DREER Travel Report - January 2011

Brisbane Floods


On January 14th Brisbane suffered the
greatest flood since 1974, and event
short of becoming the largest flood recorded
in history had locals not learned
their lesson in the previous flood. This
time around the Wivenhoe Dam saved
the third largest city in Australia from
a catastrophe resembling the one in
Toowoomba’s “land tsunamy” only 70
miles west of Brisbane.


In this dump site, I counted 14
refrigerators. Although homes and
businesses were destroyed, many businesses
now have thrived as they help in
the rebuilding of Brisbane. One business
which benefited from the floods
was Paul’s Veticon Consulting, as we
were called into people’s homes near
the river to stabilize and rebuild their
grounds.



River bank Stabilization



This house in Kenmore, an affluent area adjacent to the Brisbane river where water from the floods had risen up to 15m suffered a complete landslide on their originally vegetated sloping bank. Thanks to a group of about 200 volunteers on the day after the flood, they managed to fill up the steep drop with white plastic sand bags. Instead of treating this as a temporary, ugly solution, the owner decided to consult Veticon on how to convert this pile of bags into a stable green landscape.


The first step was to reorganize the sandbags in the form of terraces, then to cover them with an organic jute for initial stabilization and which would also hide the obstinate white bags. After that, they planted the slope with Vetiver at a density of about 10 plants per m2. Holes were made through the jute and the sandbags, and Vetiver was planted with a little bit of soil and fertilizer.



Calm after the storm


Paul wanted to visit various projects to verify that they had survived the storms in Brisbane. With welcoming arms this client in Samford brought Paul proudly showed us how his resilient vetiver landscape had once again held back against the force of his house and the runoff coming down from the mountain. This was an exceptionally expensive project because of the $100,000 rock wall holding the base of the hill with the Vetiver stabilization representing about 10% of the total cost.



Multifunctional Landscaping





After having some inicial involvmenent with planting
vetiver in Woodlands, this suburban housing
project the landscape architect took iniciative and made
use of the multifuncionality of the plant, both for
decoration and for absorbing pollutants in retention
ponds. This lagoon was part of a swale system planted
with Vetiver and natives that surrounded a park.


Brisbane Floods






Storr street chanel in Laidley was initially
built to drain the 400 m3/sec
of runoff that collected during peak
storms. This point of intersection
where upland runoff met was constantly
eroded until vetiver rows were planted
along the contours causing water to
back up behind the hedges and slowly
filter through the reeds, as shown in the
botom right picture. Even during the
brisbane flood, when the house behind
this text was an island surrounded by
water and the water came up the level
shown in the bottom picture, these vetiver
rows remained intact.




Our Asian Neighbors


Chinese new year in China town (note the vetiver plants in the pond)


Yum Cha! (Not a fan of the chicken feet though)


Celebrating Australia Day - Jan 25

Dreer Travel - November & December

WATER TREATMENT USING CONSTRUCTED WETLANDS





The first month of my time in Australia included some intense labor under the sun, which caused my tan to darken by a few shades and my muscles to soar early in the mornings as we took on the construction of 56 miniature wetlands at a waste water treatment plant. To some such an activity might sound like a dreadful experience, but those who know me well enough probably already figured out that such experiences are just my cup of tea. If you take a look at the second attachment, you will find a paper explaining the materials and methods for this experiment whose goal was to screen 6 plant species to be used in a type of constructed wetland called Macrophyte Sludge Drying Bed. The following paragraphs, however, describe the actual experience of building the wetlands and demonstrate how this project has taught me the principles behind constructing a well-designed experiment.


project intro
This all startded with Johannes Biala from the Organic Force who wanted to find out what plants would best fit in a large scale macrophyte sludge drying bed in southern Queensland. The goals of the project were therefore:
1. To compare the ability of different species to survive in septic sludge drying beds with rising sludge levels.
2. Assess whether native wetland plants of Queensland that are not dormant in winter are more effective than Vetiver and Phragmites in the stabilization and drying of sludge.

selecting the plants

Not knowing much about wetland plants or about Australian Species, I decided to consult a book written by Australian Nick Romanovsky called Planting Wetlands and Dams: A practical guide to wetland design, construction and propagation in Australia. Although the most commonly used plant worldwide in macrophyte sludge drying beds, reed beds, and other constructed wetlands is Phragmites Australis (not a native plant, despite its name) Romanovsky says that “it would be more sensible to research the wide variety of fast-growing, nutrient responsive, evergreen plants available in Australia than to continue using plants chosen in very different climates under very different limitations” (Romanowsky, 1998). By this he means, we should not assume that just because other wetlands in the world use Phragmites, by default we should use it too. Therefore six plant species were chosen for this trial in order to compare the effectiveness of different species in accelerating sludge stabilization and sludge drying, as well as in tolerating rising sludge levels. Vetiver was chosen because it is known to transpire a lot of water and because as sediments accumulate in the top, the crown of the roots will continue to emerge from the ground and rise accordingly. Phragmites australis, or common reed, was also included because it has already been used for this purpose before and would make a good standard for the sake of comparison. The rest of the plants, Bolboschoenus fluviatilis – Stream Club Rush, Lepironia articulata – Blue Spike Rush, Schoenoplectus mucronatus – Tall Rush, and Philydrum lanuginosum – Frogsmouth, are all native Australian wetland plants that will probably tolerate rising sludge levels, completely saturated soil and will remain green in the winter (as opposed to Vetiver and Phragmites which will turn brown in the winter of Southern Queensland).

finding materials

Professor Margaret Greenway, from Griffith University, has been working in a similar experiment at the same sewage treatment plant, where she has been testing the success of certain natives and non-natives in bioswales to tolerate polluted stormwater. Although our design ended up being much simpler than Prof. Greenway’s, we most certainly benefited from having hers as a reference. As for the acquisition of materials, much to our fortune, Johannes managed to get the wheelie bins for free, which certainly reduced the cost of the project by quite a bit. After getting them all together, we decided that we needed another 8 bins, which ended up being a bright yellow rather than dull green… hopefully a change in the aesthetic of the bin will not skew our results!

labor in Australia
One thing that shocked me about Australia is that people are not interested in doing much physical labor. The minimum wage is as high as $15/h but you won’t get anybody sweating their hands and wearing out their backs under the Australian sun unless you pay them $20/hour. Coming from a country where the labor force is abundant (Guatemala) and people will happily work for $8 a day, the idea that very few people are willing to put in some labor for such a large sum of money was quite absurd to me. I of course would have gladly gotten the $20/h, but being a volunteer, I offered my muscles for the grand total of $0.00.

A controlled experiment

In order to get an appropriate standard deviation in an experiment once we start getting results, it is important to have a trial and a control with a minimum of three replicates for each. However, because this experiment takes place outside and not in a controlled greenhouse, we decided to use four replicate bins for the trial and control, giving us a total of eight bins per species. Because we had 6 species and one repeated vetiver species, we had to construct a total of 56 mini constructed wetlands. More information on the expected outcomes and plans for this experiment are found in the second attachment “Materials and Methods for Macrophyte Screening”. I learned it is extremely important to fill the bins with the exactly same amounts of gravel, sand and soil, that they receive the same amount of irrigation and sun, and that they be an exact replicate of each other so that the only variant is the plant species planted in the bin.

Vetiver (big) Vetiver (small) Phragmites australis Lepironia articulata Phylidrum lanuginosum Schoenoplectus mucronatus Bolboschoenus fluviatilis

Irrigation
The final stage for setting up the experiment was to establish the irrigation system, which we managed to install almost completely but for the final connection to the faucet, which ended up being extremely complicated. However, because it has been raining so much in Queensland, as you probably have heard, the completion of the irrigation system has not been a priority.


MUCH TO LEARN

During the time when we were not shoveling gravel, driving on the left lane, looking for random irrigation equipment, or signing in and signing out of the Loganholme water treatment plant, I was reading all that I could put my hands on about biology, water treatment, wetland ecosystems and constructed wetlands around the world. One very special book that I have been meticulously studying is the first of three volumes of the 10th international Conference on Wetland Systems for Water Pollution Control. Some basic information that I found is that most constructed wetlands are categorized under Vertical Flow Reedbeds, Horizontal Flow, and Surface Flow, and it is crucial to select the right type of wetland based on the quality and quantity of water, land availability, population and budget. In a paper about Thailand, I found a creative wetland with the shape of a butterfly and flower meant to be used as a park and visual amenity. This to me of course, alludes to my original intent in constructing wetland-parks that can also be visually appealing.

The problem with diving into this subject on my own is that although I have no problem understanding the layout and basic structural concepts behind constructed wetlands, when it comes to grasping the difference between Nitrite, Nitrate and Total Kjedahl, BOD and COD, and the meanings of TS, ppm, heavy metals, field capacity, surface tension, soil available water, osmosis, Redox, and BOD5 m-2 d-, I had to ask Dr. Paul Truong to give me an overview on agronomy and water properties. I was very worried about not understanding these concepts, and wondered if it would be necessary for me to get a degree in that covers such material, but according to Paul all I need to do is be proactive so that whenever I don’t understand something, I just look it up on the web as if I was looking it up on a dictionary, and eventually I should be able to grasp these terms and their values.

VISITING VETIVER PROJECTS AROUND QUEENSLAND


In addition to giving me a course on agronomy for dummies, Paul also drove me around to visit a few of the sites where he has planted Vetiver for various purposes as part of his business Veticon Consulting. A lot of the technical reports on these sites have already been written, so if you wish to have a copy let me know (therefore I will write about the things I remember and wrote down rather than being extremely thorough in my explanation of the sites).

Toogoolawah



The Toogolawah wastewater treatment wetlands were built to polish wastewater so that it would comply with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) licensing conditions. Its daily output is of 0.3 Mega Liters (an Olympic sized pool is 2.5 ML), with Nitrogen concentration of 30-80 mg/L , and Phosphorus level of 10-20 mg/L (or parts per million, ppm). The primary treated water first goes into an imhoff tank (where I am standing to take the picture above) which is meant to separate the sludge from the effluent and dump it into the sludge drying beds seen at the bottom right of the photo. The effluent then goes into three ponds planted with Vetiver around the edges that help reduce N & P concentrations. In the middle of the pond, you will see the sunken skeleton of one of 21 Vetiver planted pontoons that were supposed to use the roots to help absorb the nutrient load in the water. After flowing through these ponds the effluent gets pumped into two outlets at the top of the hill, where water then flows into a 1.5 hectare field planted with vetiver on each 3m contour (which helps spreads the water across the slope), as shown on the adjacent map. Vetiver is so successful at absorbing the water in this wetland, that it manages to completely consume the pond effluent before getting to a river at the right. Samples taken towards the middle of the hill had already reduced levels to 1-4 mg/L of P and 4-6mg/L of N, which is evidenced in the way that the first rows of Vetiver had much more abundant growth than those at the end of the hill. I must mention that in order to keep the rows looking this neat, regular mowing and pruning is necessary.















Toogoolawah pontoons… a romantic but unfeasible idea

Pontoon floating structure


Removable tray for ease of maintenance

An advantage that you otherwise would not have by just reading Dr. Truong’s papers is listening to his dry humor when the truth comes out about how those bloody pontoons are no good. People spend immense sums of money to build them and plant them with Vetiver so that they can watch them romantically flow across the ponds back and forth, but in truth, when you consider the cost-benefit ratio, pontoons are extremely complicated to build and usually fail. Vetiver can do a lot, but the one thing it cannot do is float… so when you try to defy buoyancy by artificially putting them on $1200 rafts, youre better off building another type of wetland.







Incitec – pontoons… a great nesting spot!




For those like me who do not know anything about ammonia, you might be interested to find out that Incitec Pivot, an industry here in Brisbane, can make explosives and fertilizers out of that same component, and ingeniously extract their raw material – nitrogen, straight from the air we breathe, which is composed of 78% nitrogen and only 20% oxygen. Because they produce fertilizers, one of their biggest problems with the EPA is the detention and filtration of their stormwater, to which they have allocated a great amount of funds and research. This included of course, the construction of some ever-evolving Vetiver pontoons, which were first built of a floating lattice with tucked in Vetiver pots whose roots had to force themselves through the plastic pot. Then the lattice was replaced for a flexible net where the plants could woven in without the pot. The next challenge is to figure out how to get the ducks to stop nesting on such a perfectly fit habitat for their babies.






Delfin Lend lease housing projects

Springfield Lakes


Forest Lake


We also visited two housing developments in Brisbane’s suburbs that embraced their natural landscape by preserving small creeks for stormwater drainage, forest corridors and enhanced views. Some of the nutrient rich and polluted runoff gets filtered through these swales before flowing into a pleasant lake at the center of the development. Initially though, these swales were not doing a proper job filtering the runoff, causing the lakes to develop algal blooms.

Hence Vetiver became an obvious solution and was therefore added to the greenery of these developments. The grass was planted along the edges of the lakes to prevent erosion, along the swales to help filter runoff before flowing into the creeks, and in some places it was planted for purely aesthetic reasons.
















Forest Lake erosion


How not to construct a check dam and where not to plant Vetiver


Successful flash flood control – Vetiver planted on gently sloping spillway

The voracity of this year’s storms created a lot of erosion problems in Queensland, and even affected me personally as I had to move out of my flooded room and into another house! Most erosion can be solved with simple engineering concepts and by planting Vetiver appropriately. The example above illustrates perfectly how two infrastructural projects using Vetiver of comparable cost can either succeed or fail in ameliorating flash floods using a check dam. The first picture shows Vetiver planted after the spillway, creating an undercutting beneath the falling water. Vetiver planted directly after the fall prevented water from eroding the riverbed downstream but it also caused water to divert perpendicular to the intended flow and create erosion along the edge of the creek. The second damming system on the right had Vetiver planted along the edge of the spillway, protecting the sloping wall from sediments, reducing undersurface erosion and also holding the rock and mortar wall in its place.



Vegetation was removed along the river edges and lined with rocks in order to clear views. This idea caused the edges to suffer erosion.


Vegetated swales where Vetiver was planted in perpendicular rows and Phragmites was allowed to colonize. This had a more interesting dynamic as water pushed the tall and mighty Phragmites reeds to the floor and caused some Vetiver grass to bend.


Vetiver tricks and tips learned at Forest Lake


Despite the fact that some vetiver will bend under such a calamity, the plant does have ways of regenerating itself and finding its way upward again. The interesting thing about this picture is that although Vetiver is known not to have rhizomes and is considered sterile, the only way for a new plant to naturally emerge from an old one is when the foliage bends as in this picture. This shoot emerging from the culm of another vetiver shoot can actually develop roots and generate a new plant!


Both of these developments were abundant with Vetiver, and for some reason the gardeners chose not to give it any maintenance. In this picture, you can appreciate the contrast of maintained vs. unmantained Vetiver. Pruning it halfway down the bottom once a year can render much more beautiful foliage (bright green grass) than if left to grow wildly (brown weedy grass behind). In these subtropical regions, Vetiver will turn brown after flowering, and the old foliage will actually remain there indeterminately as the new foliage emerges from the crown of the plant.

Loganholme river



The last visit I will mention in this report was at the Loganholme River. As you can see in the following picture of my finger, Australia suffers from some of the most inhospitable soil on earth. It took me about two minutes to actually get this sticky stuff off my finger! My point is, very few things grow on this soil, and when the greatest pest of all – humans, decide to come in and remove the plants that took ages to adapt and grow on this soil in order to accommodate our infrastructure, it becomes a huge challenge just to reestablish some form of vegetation there. If you look at the second picture, you might think that it could not really be that hard for plants to grow here, but look at the third picture and you will notice that this landscape used to be a sticky, white, impenetrable surface!
As you can see in the adjacent picture with Paul walking across the river, Vetiver has been planted perpendicular to the flow of water. This is meant to hold back the riprap that you see scattered on the riverbed. You will notice the gap in the middle of the Vetiver strip on the right is as a place where riprap managed to escape.


SIGHT SEEING IN AUSTRALIA


Wynnum mangroves – 15 minute run from where I lived


Blue Mountains – like the Grand Canyon with trees!

Research Trip - Chile & Australia

DREER TRAVEL AWARD - RESEARCH ON THE VETIVER SYSTEM


One of the greatest attributes of the Dreer award, is the responsibility that the recipients get of sharing our experiences and findings with other students, professors and friends. It was with excitement that I remember reading the reports of last year’s recipient, Stephanie Gautama, who revealed the structural intricacies and benefits of green wall technologies, and with sincerity explained the difficulty of maintaining alive that green blotch that we so easily draw into the designs of buildings and landscapes.

Santiago, Chile - Lush green wall that reminded me of Stephanie’s research.


Stephanie and I on a trip to Pondicherry, India


Tilapia ponds in Guatemala using Vetiver for filtration (rafts) and slope stabilization (front grass)



Now it is my turn to share with you all the knowledge that I might gain in the six months ahead, researching the use of the Vetiver plant (Chrysopogon zizanioides) in constructed wetlands, slope stabilization and as a key component for the Green Infrastructure that landscape architects often embed in the rhetoric of our designs. The original travel plan involved going to a conference in Chile, and from there traveling to Australia and finally to Vietnam. However, the future of my trips is yet to be determined, as the original trip to Vietnam had to be changed, due to safety concerns and also because the great Vetiver expert from Vietnam, Paul Truong, with whom I will be working, has been living in Australia for many years as an internationally renowned consultant for the Vetiver System (VS). Mr. Truong invited me to speak at a Conference in Chile and also found a place for me to stay in Brisbane, a city on the eastern coast of Australia, about 46o miles north of Sydney.

A T T R I B U T E S o f V E T I V E R



The following is a quick list of attributes adapted from Vetiver System Applications, Technical Reference Manual which should help you understand how a simple plant can be an answer to a lot of the most prominent environmental problems in tropical and subtropical areas of the world.

Origin: Southern India

Physical attributes: Tall grass with varying height from 0.5 to 3.0 m tall
Dense root system without rhizomes, can grow up to 3.6 m deep in a year
Flowers are sterile and plant is therefore non-invasive

Tolerance: High concentrations of nutrients (N and P), heavy metals; acid, alkaline, saline soils Herbicides & plagues
Temperatures of -15o to 60oC (5o to 140o F)
Complete saturation or drought
Fires

Intolerance:
Shade
Complete flooding of foliage for an extended period of time
Animal grazing (rabbits)

Uses:
Slope stabilization – Prevents erosion in barren land that is hostile to most plants
Effluent filtration – Absorbs 94% Phosphorus and 90% Nitrogen from water in 4 days
Phytostabilization – prevents heavy metals from moving to groundwater
Land rehabilitation – pioneer plant that helps improve soil and moisture for other plants
Buffer or barrier – prevents spreading of forest fires and pests into crops, slows water flow
Natural Terracing – contour planting accumulates soil behind the constantly emerging roots
Arts and Crafts – Thatched roofing, household products (chairs, hats, baskets etc)
Perfume – Essential Oil extraction from Roots

Facts:
One hectare of planted Vetiver can evaporate 279,000 liters/day
When used in civil works its cost is about 1/20th the cost of the traditional grey infrastructure
“A Living Soil Nail” – Average tensile strength of 1/6 of mild steel

To learn more about the Vetiver System applications, go to http://www.vetiver.org/TVN-Manual_Vf.pdf


C H I L E C O N F E R E N C E



Before leaving home, Guatemala City to go off to Chile’s capital Santiago, along with my two proud supporters (my mother and my grandmother), I had to prepare a series of documents for the First Latin American Vetiver Conference, where I presented my thesis Green Movement Against Green Water http://hdl.handle.net/1813/17514. In addition to preparing a presentation, an abstract and a summary of my thesis, I was also asked to translate some of the papers written in English into Spanish, which of course, helped me learn a lot of new information about Vetiver which I had not yet heard. The conference took place Oct. 14-16, an exciting time to be in Chile when after 69 days of being buried 700 meters underneath the surface, on Oct. 13th the 33 rescued miners became Chile’s new heroes.

A total of 18 speakers presented their research worldwide on Vetiver. One of the speakers was Her Royal Highness Princess Maha Chakri Sirindhorn of Thailand, the patron of the Vetiver grass worldwide who has followed her father’s legacy in promoting and teaching people about the beneficial attributes of this plant, which has helped shape and preserve the landscape of her country. At the conference, I finally met Dr. Paul Truong from Brisbane, Australia, probably the most prominent leader in the research and proclamation of the Vetiver System Applications.

The panelists openly shared all the knowledge they had about propagation, phytoremediation, filtration, crafts, slope stabilization, land rehabilitation; all of them proclaiming how in their case, this simple plant had enhanced the quality of life of their communities. I will not mention all of the panelist’s work, though I would be glad to share the information I obtained with anyone who requests it. I will however, mention some of the reasercher’s work which I had not yet read about in the Vetiver System Technical Reference Manual.


The first was Naulchavee Roongtanakiat, a Thai lady who had conducted painstaking research on the phytoremediation and phytostabilization capabilities of Vetiver in Thailand. This topic is of course very interesting to the eyes of a landscape architect who might want to learn about green solutions for cleaning up a site that is considered uninhabitable due to its fatal soil qualities. Vetiver can play a major role in phytoremediation, a process which according to Roongtanakiat “it can cost as little as $15-$4o per cubic meter, whereas excavation and removal can cost $100-$400 per cubic meter”. Because of its intense foliage and tolerance to toxic elements, one vetiver eco-type called Surat Thani might be good for retaining pollutants within their roots so that they don’t spread and contaminate aquifers, while another ecotype Ratchaburi might be better for absorbing these elements into its foliage, a process that is accelerated when pruning the foliage all the way to the bottom every so often, forcing the leaves to absorb the contaminants.


Another presentation which provided me with some brand new information was that of Mr. Jorge Londoño, from Colombia, who had been planting Vetiver for stabilization and combining it with a legume called Pinto Peanut (arachis pintoi) in order to aid in the replenishing of nitrogen to the depleted soil. The latter plant also prevents weeding from occurring and gives the Vetiver roots a better chance to grow without being overcast by the shade of the towering weeds. Mr. Londoño also uses an eco-mortar for the initial stabilization of the slope, which is flexible and will allow the plants as well as the wet earth to expand without much cracking.


The final presentation that truly helped understand the basics of vetiver planting was given by a Venezuelan who used a series of simple diagrams to explain the how erosion occurs and exactly how Vetiver should be planted in order to achieve its full potential. He also showed a stunning series of pictures of a roadside hill improvement where the severe erosion problems were completely stabilized with a combination of careful contour planting of Vetiver and a series of check dams. This most ambitious bioengineering project really gave Vetiver plants a chance to prove themselves!




I was the last to present my research (I’d like to think it was because they left the best for last :) which dealt with sustainable strategies for the remediation of a eutrophic lake near Guatemala City that has been severely affected by the most heavily impacted watershed in Central America. One of those strategies was of course using the Vetiver plant as a form of green infrastructure to help stabilize riparian zones and filter water pollutants. This presentation ended up being significantly different to the technical and hands-on experiences of most speakers, and was, for the most part, a study of precedents which could be applicable to Guatemala, a watershed management plan and a pilot park that applied various Vetiver strategies into the landscape. Despite the fact that this was a purely conceptual presentation, people in the audience found a new vision for how we can bring this green infrastructure technology to the next level of landscape architecture design. (Poster in spanish)


C H I L E S I T E V I S I T S


My trip in Chile also involved visiting some of the few sites where Vetiver had been installed. Contrary to all the wonders we had been hearing about Vetiver, the wilting plants did not seem to agree with the weather so far south of the equator. The freezing temperatures of the winter season (which in October had just come to an end) had caused the foliage to turn brown, but new shoots starting to emerge indicated that the roots were still alive. This is where I learned another lesson about Vetiver: as long as the crown of the roots does not freeze, the plant will regenerate year after year.

Another problem we encountered in a site visit where the plant was being used for slope stabilization, was that the small brown rows of wilted vetiver leaves would barely be visible amidst the dense weeds that had started to colonize the ground. On one hand, these weeds were good because they indicated that Vetiver had successfully created the right conditions for plant life to begin growing there again, but on the other hand, the weeds, being adapted to the climate, were thriving in the early spring, competing too much with the Vetiver saplings emerging from the crown. Paul Truong, who was called to assess the success of these projects, concluded that perhaps they should help the newly planted Vetiver by removing weeds with a pesticide or manually just this year, so that the plant would have a chance to establish a better root system. They also concluded that it would make sense to plant in the spring, around September and not right before the winter season, which was the main reason for failure in this project.


A U S T R A L I A


I was picked up from the Brisbane airport by a German couple, Johannes and Ingrid, whom Paul Truong knew via working with them in a Vetiver project at a company called Gelita which produces gelatin. Johannes, the creator and owner of a consulting company called “The Organic Force” has done work with reedbeds using Vetiver to help aid in the dewatering of sludge (see diagram of reedbeds on right). In addition, this German couple is going to provide me with housing during my time in Australia. Both of them have been very kind in including me in a lot of their daily activities, where I had the opportunity to go to a very interesting forum titled ‘Adopting Organic Waste – to – Energy Technologies in the Food Processing Industry’, which was organized by the Queensland Department of Employment, Economic Development and Innovation.
After stopping by the gold coast and going for a swim in the chilly waters, they took me to the Gelita factory, which had been producing 13,009 m3 of sludge in 2009 and about 1.3 megaliters of wastewater with high loads of Ammonium, Calcium, Sodium and Chloride per day. The company invests a lot of money in trying to filter this water but still has a big problem disposing of the sludge, and they were therefore looking for more affordable and environmentally friendly alternatives. Johannes then was hired to design and build three 40’ by 4’ reedbeds with a depth of 1.5’ as a pilot project. Although the trials ended up working OK for a while, they became poorly managed making the sludge and Vetiver unmanageable.
In addition to the reedbeds, Gelita had a large field planted with Vetiver which was being irrigated with the factory’s effluent in order to increase the evapotranspiration rate. Although the Vetiver at the moment might not seem very promising on this field due to the recent passing of winter, it is the only plant that is surviving Gelita’s highly contaminated effluents. According to Johannes, most of the Vetiver trials at Gelita are too large in scale for being pilot projects, making them hard to manage and hard to compare with the more conventional filtration methods. Therefore, my task during my stay will involve working on a brand new project, at a sewage treatment plant where we are going test the effectiveness of Vetiver, Phragmites and a few native Australian plants in containerized reedbeds (more to come next report).


In the meanwhile, as I wait for the hard work to start, I have started educating myself on the basics of water health, the different types of conventional water treatment technologies such as sand drying filter beds and effluent irrigation fields, and more “green” technologies, such as constructed wetlands and subsurface reedbeds. Every day the pile of books to read on my desk grows, and every day my brain gets filled with ideas for how I might be able to apply these technologies in the field of landscape architecture.



C O N C L U S I O N


Why I appreciate this experience: As landscape architectural students, in college we learn to think through the clicking of our fingers to design macro-level spaces without really comprehending the chemical, biological and physical changes that might take place. We develop a concept that is supposed to adapt, morph, grow and improve the world throughout time, but as students we really aren’t confronted with how these designs might fail, or how much understanding, diligence and patience it really takes to make them work. Even some of the books we read on Sustainable Urban design, that talk about the need for creating a closed-loop, regenerative system, have very few specifics for how we can make these ideas work.
What I hope to acquire from the Dreer travel award is the actual experience of seeing, feeling and smelling the impacts that people have had on a landscape and understanding how much work it actually takes to reestablish the land to a condition vaguely similar to what they used to be before.