Trees Make Us Better, Not Just the World
============================================================================
Originally posted at:
http://www.knee1.com/news/mainstory.cfm/326
Trees Sweeten the World
While the nation's parks and recreation spaces are a focal point for Healthy People 2010, Richard Killingsworth, MPH, director of the Active Living by Design and associate research professor in the Department of Health and Behavior and Health Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, wants us to think more in terms of our every day lives: how we might get more activity in just by going about our business.
"Unfortunately, physical activity has been engineered out of our daily lives," Killingsworth told the Trust for Public Land. In our haste to pave paradise when we were moving from the farm to town in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we got a bit overzealous.
Kathleen Wolf, PhD, a research social scientist in urban forest environment and behavior at the University of Washington (UW), talked to us about the problem. "With all the concern about obesity and physical activity, the transportation industry is having to rethink how streets are designed because people want to walk to get physical activity," she said. "So the research is starting to come out on how streets with trees on them affect this.
"The walk-ability of a community depends on the density of service nodes in a block, but it seems that the tree factor is part of that as well," said Wolf. "Studies at the Texas Transportation Institute at Texas A&M found that parents who have school-age children are more inclined to encourage the kids to walk to school if the route is lined with trees.
"Also a team of graduate students at UW looked at residential neighborhoods that had grocery stores in walking distance. They compared streets that were tree-lined to those that were not and found that residents perceived that that distance was less if there was greening. So people may be more inclined to walk if they think it's not as far."
Plant a Street Tree?
If you're inspired and want to be part of increasing what's known as the urban canopy, there are a number of national and local organizations that offer help. The National Arbor Day Foundation promotes the planting and maintenance of urban forests at www.arborday.org. Also, most cities and towns have various groups that will assist homeowners and communities interested in adding the joys of the urban canopy to their environs.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Why Energy Technology is Off to a Slow Start
============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/45098-why-energy-efficiency-is-a-difficult-sell
Seeking Alpha
Why Energy Efficiency Is A Difficult Sell
Monday August 20, 5:32 pm ET
Tom Konrad (AltEnergyStocks) submits: Two months ago, I was talking to an experienced entrepreneur who was exploring business models to provide geothermal heat pumps to households.
At first blush, it seems like a great idea. Geothermal heat pumps often have payback periods of under five years, which translates into internal rates or return in excess of 20% over the 30 year life of the system. With plenty of room for a business to recoup its cost of capital and leave some money on the table for the consumer, it's amazing that there isn't a company in every jurisdiction already active in the market.
In fact, sellers of geothermal heat pumps are few and far between. Google searches for "buy geothermal heat pump" and "buy geoexchange" (an alternate name) drew less than 300,000 hits combined, while searches for "buy furnace" and "buy air conditioner" drew over 2,500,000 hits each. Why is that?
Barriers to Energy Efficiency
When I spoke to the same prospective geothermal heat pump entrepreneur again a month later, he told me he couldn't figure out how to make money on the deal. Nor can I. The economics work best with new construction, but builders have no incentive to save their customers money on their utility bills. In a case study from Delta-Montrose Rural Electric Association [DMEA], a progressive Colorado electric cooperative, they identified purchase cost as the main barrier to adoption. DMEA was able to overcome that by financing the systems for their members (customers) with a payment on their monthly utility bill, something they are in a unique position to do, because they are also the electric utility.
Most utilities will not support energy efficiency programs without regulatory intervention. Since energy efficiency programs reduce the total electricity sold, and electric rates are set by regulators, without decoupling, energy efficiency measures reduce the utilities profits. A utility helping its customers reduce their usage would be like General Motors encouraging people to carpool so they could buy fewer cars.
Utility rate decoupling can fix this disincentive for a utility to work with consumers to reduce their usage, but a mental shift is also necessary for utilities to take on the challenge of working with customers to help them reduce their rates. After all, DMEA is one of a very few rural electric cooperatives with an aggressive energy efficiency program. Despite the fact that the co-ops are owned by their members, and so, unlike investor owned utilities, they should be more interested in their customers' welfare, some investor owned utilities (usually spurred on by regulators -- coops, because of their mutual structure, are mostly unregulated), as wells as municipally owned utilities, which are much more likely to embrace energy efficiency programs.
Eric Hirst of Oak Ridge National Laboratory identifies these barriers to energy efficiency improvements:
Click to Enlarge
Barriers to Improving US Energy Efficiency
For investor owned utilities (IOUs), the problems are mostly those of misplaced incentives, and attitudes. When the state regulator changes the incentives, a well run IOU will quickly change its attitude. IOUs are in business to make money, and so they respond to incentives. For a rural cooperative, I believe the main barriers are attitudes, awareness, limited ability to obtain an process information, and possibly perceived riskiness. Since co-ops are responsible only to their members, and their customers are typically even less educated about the potential for improved efficiency to increase their well being than the utility that serves them, there is no reason for the coop to change its way of doing business. Co-op boards' main incentive is to keep their members happy. Often the simplest way to do that is my keeping them ignorant.
Barriers for Business
The landscape for a traditional business to make money for energy efficiency is different. The main barriers confronting a business, such as an entrepreneur wanting to sell geothermal heat pumps, will be problems of misplaced incentives and the attitudes, awareness, perceptions, and general level of knowledge of their potential consumers.
Continuing with the heat pump example, if an entrepreneur tries to sell the ground source heat pumps to homebuilders, who would be able to install it most cheaply and thus achieve the highest rates of return, he is confronted by misplaced incentives. The builder will not be able pay the future utility costs of the house he is building, and so does not have any incentive to pay extra for a system from which he will not receive the benefit. If the entrepreneur attempts to sell the heat pump to the homeowner, he is confronted with the difficulties of drilling holes for the geoexchange loops next to an existing home, which will greatly increase the price of the system and lower the effective rate of return. If, despite this, the system still has an attractive rate of return, he will still be confronted by the homeowner's limited access to capital or, if he finances the purchase for the customer, there will be the inconvenience and added cost of billing the customer on a regular basis (an inconvenience that DMEA was able to avoid by including the costs in their electric bill.)
There are Opportunities
This is not to say that businesses will never be successful at selling energy efficiency measures to consumers, only that it takes more sophisticated business models and an understanding of the barriers to adoption for the business to succeed. One type of business that has been successfully overcoming these barriers for a long time are performance contracting companies, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. By providing its members with comfortable homes rather than simply electricity, DMEA is in some sense following the performance contracting model.
For investors, it is important to understand that a product has to be more than just financially compelling to be successful in the marketplace. I think the compact fluorescent light bulb [CFL] is an excellent example of how compelling economics are not enough to ensure the adoption of a product. For CFLs, the economics are clear; the energy savings for a 14 watt bulb used just two hours a day amount to around $3 a year, which is more than the current price of a bulb which will last a decade or more. Even in the late 1990s, when such a bulb cost three times as much, the internal rate of return for the investment exceeded 30% per annum, which is comparable to the returns that were captivating investors in tech stocks at the time.
Despite these economics, and countless endorsements from Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, and the US Department of Energy, CFLs currently only have around 5% of the US market. You'd think that endorsements as powerful as those would have people rushing out to buy them.
While CFLs are not suitable for some applications (outdoors in cold climates, and places where they will experience a lot of vibration such as ceiling fans, which leads to premature breakage), these weaknesses do not account for our slowness to adopt them. Instead, I believe the barriers to adopt them are Hirst's behavioral barriers. For a $2-3 bulb, access to capital is clearly not the problem, but perceived riskiness is definitely part of it: CFL's mercury content has earned them much bad press; (they actually contain less mercury than they save by reducing usage of coal plants), despite the fact that the mercury content is much lower than traditional fluorescent bulbs about which I have never heard a complaint regarding mercury... except from people who don't want to got to the trouble of disposing them properly.
There are often also complaints about light quality, which was indeed a problem with early bulbs. Recent ones, however, uniformly out scored an incandescent bulb in a blind test by Popular Mechanics in several measures of light quality. In my mind, I feel the real motivation for consumer resistance is fear of change. While the returns are gigantic when phrased in terms of a return on investment, in absolute terms the gains from using compact fluorescents are fairly small, just a few dollars a year per bulb. For that amount of money, most people are not willing to go to the mental effort required to change an ingrained way of doing things, and so they latch on to any "reason" not to change they find, and use it to justify it to themselves.
It's cynical, but I believe that your average person would rather waste hundreds of dollars rather than change his habit and learn something new.
Energy Efficiency Success Stories
If I am right that the slow progress of CFLs is really resistance to change, we can use that information to figure out which energy efficient technologies will be most successful: not the ones that have the best economics, but the ones that require nothing of the people who purchase them to do nothing more than provide the cash. Performance contractors and DMEA's heat pump program have been relative successes because they ask so little of customers. It's interesting to note that DMEA includes a "Geoexchange Comfort Club" or social aspect to their program. I wonder how many people joined the program just to get a free dinner.
This, I believe, is the secret behind the runaway success of the Prius. Although Toyota is lambasted for it today, the early ads for the Prius emphasized that, unlike the doomed EV1, it never had to be plugged in. But on the financial side, there is much debate about how much money they save you, if any. When stacked against hybrids, comparable diesels get similar mileage for lower upfront cost,, and for serious global warming fanatics like myself, they have the advantage of being able to burn biodiesel without any modification. Yet people look at me strangely when I tell them I have a Jeep Liberty diesel, but they're impressed that I bought a Prius in 2001.
Another example of convenience trumping cents is solar power. Solar domestic hot water [SHW] has been around since the '70s, and the financial rate of return varies from 5% to 20%, depending on a wide variety of factors. Solar Photovoltaics [PV], on the other hand, has a financial return of between 1 and 5%, depending mainly on rebates (these are all my calculations; your results may vary, but there is a strong consensus that SHW is a better financial bet than PV.) Yet again, PV is popular, and SHW is a "hidden gem" pushed by earnest environmentalists.
Yet people are used to complex electronics in their lives, but the plumbing is something they only see when there is a leak and they have to call a plumber. So while PV is much higher tech than SHW, electronics are something people are used to, while plumbing (NYSE: SHW - News) is something they only associate with inconvenience.
The Bottom Line: It's Not the Bottom Line
When it comes to selling energy efficiency to consumers, businesses need to remember that the financial and environmental outcomes are only a tiny part of most consumers decisions. Recent evolutionary psychology research implies that people do good deeds as a strategy to attract mates, and so they want to be seen doing those good deeds.
Businesses that realize that the good energy efficiency does for the environment is a better selling point will succeed where businesses peddling economics will fail. Why was the Accord Hybrid discontinued and Hybrid SUVs are struggling while Prius sales hit records? I believe it's because they are not conspicuously green. People want to be seen to be green a lot more than they want to save a few dollars on gas. The Japanese who buy fake solar panels don't ask about the payback period. Many PV installers have already realized this, and they have learned to counter arguments about the economics of PV by asking, "What is the payback period of granite countertops?"
This lesson can also be turned on its head. By making energy efficiency an item for display, just like a Terrapass window decal, energy efficiency can become something people aspire to. When our utility bills are on the internet for everyone to see, that's when we'll see geothermal heat pumps and Built Green and Energy Star homes take off. Even infrared images of homes posted on Google Street View might do the trick. Efficiency needs to be conspicuous to sell well.
============================================================================
originally posted at:
http://seekingalpha.com/article/45098-why-energy-efficiency-is-a-difficult-sell
Seeking Alpha
Why Energy Efficiency Is A Difficult Sell
Monday August 20, 5:32 pm ET
Tom Konrad (AltEnergyStocks) submits: Two months ago, I was talking to an experienced entrepreneur who was exploring business models to provide geothermal heat pumps to households.
At first blush, it seems like a great idea. Geothermal heat pumps often have payback periods of under five years, which translates into internal rates or return in excess of 20% over the 30 year life of the system. With plenty of room for a business to recoup its cost of capital and leave some money on the table for the consumer, it's amazing that there isn't a company in every jurisdiction already active in the market.
In fact, sellers of geothermal heat pumps are few and far between. Google searches for "buy geothermal heat pump" and "buy geoexchange" (an alternate name) drew less than 300,000 hits combined, while searches for "buy furnace" and "buy air conditioner" drew over 2,500,000 hits each. Why is that?
Barriers to Energy Efficiency
When I spoke to the same prospective geothermal heat pump entrepreneur again a month later, he told me he couldn't figure out how to make money on the deal. Nor can I. The economics work best with new construction, but builders have no incentive to save their customers money on their utility bills. In a case study from Delta-Montrose Rural Electric Association [DMEA], a progressive Colorado electric cooperative, they identified purchase cost as the main barrier to adoption. DMEA was able to overcome that by financing the systems for their members (customers) with a payment on their monthly utility bill, something they are in a unique position to do, because they are also the electric utility.
Most utilities will not support energy efficiency programs without regulatory intervention. Since energy efficiency programs reduce the total electricity sold, and electric rates are set by regulators, without decoupling, energy efficiency measures reduce the utilities profits. A utility helping its customers reduce their usage would be like General Motors encouraging people to carpool so they could buy fewer cars.
Utility rate decoupling can fix this disincentive for a utility to work with consumers to reduce their usage, but a mental shift is also necessary for utilities to take on the challenge of working with customers to help them reduce their rates. After all, DMEA is one of a very few rural electric cooperatives with an aggressive energy efficiency program. Despite the fact that the co-ops are owned by their members, and so, unlike investor owned utilities, they should be more interested in their customers' welfare, some investor owned utilities (usually spurred on by regulators -- coops, because of their mutual structure, are mostly unregulated), as wells as municipally owned utilities, which are much more likely to embrace energy efficiency programs.
Eric Hirst of Oak Ridge National Laboratory identifies these barriers to energy efficiency improvements:
Click to Enlarge
Barriers to Improving US Energy Efficiency
For investor owned utilities (IOUs), the problems are mostly those of misplaced incentives, and attitudes. When the state regulator changes the incentives, a well run IOU will quickly change its attitude. IOUs are in business to make money, and so they respond to incentives. For a rural cooperative, I believe the main barriers are attitudes, awareness, limited ability to obtain an process information, and possibly perceived riskiness. Since co-ops are responsible only to their members, and their customers are typically even less educated about the potential for improved efficiency to increase their well being than the utility that serves them, there is no reason for the coop to change its way of doing business. Co-op boards' main incentive is to keep their members happy. Often the simplest way to do that is my keeping them ignorant.
Barriers for Business
The landscape for a traditional business to make money for energy efficiency is different. The main barriers confronting a business, such as an entrepreneur wanting to sell geothermal heat pumps, will be problems of misplaced incentives and the attitudes, awareness, perceptions, and general level of knowledge of their potential consumers.
Continuing with the heat pump example, if an entrepreneur tries to sell the ground source heat pumps to homebuilders, who would be able to install it most cheaply and thus achieve the highest rates of return, he is confronted by misplaced incentives. The builder will not be able pay the future utility costs of the house he is building, and so does not have any incentive to pay extra for a system from which he will not receive the benefit. If the entrepreneur attempts to sell the heat pump to the homeowner, he is confronted with the difficulties of drilling holes for the geoexchange loops next to an existing home, which will greatly increase the price of the system and lower the effective rate of return. If, despite this, the system still has an attractive rate of return, he will still be confronted by the homeowner's limited access to capital or, if he finances the purchase for the customer, there will be the inconvenience and added cost of billing the customer on a regular basis (an inconvenience that DMEA was able to avoid by including the costs in their electric bill.)
There are Opportunities
This is not to say that businesses will never be successful at selling energy efficiency measures to consumers, only that it takes more sophisticated business models and an understanding of the barriers to adoption for the business to succeed. One type of business that has been successfully overcoming these barriers for a long time are performance contracting companies, which I wrote about a few weeks ago. By providing its members with comfortable homes rather than simply electricity, DMEA is in some sense following the performance contracting model.
For investors, it is important to understand that a product has to be more than just financially compelling to be successful in the marketplace. I think the compact fluorescent light bulb [CFL] is an excellent example of how compelling economics are not enough to ensure the adoption of a product. For CFLs, the economics are clear; the energy savings for a 14 watt bulb used just two hours a day amount to around $3 a year, which is more than the current price of a bulb which will last a decade or more. Even in the late 1990s, when such a bulb cost three times as much, the internal rate of return for the investment exceeded 30% per annum, which is comparable to the returns that were captivating investors in tech stocks at the time.
Despite these economics, and countless endorsements from Al Gore, Oprah Winfrey, and the US Department of Energy, CFLs currently only have around 5% of the US market. You'd think that endorsements as powerful as those would have people rushing out to buy them.
While CFLs are not suitable for some applications (outdoors in cold climates, and places where they will experience a lot of vibration such as ceiling fans, which leads to premature breakage), these weaknesses do not account for our slowness to adopt them. Instead, I believe the barriers to adopt them are Hirst's behavioral barriers. For a $2-3 bulb, access to capital is clearly not the problem, but perceived riskiness is definitely part of it: CFL's mercury content has earned them much bad press; (they actually contain less mercury than they save by reducing usage of coal plants), despite the fact that the mercury content is much lower than traditional fluorescent bulbs about which I have never heard a complaint regarding mercury... except from people who don't want to got to the trouble of disposing them properly.
There are often also complaints about light quality, which was indeed a problem with early bulbs. Recent ones, however, uniformly out scored an incandescent bulb in a blind test by Popular Mechanics in several measures of light quality. In my mind, I feel the real motivation for consumer resistance is fear of change. While the returns are gigantic when phrased in terms of a return on investment, in absolute terms the gains from using compact fluorescents are fairly small, just a few dollars a year per bulb. For that amount of money, most people are not willing to go to the mental effort required to change an ingrained way of doing things, and so they latch on to any "reason" not to change they find, and use it to justify it to themselves.
It's cynical, but I believe that your average person would rather waste hundreds of dollars rather than change his habit and learn something new.
Energy Efficiency Success Stories
If I am right that the slow progress of CFLs is really resistance to change, we can use that information to figure out which energy efficient technologies will be most successful: not the ones that have the best economics, but the ones that require nothing of the people who purchase them to do nothing more than provide the cash. Performance contractors and DMEA's heat pump program have been relative successes because they ask so little of customers. It's interesting to note that DMEA includes a "Geoexchange Comfort Club" or social aspect to their program. I wonder how many people joined the program just to get a free dinner.
This, I believe, is the secret behind the runaway success of the Prius. Although Toyota is lambasted for it today, the early ads for the Prius emphasized that, unlike the doomed EV1, it never had to be plugged in. But on the financial side, there is much debate about how much money they save you, if any. When stacked against hybrids, comparable diesels get similar mileage for lower upfront cost,, and for serious global warming fanatics like myself, they have the advantage of being able to burn biodiesel without any modification. Yet people look at me strangely when I tell them I have a Jeep Liberty diesel, but they're impressed that I bought a Prius in 2001.
Another example of convenience trumping cents is solar power. Solar domestic hot water [SHW] has been around since the '70s, and the financial rate of return varies from 5% to 20%, depending on a wide variety of factors. Solar Photovoltaics [PV], on the other hand, has a financial return of between 1 and 5%, depending mainly on rebates (these are all my calculations; your results may vary, but there is a strong consensus that SHW is a better financial bet than PV.) Yet again, PV is popular, and SHW is a "hidden gem" pushed by earnest environmentalists.
Yet people are used to complex electronics in their lives, but the plumbing is something they only see when there is a leak and they have to call a plumber. So while PV is much higher tech than SHW, electronics are something people are used to, while plumbing (NYSE: SHW - News) is something they only associate with inconvenience.
The Bottom Line: It's Not the Bottom Line
When it comes to selling energy efficiency to consumers, businesses need to remember that the financial and environmental outcomes are only a tiny part of most consumers decisions. Recent evolutionary psychology research implies that people do good deeds as a strategy to attract mates, and so they want to be seen doing those good deeds.
Businesses that realize that the good energy efficiency does for the environment is a better selling point will succeed where businesses peddling economics will fail. Why was the Accord Hybrid discontinued and Hybrid SUVs are struggling while Prius sales hit records? I believe it's because they are not conspicuously green. People want to be seen to be green a lot more than they want to save a few dollars on gas. The Japanese who buy fake solar panels don't ask about the payback period. Many PV installers have already realized this, and they have learned to counter arguments about the economics of PV by asking, "What is the payback period of granite countertops?"
This lesson can also be turned on its head. By making energy efficiency an item for display, just like a Terrapass window decal, energy efficiency can become something people aspire to. When our utility bills are on the internet for everyone to see, that's when we'll see geothermal heat pumps and Built Green and Energy Star homes take off. Even infrared images of homes posted on Google Street View might do the trick. Efficiency needs to be conspicuous to sell well.
Saturday, October 20, 2007
Chicago sewer treatment plant fosters fish
===================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/fall2007/sponges.html
New Life in East Chicago
By Craig Vetter
In 1989, Peter Baranyai began seeing strange things in the wastewater treatment plant he runs. Today, his plant not only cleans water — it raises wild fish.
Thirty-five years ago, Peter Baranyai took what he thought would be a temporary job at the East Chicago Sanitary District Wastewater Treatment Plant. He’d grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a swath of nine square miles on Lake Michigan’s southern shore that, to this day, is dominated by sprawling rust-colored steel mills, oil refineries, and the tank farms that surround them.
At age 58, Baranyai, whose father worked in the mills, now runs the wastewater plant. A tall, thin, soft-spoken man with receding gray hair, he knows every pipe, pump, and tank in this state-of-the-art facility. His job is to ensure that 15 million gallons a day of wastewater from East Chicago residents and industries get clean enough to be returned, through a long, straight channel, into the Grand Calumet River. When his plant is done with it, the water is “very clean, top notch, class A,” according to Roger Klocek, senior biologist for the Shedd Aquarium.
But Baranyai isn’t what you might expect a wastewater plant manager to be, some strict pragmatist devoted to absolute sterility and shining, clean surfaces. When nature invited itself into his plant, not only did he let it be, he let it change his whole philosophy about what it means to run the place. By his own admission, he now thinks of himself as a naturalist first and a wastewater plant manager second.
Sponges and salmon video
Flash Player 8 or greater is required for this video. Download Flash Player for free.
Baranyai’s shift began in 1989, a year and a half after the East Chicago plant had changed its final disinfection process. The water district had invested $19 million to overhaul the plant, to comply with federal Clean Water Act standards. Instead of adding chlorine to kill bacteria, which it had done for years, the plant started using long racks of powerful ultraviolet lights
“I was touring some grade school kids around the plant that October,” he says, “and we were looking into the effluent channel, where the water had drastically changed from a murky beige to crystal clear since the new treatment plant and the ultraviolet system had been in use. I looked down, and saw this 30-inch fish, and I was amazed. After it died, we had it identified. It was a Chinook salmon.”
It would be another two years before the full surprise of what was happening would hit Baranyai and the biologists he invited to investigate.
“I was looking into this disinfection contact chamber right here,” Baranyai said, standing above three rectangular tanks that hold the UV lights, the last chamber before the water reaches the channel. “I noticed this weird material among the aquatic plants on the walls and floors of the chambers.”
He called Tim Early of Purdue University’s Aquatic Resource Center, who braved the final disinfection chamber wearing air-tight scuba gear. He identified thousands of freshwater lake sponges, Ephydatia muelleri, in colonies 10 to 20 times larger than those normally found in Lake Michigan.
“Nobody thought the water could be clean enough to support the sponges,” says Baranyai, “but the walls were just encrusted.”
Watching the salmon dart and ferry
Watching the salmon dart and ferry, one can forget that this is
an urban effluent channel, not a country stream.
Photo: Peter Baranyaii
The sponges — actually colonies of small, primitive animals — were flourishing on the microscopic dead bodies of the billions of bacteria being sterilized by the UV lights and washing down the channel. A sponge the size of a little finger can pass 30 liters of water a day through its body, pulling organic material and certain metals from the water and extracting the chemicals it needs for growth.
On his dive, Early, who has since passed away, investigated the tank walls, which by this time approximated a coral reef, complete with clouds of small fish two to three inches long. These fingerlings were more Chinook salmon, an introduced species, one of the most highly prized game fish in the Great Lakes.
Salmon, of course, return to their birthplace to spawn. Since the fingerlings were genetically related and the same age, the biologists concluded that they had been born to parents that had migrated 6.2 miles from Lake Michigan, up the effluent stream, and into a 200-foot exit pipe against a swift flow. The salmon then had to jump a four-foot waterfall into the contact chamber, which became the nursery for their young.
“They’ve been back every October and November since then,” Baranyai told me with a quiet pride as we stood on the verdant edge of the effluent stream. “Last year we had over 200 salmon.” No one knows for sure why the salmon come here. Speculation is that smell and water temperature attract them, along with their tendency to search out the smallest part of a stream in order to protect their spawn from predators.
Some 18 years since the switch to UV, the now annual salmon run is only part of the story. Perhaps a more important sign of the river’s road to recovery is the appearance, according to surveys by the Aquatic Resource Center and Klocek, of white sucker, smallmouth bass, pumpkinseed, and rock bass, all native Illinois fish. Especially promising is the spawning of state-threatened river redhorse, which requires clear, clean water for survival. Recent surveys have also found daphnia, a small, shrimplike crustacean dependent on good water quality, in the water filters for seven months in a row. It isn’t known whether the daphnia’s presence is the result of the sponge colonies.
Sponges help keep things clean
Despite their looks, lake sponges actually help keep things
clean by pulling organic materials and metals from the water.
Photo: Peter Baranyai
The surrounding land has changed too. “These banks were just an arid stretch with nothing growing before we stopped using the chlorine and went to ultraviolet,” says Baranyai. “Now we have 95 species of birds out here, deer, snapping turtles, a colony of beavers, even coyotes. This ecosystem was unimaginable when I was a kid. To me, it means that the Clean Air and Water Acts have brought government, industry, and environmentalists together in a way that is really beginning to show some results. It’s great that our plant is a part of that.”
Forty feet wide and 700 feet long, the effluent channel today looks more like a small stream. Even the occasional exposed wall of concrete appears more like a rock cliff than the industrial structure it is. It’s easy to see how this plant has changed Baranyai’s perspective on what and where nature can be. These days he’s regularly out photographing and observing the animals. He’s excited to play such a large role in this natural process and believes it can be replicated in other treatment plants.
“Do you give the fish names?” I ask Baranyai.
He smiles. “No,” he says, “but I am very protective of the fish. Not long ago we had this government inspector out here, an avid fisherman, who asked me if he could go fishing in the effluent channel. I told him absolutely not.”
===================================================================================
originally posted at:
http://www.chicagowildernessmag.org/issues/fall2007/sponges.html
New Life in East Chicago
By Craig Vetter
In 1989, Peter Baranyai began seeing strange things in the wastewater treatment plant he runs. Today, his plant not only cleans water — it raises wild fish.
Thirty-five years ago, Peter Baranyai took what he thought would be a temporary job at the East Chicago Sanitary District Wastewater Treatment Plant. He’d grown up in East Chicago, Indiana, a swath of nine square miles on Lake Michigan’s southern shore that, to this day, is dominated by sprawling rust-colored steel mills, oil refineries, and the tank farms that surround them.
At age 58, Baranyai, whose father worked in the mills, now runs the wastewater plant. A tall, thin, soft-spoken man with receding gray hair, he knows every pipe, pump, and tank in this state-of-the-art facility. His job is to ensure that 15 million gallons a day of wastewater from East Chicago residents and industries get clean enough to be returned, through a long, straight channel, into the Grand Calumet River. When his plant is done with it, the water is “very clean, top notch, class A,” according to Roger Klocek, senior biologist for the Shedd Aquarium.
But Baranyai isn’t what you might expect a wastewater plant manager to be, some strict pragmatist devoted to absolute sterility and shining, clean surfaces. When nature invited itself into his plant, not only did he let it be, he let it change his whole philosophy about what it means to run the place. By his own admission, he now thinks of himself as a naturalist first and a wastewater plant manager second.
Sponges and salmon video
Flash Player 8 or greater is required for this video. Download Flash Player for free.
Baranyai’s shift began in 1989, a year and a half after the East Chicago plant had changed its final disinfection process. The water district had invested $19 million to overhaul the plant, to comply with federal Clean Water Act standards. Instead of adding chlorine to kill bacteria, which it had done for years, the plant started using long racks of powerful ultraviolet lights
“I was touring some grade school kids around the plant that October,” he says, “and we were looking into the effluent channel, where the water had drastically changed from a murky beige to crystal clear since the new treatment plant and the ultraviolet system had been in use. I looked down, and saw this 30-inch fish, and I was amazed. After it died, we had it identified. It was a Chinook salmon.”
It would be another two years before the full surprise of what was happening would hit Baranyai and the biologists he invited to investigate.
“I was looking into this disinfection contact chamber right here,” Baranyai said, standing above three rectangular tanks that hold the UV lights, the last chamber before the water reaches the channel. “I noticed this weird material among the aquatic plants on the walls and floors of the chambers.”
He called Tim Early of Purdue University’s Aquatic Resource Center, who braved the final disinfection chamber wearing air-tight scuba gear. He identified thousands of freshwater lake sponges, Ephydatia muelleri, in colonies 10 to 20 times larger than those normally found in Lake Michigan.
“Nobody thought the water could be clean enough to support the sponges,” says Baranyai, “but the walls were just encrusted.”
Watching the salmon dart and ferry
Watching the salmon dart and ferry, one can forget that this is
an urban effluent channel, not a country stream.
Photo: Peter Baranyaii
The sponges — actually colonies of small, primitive animals — were flourishing on the microscopic dead bodies of the billions of bacteria being sterilized by the UV lights and washing down the channel. A sponge the size of a little finger can pass 30 liters of water a day through its body, pulling organic material and certain metals from the water and extracting the chemicals it needs for growth.
On his dive, Early, who has since passed away, investigated the tank walls, which by this time approximated a coral reef, complete with clouds of small fish two to three inches long. These fingerlings were more Chinook salmon, an introduced species, one of the most highly prized game fish in the Great Lakes.
Salmon, of course, return to their birthplace to spawn. Since the fingerlings were genetically related and the same age, the biologists concluded that they had been born to parents that had migrated 6.2 miles from Lake Michigan, up the effluent stream, and into a 200-foot exit pipe against a swift flow. The salmon then had to jump a four-foot waterfall into the contact chamber, which became the nursery for their young.
“They’ve been back every October and November since then,” Baranyai told me with a quiet pride as we stood on the verdant edge of the effluent stream. “Last year we had over 200 salmon.” No one knows for sure why the salmon come here. Speculation is that smell and water temperature attract them, along with their tendency to search out the smallest part of a stream in order to protect their spawn from predators.
Some 18 years since the switch to UV, the now annual salmon run is only part of the story. Perhaps a more important sign of the river’s road to recovery is the appearance, according to surveys by the Aquatic Resource Center and Klocek, of white sucker, smallmouth bass, pumpkinseed, and rock bass, all native Illinois fish. Especially promising is the spawning of state-threatened river redhorse, which requires clear, clean water for survival. Recent surveys have also found daphnia, a small, shrimplike crustacean dependent on good water quality, in the water filters for seven months in a row. It isn’t known whether the daphnia’s presence is the result of the sponge colonies.
Sponges help keep things clean
Despite their looks, lake sponges actually help keep things
clean by pulling organic materials and metals from the water.
Photo: Peter Baranyai
The surrounding land has changed too. “These banks were just an arid stretch with nothing growing before we stopped using the chlorine and went to ultraviolet,” says Baranyai. “Now we have 95 species of birds out here, deer, snapping turtles, a colony of beavers, even coyotes. This ecosystem was unimaginable when I was a kid. To me, it means that the Clean Air and Water Acts have brought government, industry, and environmentalists together in a way that is really beginning to show some results. It’s great that our plant is a part of that.”
Forty feet wide and 700 feet long, the effluent channel today looks more like a small stream. Even the occasional exposed wall of concrete appears more like a rock cliff than the industrial structure it is. It’s easy to see how this plant has changed Baranyai’s perspective on what and where nature can be. These days he’s regularly out photographing and observing the animals. He’s excited to play such a large role in this natural process and believes it can be replicated in other treatment plants.
“Do you give the fish names?” I ask Baranyai.
He smiles. “No,” he says, “but I am very protective of the fish. Not long ago we had this government inspector out here, an avid fisherman, who asked me if he could go fishing in the effluent channel. I told him absolutely not.”
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