Weekly Article for Lakeville Journal and Millerton News

By Peter Riva
Copyright 2009 and All Rights Reserved
Date: Friday, May 22, 2009
Septic Systems for Carbon
Some centuries ago (indeed, still in some underdeveloped regions today), sewage used to pour
down lanes and open gutters in towns, slowly winding its way to fetid lagoons or open water. Most
houses had an outhouse over an open pit. When you drive around in today’s national parks, there are
outhouses still in operation. In most of the townships this paper reaches, individual homes have septic
systems which are, really, just a series of pipes connected to a hole in the ground. Okay, there’s a
collection tank, but the overflow from that goes to a leech field which dumps the biodegraded refuse
into the ground and, eventually, it filters back into the groundwater.

3,500 years ago, the first town-wide sewage collection system was built but it was not until the late
1800s that a sewage treatment plant was really developed. Since then, the development of processing
the sewage into grey water and black water – and the breaking down of the latter - has seen a series of
ongoing scientific breakthroughs. Since 1914, treatment plants have been commonplace in most US
cities and their lifestyle and financial benefit to communities has been proven, again and again. In fact,
having a town-wide sewage treatment system is the minimum requirement of most modern and
developing townships. Those without a septic system usually continue to plummet economically. How
successful are these septic systems nationwide as part of the economy? Some produce garden fertilizer
and pay for their upkeep, some produce 30-50% of the local electricity, some recycle grey water into
valuable fresh water (especially cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas) and some are designed as algae ponds
to turn CO2 into Oxygen. In fact, sewage treatment is a boon industry with actual profits, recapturing
valuable fertilizer, fueling mini-power plants and irrigating farms and fields.

The emission from large power plants burning fossil fuels (output = CO2), the exhaust from your car
or truck, the factories pumping out carbon emissions – all these are like the sewage street gutters of the
middle ages. And like the sewage back then – when they relied on the ocean or rivers to take all that
slimy material way – today’s carbon emissions are pumped into the atmosphere, that great ocean of air,
assuming it will somehow transport it to a place on the planet that will clean it up and recycle it.
 And it did, for centuries. Now, in this decade, however, there are more people alive today than ever
lived on the planet before collectively! There is simply too much atmospheric sewage for the vast ocean
of air to deal with. Purification is not about “the lungs of the earth” or vast pine forests or sea algae
anymore, it is about swamping the system and killing the very plants we rely upon to clean up our
smoggy output. Between acid rain, lack of environmental controls and our wasteful ways with energy
consumption, we’ve overburdened the system. What to do?

Create a new enterprise, new commercial models that make use of all this seeming waste. Like the
septic waste of yore that turns black sludge into liquid gold, we need to recycle the CO2 and CO into
useful industrial products or life-enhancing clean air. You can do this in two ways: you can capture it or
you can change it. If you capture it, you can use the CO2 and CO for chemical processes and
manufacturing – make things from it, everything from tires to plastics. If you change it, you can produce
oxygen for the air we breathe and compostable material to use as fertilizer. Hundreds of teams of
scientists and engineers are about to try and do just that, on a grand scale. A new time in industry has
begun – and, in America, we’ve been lagging behind after 8 years of “just say no” to anything
environmental.

In Sweden, at Vattenfall, they are finishing building a new coal-powered electricity plant. But it has
no smokestack. Instead, the smoke from burning the coal is pumped underground into disused mine
shafts that act like huge propane storage tanks. In those conditions of heat and pressure, the fumes
release much of the soot and heavy metals (which can be re-mined later), leaving the CO2 to be
extracted into a chemical plant for manufacture with nitrogen (from the air) into fertilizer for farmers. If
it works, the $1billion pant will supply 30% of Sweden’s fertilizer needs at about 60% of normal cost for
farmers. Cheaper food, cleaner air, healthier environment.

Meanwhile, two American scientist teams are testing genetically-modified algae placed in a car’s
muffler which absorbs the CO2 and nitrous oxide, grows and releases oxygen and hydrogen in the form
of water vapor. And the algae your car makes? Again, good fertilizer, cheap fertilizer.

The most cutting-edge comes from UCLA Professor Omar M. Yaghi who has created zeolitic
imidazolate frameworks, or ZIFs, which can be applied on the inside of smokestacks. ZIFs trap and store
CO2 emissions. You can then collect them, repaint the smokestacks, and recycle the CO2 into – you
guessed it – transportable chemical compounds for industry and farming.

The point is, we need septic systems for the air we pollute just as much as we needed them for
human waste. And, like healthy septic systems for human waste, these too can be turned to profit.