Can Earthworms Solve the Water Scarcity Problem?

Nature Can Clean Our Polluted Water Efficiently and Inexpensively

Many farms, especially dairy farms, struggle with how to dispose of polluted wastewater. The hundreds of millions of gallons of water farms use gets contaminated with animal waste, artificial fertilizers, and harmful chemicals, which frequently percolate down to the groundwater that people could one day drink.

Some regenerative ag operations are finding a nifty solution to this problem. They are discovering that earthworms, those ubiquitous dirt-eaters, are also able to clean water. They have long been known as nature’s way of enriching soil, but only recently has it been found that they can also cleanse wastewater. 

BioFiltro, an international company, has installed more than 200 of their three-stage wastewater treatment systems. The first chamber contains wood chips, earthworms, and microbes. The second level filters the water through crushed rock, and finally the cleaned water is collected in a drainage basin. A dairy farm in Washington State pumps half a million gallons of manure and chemical-laden water through a BioFiltro vermifiltration unit each day. The worms devour all the manure and harmful chemicals while aerating the water and wood chips. The aeration by the worms prevents the chip layer from clogging and becoming anaerobic. The density of worms is around 12,000-18,000 per cubic yard. The dairy reuses this treated water 10 times.

Vermifiltrated water is highly nutritive, pathogen-free, and scrubbed of chemicals, qualifying it for use on crop fields. The key to this low-cost, efficient, and odor-free process is the earthworm. These workers live, on average, six years, have numerous offspring, and each one produces about 10 pounds of castings per year, a nutritious and valuable soil amendment. This vermicompost can produce an additional income stream for farmers or can be used on their own crops.

Traditional wastewater treatment is energy-intensive and generates around 5 percent of all greenhouse-gas emissions (GHG). In comparison, vermifiltration requires almost no electricity, thereby reducing GHG emissions by 91 percent. Astoundingly, earthworms remove more than 80 percent of nitrites in wastewater and reduce methane emissions by an even higher percentage.

Vermifiltration was recently approved to become a component of the California Department of Food and Agriculture’s Alternative Manure Management Program — a program that provides funding to farmers who install sustainable GHG-reducing systems.

Water is becoming an increasingly valuable and scarce resource. Climate change and droughts are further taxing the planet’s limited supplies of fresh water; 85 percent of fresh water is used in global agriculture. Vermifiltration offers great hope for cleaning, reusing and stretching our supply of water. It has even proven to be effective in treating industrial and municipal wastewater. Some scientists believe it to be one of the most promising efforts to stem the global water crisis.

A Win for Housing, Livability, and the Climate

California Is Starting to Reverse a Century of Policy That Has Shaped Our Cities

Cities across America have suffered from sprawl, degraded urban design, poor walkability, high housing costs, and economic injustice. Many factors contribute to these urban ills, but UCLA professor Donald Shoup makes a cogent case that parking requirements in zoning ordinances are the main culprit. Per professor Shoup, such mandates subsidize cars, thus leading to more driving and car ownership. Looking at numbers nationwide, there are eight parking spaces for every car.

A few weeks ago, Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law a bill eliminating parking mandates for residential and commercial developments located within half a mile of major transit stops. Cities in California (and elsewhere in the country) are facing a growing affordable-housing crisis. This legislation is an important win for housing and parking reform advocates, because parking requirements raise housing costs, eat up valuable land, and make communities less delightful places. This act to remove parking requirements is the first statewide effort to prioritize people and their housing needs over cars.

Starting a couple of decades ago, Santa Barbara began taking some tentative steps to reform parking mandates. Casa de las Fuentes on West Carrillo is a 42-unit, affordable rental complex, designed for downtown workers. Instead of the standard two parking spaces per unit, it innovated with just one and charged $50/month to any occupant who owns or has leased a car. Unbundling parking from condo or rental living spaces needs to be universal. Even with only one space per unit, the Casa’s covered parking is usually only half full.

Eliminating on-street parking reduces car trips, especially when accompanied by increased public transit. Copenhagen has removed 2-3 percent of its street parking each year for more than a decade with growing improvements to its economy and livability. In the past year, Oslo has removed more than 700 downtown parking places and replaced them with bike lanes, pocket parks, and sitting areas. Oslo’s ultimate goal is a total ban on cars in the city center. In Paris, the pandemic led to the mayor accelerating the plan to remove 72 percent of on-street parking and speed up the creation of more bike lanes.

California’s new parking reform law is not only helping with housing affordability and neighborhood livability but also reducing air pollution and greenhouse-gas emissions. As we move to more electric vehicles, it is still important to remove parking requirements and increase the fees charged for parking. Such changes lead to fewer vehicles being manufactured and the conserving of valuable finite resources. Moreover, fewer parking spaces mean cars are less dominant in urban design. Hopefully this California innovation will spread to other states, as often is the case when California takes the lead.

Eco-Friendly Cooling Equipment is Coming

Mechanical Cooling Needs to Use Less Energy and Avoid Dangerous Refrigerants

Heat waves are becoming more frequent, more extreme, and more widespread. Air-conditioning (AC) is ubiquitous in the U.S. (90 percent penetration), but not in Europe and many other regions where it is increasingly becoming a necessity. Outside the U.S., less than 25 percent of people in regions that merit AC have it. Consequently, the International Energy Agency expects AC energy consumption to triple worldwide by 2050.

Unfortunately, AC, in its current form, carries significant environmental costs: More demand for cooling leads to more warming of the planet. In addition, the refrigerants used in cooling condensers are 2,000-3,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide as a climate-warming agent when it leaks into the atmosphere.

Gradient Comfort, a San Francisco–based company, is tackling AC’s climate predicament — their mission is to push the industry to zero carbon emissions. Gradient has developed an innovative window cooling and heating unit that is both efficient and eco-friendly. It is a heat pump, a technology gaining in popularity for centralized heating and cooling systems because of energy efficiency, but such equipment tends to be bulky, expensive, and requires professionals to install. Gradient’s technology, however, offers a sleek, affordable, and compact alternative. 

The only Gradient model currently available (it only came on the market this summer) is a window unit. It sells for $2,000 compared to $5,000 or more for comparable units. Their saddle bracket fits on the windowsill of a single- or double-hung window and holds a sleek, attractive fan-coil unit on the inside while the evaporator heat pump is on the outside. Both components fit below the window, so that views are not obstructed. Housed with the fan coil is a quiet fan, eliminating any noise issues. The company is designing other models to fit other styles of windows, e.g., casement units. The unit is planned for do-it-yourself installation in 15 minutes with just a few basic tools. 

Gradient won the Fast Company’s 2022 World-Changing Ideas Award. The cooling component is 30 percent more efficient than traditional window units. When both heating and cooling are combined, the improved efficiency jumps to 75 percent. Another big plus is the refrigerant: Although still a hydrofluorocarbon, the fluid used by Gradient has a quarter the global warming potential of those used by other AC manufactures. They are working to improve their refrigerant even more.

The Gradient device is designed to use only the amount of energy required as it is turned up or down. It is also linked to Wi-Fi in order that it can be self-adjusted when there is heavy demand on the electric grid.

Although Gradient needs more improvements to reach its goal of zero greenhouse-gas emissions, it has taken big first steps in addressing the widespread flaws in existing systems: high cost, cumbersome installations, and unsightliness. These are important directions for widespread adoption of cooling including in less affluent areas of the world.

Impressions from a Month in France and Scotland

Climate and Resilience Issues Are Being Addressed in Impressive Ways

This summer’s heat extremes in Europe have set new temperature records, spread wildfires, and created public health issues. Fifteen thousand people died in France during the August 2003 heat wave. This summer, with even higher temperatures, no one has died in France. Big numbers have died in other southern European countries where there have not been the same kind of measures taken to protect citizens. The French government has created a comprehensive heat emergency plan as part of a larger scheme to address climate change and boost climate resilience. 

Swimming pools, bathhouses (dating back to the period before many French had bathrooms at home), and parks are open daily and with hours extending to almost midnight. Misting machines in parks, plazas, and other public spaces, often tied to fire hydrants, are set up to cool these areas and create fun places for children to play. “Heat wave kits” are sent to parents for their children and to older, at-risk people.

There is also a push to ban cars in French cities and make public transportation free during temperature spikes, but this has not turned into official policy yet.

The heat island effect makes French cities as much as 18 degrees Fahrenheit hotter than the rural hinterland. To counter this phenomenon, streets and sidewalks are being made more porous, thousands of urban trees are being planted, and roofs are being transformed into green, vegetated coverings. According to Le Parisien, a national newspaper, the temperature can differ 90 degrees F between an asphalt-topped roof and a green roof.

In Britain, railway engineers were painting iron train tracks white to reduce temperatures by 10-15 degrees F and minimize buckling. 

Circling back to climate change, Scotland set a target of 100 percent renewable electricity by 2020; they hit 97 percent. Wind generators contribute the major component of this renewable power, 66 percent of it from offshore wind farms. Although wind towers dot the Scottish countryside, careful siting prevents view corridors or protruding above ridgelines. Perhaps because of Scotland’s long history of civic involvement, the Scots have done better than the French in taking aesthetics into account when locating wind turbines. 

Scotland is finalizing a development formula by which local communities will get a percentage of the returns from wind generators and other renewables for education, health, and affordable housing budgets. One sees almost as many solar panels in Scotland as in Southern California, despite their far north latitude. Ocean current, tidal, and bio waste also factor into their clean energy mix