. Case #1 is an Advanced Ecologically Engineered System (AEES) for the treatment of sewage in Vermont, a cold climate. The facility treated 300 m 3 per day (79,250 gallons per day) of sewage to advanced or tertiary wastewater standards, including during the winter months. A number of commercial byproducts were developed as part of the treatment process. Case #2 involved the treatment of a pond contaminated with 295 m 3 per day (77,930 gallons per day) of toxic leachate from an adjacent landfill. ...

https://ewrel.fiu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2011/10/EcologicalD...

Thanks, it's good to see the top project is tackling fuel oil. Maybe that could work if/when we get serious about Greenpoint in Brooklyn.

https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenpoint_oil_spill

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