It's a living (machine, that is)

A few weeks ago a few of us visited a facility north of Muncie, Indiana, that was built, or at lease paid for, by the creator of Garfield the Cat, Jim Davis, at his corporate site know as PAWS. With the urging of Russ Vernon, whose business card reads "Horticulturist/Plant Manager" and who also helped design the system, the folks at PAWS have built a "living machine." [NOTE: See picture posted above on Feb 10.]

We didn't meet Jim Davis, but I bet we would have stumped him with some of our questions. On the other hand, Russ took on every question with practiced ease. He has been describing his waste processing system to visitors for fourteen years.

Instead of a large septic system to handle solid waste from the PAWS campus, the living machine, with only a monthly infusion of purchased bacteria, and a system to maintain a desirable temperature in a few of the tanks, has transformed all of the site's sewage waste --toilets, showers, and kitchens-- into water that could be drunk and an occasional small amount of sludge, too small even to need regulation. The system handles the mostly business-hours waste for about fifty people.

I won't describe it in detail in this entry but I will note a few things, especially one that surprised me.

There was no --zero, nada, zilch-- detected odor of sewage in the building. The building had a climate and aroma more like that of a greenhouse.

There are a series of tanks with various green plants floating in them, a lagoon with fish and more plants, and a "marsh" with various live and dormant plants in it. (The visit was in January.) The predominate plant was the water hyacinth which I later learned is very useful for composting, especially those taken from a living machine that will have absorbed extra neutrients.

We have been discussing how we would deal with sewage at Raccoon Creek and still don't have the final answer, but incorporating a living machine is now something we are seriusly considering.

Since we have decided we will build a community building of some sort, why not incorporate a living machine into the front side of it?

Many areas in passive solar buildings might, at best, hold a seating area and some plants. We are now thinking at least the final stages of a livnig machine --the lagoon and the marsh-- might be a beautiful place to enjoy the plants and the humidity (in the winter) while also performing an essential task for the community. The initial tanks in the system and the pumps that aerate all of the tanks could be housed in a room outside of this green house-like section if necessary for the esthetics of the design.

Further, the ultmate system can be built in stages. By that I mean, we could build two or three parallel systems, essentially replicas of each other, as they were needed. This step-wise approach would serve two purposes. It would allow us to pay for the separate systems as they were needed and as funds became available, and, after the second system was in place, it would give us redundancy in case one system had to be taken off-line for maintenance of any sort. (By the way, Russ told us his system hasn't failed once in fourteen years!) We could build each system as the number of members approached the processing capacity of those installed already.

Each building at Raccoon Creek would be connected to the living machine just as one would connect a typical home to a municipal sewage system.

If you'd like to read my full notes on the visit to the PAWS site, send me an email message at rcc@netdirect.net. It's about 150 80-character lines. I'll send it as a plain text attachment.