Lincoln greenhouse-tourist complex to be first in the province to use 'constructed
wetland' as a novel back-to-nature approach to treatment.
With a little help from literally thousands of cattails and other wetland plants,
a major greenhouse operation here will soon be the first in Ontario to use a
novel back-to-nature approach for treating its sewage.
Niagara Under Glass, a $23.5 million greenhouse-tourist complex now under construction
in Lincoln, has received approval from the province's Ministry of Environment
to treat its sewage and waste water using a 'constructed wetland' that will
purify the water enough to allow the greenhouse to use it again.
'It will be a closed-loop system that will work on an old principle - keep
it simple,' said John Albers, president and general manager of Niagara Under
Glass which will be completing the first phase of its 20,520 square metre complex
before the end of this year.
'With this (wetland) system, you are working with nature, you are not fighting
against it.'
The system, using thousands of wetland plants rooted in thick beds of sand,
is the brain-child of Niagara resident Edgar Lemon, a retired Cornell University
soil scientist who has been experimenting with ways of using wetlands to treat
sewage for the past eight years.
With the help of the Friends of Fort George, a Niagara-based group dedicated
to preserving historic parks, the Ministry of Environment and Regional municipality
of Niagara, the 78-year-old Lemon began testing the power of wetlands to treat
sewage effluent from his home town. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
became so impressed with the results - ministry test showed the effluent could
be cleaned to drinking-water standards - that it awarded Lemon about $100,000
US to see if he could get the wetland plants to work their magic through the
long, frozen months of winter.
Albers, a native to Lincoln who has worked most of his life in the greenhouse
business, also became impressed when he read about Lemon's experiments in local
newspapers a few years back.
'I went to Niagara-on-the-Lake to see (Lemon's) system for myself and at the
end of it was a tap with water running so clean, it looked like you could drink
it,' said Albers. 'Seeing is believing.'
Niagara Under Glass is not located near conventional sewer systems, so Albers
and his partner, Mike Duffy, had been looking for other ways of treating the
tourist attraction's waste.
When the facility's second phase is completed in 2001, it will include indoor
ponds, food and retail outlets and the builders hope to attract 200,000 visitors
annually.
The wetland system will be capable of purifying up to 18,000 litres of effluent
per day filtering it through one box after another until it is clean enough
to drain into two larger ponds full of cattails and other plants that will make
up part of the planned sprawling park.
Duffy said the purified water will be re-used in the greenhouses and washroom
facilities.
Drinking water will go through an additional treatment process know as reverse
osmosis. Altogether, the system will cost Niagara Under Glass about 420,000
to build. 'I'm pretty excited about this,' said Lemon of Albers 'and Duffy's
decision to use his approach, 'because I think these fellows are marching proudly
into the 21st century with this.' lemon's long-term dream is to see constructed
wetlands used to treat sewage from entire municipalities.
