The Province of Manitoba recently released its water quality standards regulations for 2012.

The Manitoba Water Quality Standards, Objectives, and Guidelines set out water quality conditions that will protect water quality for various uses including fish and other aquatic life, sources of drinking water, irrigation and livestock watering, and recreation.

The province-wide standards saw changes in acceptable levels of phosphorus and nitrogen for 2012. Under the new province-wide nutrient standards a 1 mg/L phosphorus limit applies immediately for all new, expanding or modified wastewater treatment facilities. Existing wastewater treatment facilities serving more than 2,000 people or equivalent due to industrial contributions will be required to meet a 1 mg/L phosphorus limit by Jan. 1, 2016.

Nitrogen removal to 15 mg/L is also required on a site-specific basis for new and expanding wastewater treatment facilities serving more than 10,000 people or equivalent load. No deadline was specified in the regulation.

Manitoba Water Stewardship has indicated that they will work with the City and other provincial departments to identify sources of funding for nutrient removal upgrading.

The City has applied for 50/50 funding from the Province for engineering design, and for 2/3 Canada-Manitoba infrastructure funding for the remainder of engineering and construction.

The City is expected to come up with a compliance plan later this year.

ST. JOHN’S, NEWFOUNDLAND AND LABRADOR–(Jan. 16, 2012)

Parliamentary Secretary Greg Rickford, on behalf of the Honourable John Duncan, Minister of Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development, announced an investment of approximately $700,000 to Miawpukek First Nation for water infrastructure upgrades and emergency management activities. Mr. Rickford was in St. John’s to meet with Aboriginal stakeholders to discuss economic development as part of the government’s coast to coast pre-budget consultation.

As a result of this funding, two major projects will be completed. The East Brook Bridge, which was seriously damaged by flooding, will be replaced and the existing water pumphouse will be upgraded. These upgrades, which include electrical and mechanical work, will provide continued water services to approximately 200 homes on reserve. Both projects are expected to be completed by March 31, 2012.

“I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Government of Canada for its contribution to the continuous well-being of our community,” said Chief Mi’sel Joe. “These infrastructure upgrades will not only improve our day-to-day lives, but will stimulate our local economy by creating new jobs and making our community more sustainable.”

Funding for these infrastructure projects is provided through Aboriginal Affairs and Northern Development Canada’s Emergency Management Assistance Program (EMAP), established to assist First Nation communities in managing emergencies, and the First Nations Water and Wastewater Action Plan.

By the end of 2013, the Government of Canada will have invested approximately $2.5 billion in water and wastewater infrastructure for First Nation communities since 2006. These investments have been made through the Capital Facilities and Maintenance Program, First Nations Water and Wastewater Action Plan and Canada’s Economic Action Plan.

Miawpukek First Nation was established as a reserve in 1987 and is located on the Island of Newfoundland. The community has 2,780 members, with an on-reserve population of approximately 830 members.

Profile of Miawpukek First Nation

This release is also available on the Internet at www.aandc.gc.ca.

DECADES ago, your correspondent visited one of the larger sewage works in the Thames Valley to learn how the new biodegradable detergents, with their long hydrocarbon chains, were affecting the plant’s filtration processes. The plant was coping just fine, he was informed. And the output was so good, it was piped straight back to local reservoirs for redistribution.

Each drop of water used by Londoners subsequently passed through the plant for reprocessing at least six times before eventually escaping to the sea. The engineer in charge was convinced that, with further refinement, the sewage works would be capable of recycling the same water indefinitely—with the quality improving with each treatment cycle. Offered a glass of the finished product, your correspondent thought it tasted a good deal better than the chalky liquid that spluttered from London taps (see “From toilet to tap”, September 26th 2008).

In America, the assumption is that, if recycled at all, reprocessed effluent is used strictly for irrigating golf courses, parks and highway embankments, or for providing feedwater for industrial boilers and cooling at power stations. The one thing water authorities are loathe to discuss is how much treated sewage (politely known as “reclaimed water”) is actually incorporated in the drinking supply.

The very idea of consuming reprocessed human, animal and industrial waste can turn people’s stomachs. But it happens more than most realise.

Even municipalities that do not pump waste-water back into aquifers or reservoirs, often draw their drinking supply from rivers that contain the treated effluent from communities upstream.

A survey done in 1980 for the Environment Protection Agency (EPA), which looked at two dozen water authorities that took their drinking water from big rivers, found this unplanned use of waste-water (known as “de facto reuse”) accounted for 10% or more of the flow when the rivers were low. Given the increase in population, de facto reuse has increased substantially over the past 30 years, says a recent report on the reuse of municipal waste-water by the National Research Council (NRC) in Washington, DC.

Along the Trinity River in Texas, for instance, water now being drawn off by places downstream of Dallas and Fort Worth consists of roughly 50% effluent. In summer months, when the natural flow of the river dwindles to a trickle, drinking water piped to Houston consists almost entirely of processed effluent.

The main problem is not changes in the weather (though global warming hardly helps), but population growth. The American population has doubled, to over 300m, since the middle of last century—and is expected to increase by a further 50%, to 450m, over the next half century. Meanwhile, households as a whole have been consuming water at an even faster rate, thanks to the housing boom and the widespread use of flushed toilets, dish washers, washing machines, swimming pools and garden sprinklers.

Then there is the ongoing migration within America from the cooler climes of the north-east and mid-west to the sunbelt of the south. Since 1970, Arizona, California, Florida, Nevada and Texas have seen their populations surge by 85% to 400%. This exodus to warmer, dryer parts of the country has coincided with a decline in the construction of hydrological infrastructure—dams, aquaducts, tunnels, pipelines and reservoirs—for collecting, storing and transporting water to precisely those parched places.

The fact is, there are simply no more ambitious water projects remaining to be tackled like those of the early 20th century, which pumped water from the Colorado River and the snow-capped Sierra Mountains across hundreds of miles of desert to the thirsty cities of the American south-west (see “Water, water everywhere”, June 25th 2010). Today, few lakes and rivers within pumping distance of the country’s conurbations remain untapped. Meanwhile, dams that help purify effluent in rivers—by holding back water for months on end so that microbial and photochemical processes can do their job—are being dismantled to restore natural habitats and protect threatened species.

Over the past quarter of a century, the amount of water used in the United States has remained stable at around 210 billion gallons (795m cubic metres) a day. While consumption by households has tripled since the 1950s, the amount of water used to irrigate agricultural land and feed industry has declined. Farmers have embraced more efficient sprinkler systems, put more crops under glass, planted more drought-resistant varieties, and profited from selling their surplus water to nearby towns. On the industrial side, the use of thermo-electric power—with its need for cooling water—peaked in 1980 and is now below its 1970 level. Meanwhile, many old water-using industries have upgraded from steam to electric power or moved offshore.

Conservation has also helped ease the demand for fresh water, though it comes nowhere near offsetting the thirst of the sunbelt’s surging population. The only conclusion is that, like it or not, people will have to get used to drinking their own effluent.

Read the rest of the article

“Our Government has delivered on our commitment to make the Gas Tax Fund a permanent annual investment of $2 billion,” said James Lunney, Member of Parliament for Nanaimo-Alberni, on behalf of the Honourable Denis Lebel, Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities. “This innovative project will benefit our watershed and ecosystem, and contribute to a sustainable water supply for the Oceanside area.”

Aquifer Storage and Recovery (ASR) is a relatively new technology that is intended to manage peak demands and reduce overall demand on water treatment plants. The project will help excess water from the Englishman River flow through the treatment plant, and into wells. In the summer months, water will be withdrawn from the wells and pumped into the distribution system.

“If the analysis of this project proves successful, we will be able to reduce the future water treatment plant capacity by about one-third,” said Joe Stanhope, Chair of the Englishman River Water Service Management Board. “This technology will also allow the quantity of water taken from the Englishman River during the summer months to be reduced, on average, by 50 per cent. This will assist in maintaining the minimum fisheries flow in the lower reaches of the river, and will provide an important supplemental source of water to meet future need.”

“The federal Gas Tax Fund will allow the Englishman River Water Service to research this innovative ASR technology not only for the residents of our region but also as a first for British Columbia,” said Chris Burger, Mayor of the City of Parksville. “We are excited to be given this opportunity which will allow us to efficiently store drinking water at a lower cost.”

“It’s good to see the Gas Tax Fund supporting such innovative approaches for plans to capture and store drinking water,” said Ida Chong, Minister of Community, Sport and Cultural Development. “The regional district should be commended for future thinking in considering the long-term water needs of area families.”

Canada’s Gas Tax Fund provides stable, long-term infrastructure funding to local governments and other organizations through a tripartite agreement between the federal government, British Columbia and the Union of British Columbia Municipalities (UBCM). The fund primarily supports capital projects that lead to cleaner air, cleaner water or reduced greenhouse gas emissions. UBCM administers the Gas Tax Fund in BC in collaboration with Canada and British Columbia. On December 15, 2011, legislation was passed that has made the Gas Tax Fund a permanent annual investment of $2 billion.

“BC communities are developing new ways of managing local water supplies,” said Heath Slee, President of UBCM. “UBCM appreciates the support of the Gas Tax Fund for new design concepts that promise to safeguard our rivers and streams.”

For more information:

Pierre Floréa
Office of the Minister of Transport, Infrastructure and Communities
613-991-0700

Jeff Rud
Communications Director
Ministry of Community, Sport and Cultural Development
250-208-4028

Paul Taylor
Relationships and Communications Advisor
UBCM
250-356-2938

Mike Squire
Program Manager
Arrowsmith Water Service
250-951-2480

Infrastructure Canada
613-960-9251
Toll free: 1-877-250-7154

And last week, researchers brought in three different machines to cut, chip or bundle the various varieties of the fast-growing wood.

While trees aren’t usually on the list when farmers decide what crops they will plant, these species are being tested as both fuel and a way to naturally dispose of treated waste water and sludge.

Whitecourt offered the seven-hectare site beside its treatment plant to researchers in 2006, along with an electricity hookup and an unlimited supply of waste water to irrigate the young trees with underground pipes.

“The cut last week was our second on that site. The irrigated trees were 30-per-cent larger than the ones that weren’t irrigated, and we think they will be a good fuel source for our wood-burning power plant,” says Peter Yackulik, the town’s project manager.

“The question to be answered is what will it take to commercialize this operation in the future.”

The project is part of a federally led research program, with Alberta leading the way.

Whitecourt was the first test site in Canada, and there are now five locations in the province, says Richard Krygier, a researcher with Natural Resources Canada’s Canadian Wood Fibre Centre.

Saskatchewan is also interested, and Krygier hopes what has started here will eventually be copied across the country.

The other municipalities taking part with Whitecourt — Edmonton, Camrose County, Grande Prairie and Beaverlodge — met recently with government and industry supporters to form the Alberta Rural Organic Waste to Energy Network (AROWEN) to exchange ideas and encourage others to consider their approach.

“There are now 24 municipalities, companies or government departments working on this project,” says Krygier, listing an irrigation firm, a nursery company and a laboratory.

The research may provide an alternative way to treat waste water. Most areas with fewer than 5,000 residents still use lagoons and primary treatment systems, which eventually discharge into streams and rivers.

Larger centres with state-of-the-art sewage systems, such as Whitecourt and Edmonton, still have to dispose of the leftover sludge.

Researchers are studying the effects of applying this material to fields of willow trees, where it breaks down and acts as a natural fertilizer.

Edmonton’s project involves using sludge with trees on a test plot near the new remand centre being built on the city’s northern outskirts.

These trees produce biomass that can be burned for heating or to generate electricity, or in the future could be used in bio-products such as chemicals and drugs.

At the Whitecourt site, Krygier says five varieties of willow and two types of poplar were planted on irrigated and non-irrigated land.

The waste water is the same highly treated effluent discharged into the river, so it really can’t be considered sewage.

“This was our first project and we weren’t prepared to work with something that was a little ‘fresher’,” Krygier said, referring to sewage treated only to the primary level.

Using soil moisture sensors, irrigation occurred when the young trees were so dry they needed extra water.

Irrigation only works during the growing season, so a town relying on willow fields would need a winter waste water storage site, such as an engineered wetland, Krygier says.

Harvesting was done with a Claas unit, which did a good job quickly chipping the stalks, a baling machine and a cane cutter pulled behind a tractor.

It’s a new application for equipment many Alberta farmers are already accustomed to using. Farmers also have plenty of experience handling chipped material (silage for dairy cows) and round bales of hay and straw.

“But you are talking $35,000 for the cutter, $140,000 for the round bailer and $160,000 for the Claas head unit, so we were demonstrating different equipment scales of harvesting.”

The willow and poplar chips are being dried in the yard of Edmonton’s Northern Forestry Centre, testing a new technique adopted from Ireland — pumping air through slotted pipes under the pile — that has been modified by a local grain-drying firm.

“In Ireland they could dry wood chips with 45 to 50 per cent moisture content, which is what they are right now in winter, down to 18 to 20 per cent in four months,” Krygier says.

The chips will be studied and graded at a national forestry research lab to determine their quality.

Other countries, such as Sweden, have plantations of fast-growing trees harvested every few years just like crops. If it makes economic sense, large areas of brush land, marginal farmland and even the land under power lines could support willow crops in Alberta.

dcooper@edmontonjournal.com+

© Copyright (c) Postmedia News

Related:

Using wastewater to irrigate short rotation crops delivers dual dividend (Logging and Sawmill Journal, Nov 2011)

For more information about this method, contact Martin Blank at (780) 435-7309 or Martin.Blank@nrcan.gc.ca, Richard Krygier at (780) 435-7286 or rkrygier@nrcan.gc.ca, or Derek Sidders at (780) 435-7355 or dsidders@nrcan.gc.ca

After testing 120 brooks, collectors and outfalls in Montreal, researchers discovered that samples containing human urine and feces were also lightly caffeinated. Their conclusion: If there’s an abundance of caffeine in the water, “it means you have a leaky sewage pipe somewhere,” lead researcher Sébastien Sauvé told the Post on Monday.

Traditionally, researchers analyze sewer leakage by testing for fecal coliforms, a family of bacteria that includes E.coli. The test is unable to gauge the presence of human sewage because fecal coliforms could just as easily come from pigeons, raccoons or a nearby dairy farm. Caffeine, by contrast, is human-specific.

“Cows don’t drink coffee,” said Mr. Sauvé.

Unlike many other chemicals in human waste, caffeine is also unlikely to have bled into the water from a nearby farm or industrial facility. Montreal’s aging sewer system is apparently far from watertight. Mr. Sauvé’s team collected water samples throughout the spring and fall of 2008 — and always after a particularly heavy rain.

In every sample collected, Mr. Sauvé’s team found traces of caffeine, leading the team to conclude that Montreal’s storm drains are “widely contaminated” by leaking human sewage.

Mr. Sauvé’s team tried testing water samples for carbamazepine, a common anti-seizure drug, but the researchers could find no correlation between the drug and the presence of fecal matter.

On the other hand, any water sample “containing more than the equivalent of 10 cups of coffee diluted in an Olympic-size swimming pool is definitely contaminated with fecal [bacteria],” according to a prepared release by the university.

Luckily, with the country’s coffee and energy drink consumption on the rise, caffeine levels in Canadian urine show no sign of diminishing. Tim Hortons, which holds an estimated 80% share of the Canadian coffee market, sells more than three million cups of coffee per day.

For now, Mr. Sauvé’s caffeine test may only be regionally effective. In South America, caffeine could just as easily be leached into the water system by coffee, tea and cola plantations.

Presumably, the test could also prove ineffective in heavily Mormon communities where the drinking of coffee and tea is frowned upon.

Mr. Sauvé says the caffeine test is a valuable tool in preventing municipalities from ducking responsibility for a leaky sewerage system.

“If there’s too much caffeine in the water, there’s no way a city can say it’s because there are too many dogs,” said Mr. Sauvé.

December 6, 2011

By Christopher Mims

When city services can autonomously go online and digest information from the cloud, they can reach a level of performance never before seen. First up, water systems that automatically know when it will rain and react accordingly.

With a little help from what’s called the Internet of Things, engineers are transforming cities from passive conduits for water into dynamic systems that store and manage it like the tissues of desert animals. By using the Internet to connect real-world sensors and control mechanisms to cloud-based control systems that can pull in streams from any other data source, including weather reports, these efforts enable conservation and money-saving measures that would have been impossible without this virtual nervous system.

Marcus Quigley, principal water engineer at the infrastructure engineering firm Geosyntec, has been tackling this problem using hardware from Internet of Things company ioBridge, whose Internet-connected sensors have been used in everything from location-aware home automation to tide gauges that tweet.

It may sound like a trivial problem, but the EPA estimates that the U.S. has $13 billion invested in wastewater infrastructure alone. More importantly, the majority of America’s largest cities–more than 700 in all–dump millions of gallons of raw sewage into our waterways every time it rains, because their sewer and stormwater systems were designed a century ago.

These overwhelmed cities include New York City, Detroit, Boston, Portland, St. Louis, Chicago, Seattle, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, many other cities, mostly in the Rust Belt and New England. With the notable exception of Los Angeles, almost every major urban center in the U.S. is in need of a way to soak up rainstorms rather than dump them straight down the drain in a desperate attempt to prevent flooding.

That’s where “high performance” infrastructure–infrastructure that can react to its environment like a living thing–comes in.

“The conventional way to build a city is you build what you want, and then you get rid of water as quickly as possible,” says Quigley. Historically, that’s meant massive projects to redirect all the water sluicing down impermeable streets and concrete and into the Moria-like recesses of a city’s sewer system. Green infrastructure tries to control runoff on-site, rather than sending it below, through the use of “bioretention cells” and rain gardens, which absorb and filter the water into collections of plants and artificial wetlands.

High-performance green infrastructure takes things a step further, by anticipating demand for water storage and preparing a system accordingly. For example, in seven projects deployed in St. Louis and one in New Bern, North Carolina, Geosyntec integrated a building’s rainwater catchment system with software that uses weather predictions from the Internet to know when a basin should be partly emptied to accommodate incoming stormwater.

Many more projects of this kind are on the way, including installations in Washington, D.C. and New York City.

“Instead of trying to use what I consider sub-optimal passive systems to control these … components of the urban environment, what we’re doing is making decisions in real time to achieve specific environmental goals,” says Quigley.

Dynamic control of a rainwater catchment allows these basins to be used to their maximum without fear that they’ll be overwhelmed by weather events. Giving building planners the assurance that they’ll always have access to a free water supply means they can actually use it. And putting these on enough buildings could go a long way to solving the problem of combined sewer and stormwater systems being overwhelmed when it rains.

It’s early days for these kinds of systems, and managing runoff is just one of the applications they could be put to use.

“The big picture is that we are able to take any piece of information that is Internet-accessible, any feed, and integrate it into the logic of how we operate these components of our city,” says Quigley.

Geosyntec’s cloud-based infrastructure is just as important as the physical infrastructure it puts into place on-site. Led by software developer Alex Bedig, the company has created a general-purpose platform for handling all the relevant inputs, sending instructions to valves and other control points, and never, ever failing in an emergency.

Taken together, these physical and virtual systems are explicitly biomimetic, says Quigley.

“The intent of an active system is to take the built environment and have it perform as if it were natural. We’re fundamentally saying that passive systems are unable to do that in an optimal way. In many cases they are unable to do it at all.”

It’s a story we’ve heard in the energy industry for years–hence the notion that a dynamically managed “smart grid” is not only helpful, but absolutely essential for integrating our power-generating infrastructure with the natural world through renewables. The smart grid extends all the way down to the level of the individual through demand management for energy conservation, but these principles have yet to show up on the same scale in the management of physical resources like water.

Humanity has a sorry habit of neglecting its waste stream, whether its the 99% of precious rare earth elements we fail to recycle or the complete absence of curbside composting from most American cities. The handy thing about water is that, through evaporation, it recycles itself. Now all we have to do is make the best use of it we can while it’s coursing through our cities.

via: Fast Company

————————–

Publications and Projects by Geosyntec:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/nov/24/africa-water-grab-land-rights

The banks of the Niger river, in southern Mali, have been flooded by a steady stream of foreigners. Coveted by foreign investors eager to snap up large tracts of fertile farmland, the river basin has been at the centre of a race to get hold of African land at rock-bottom prices. Meanwhile, last week, hundreds of smallholder farmers and civil society activists flocked to the same river basin for the first international conference to tackle the global rush for land.

West Africa’s largest river, the Niger is thought to sustain over 100 million people as it snakes 4,180km through Guinea, Mali and Niger before emptying into Nigeria’s colossal Niger Delta. In Mali, the Office du Niger is home to the vast majority of the country’s largescale land deals, seen by campaigners as emblematic of the “land grabs” taking place in developing countries. Recent estimates suggest that foreign investment in Mali’s limited arable land jumped by 60% between 2009 and 2010. But the potential knock-on effects of these land deals on local communities’ access to water has rarely made it centre-stage.

Ongoing research from the London-based International Institute for Environment and Development seeks to redress this blindspot, honing in on how such land deals might affect water access for fishing, farming and pastoralist communities. In a policy paper out on Thursday, the IIED’s Jamie Skinner and Lorenzo Cotula warn that an alarming number of African governments seem to be signing away water rights for decades, with major implications for local communities.

Investors in farmland are, understandably, after land with high growing potential – either land with lots of rainfall or land that can be irrigated. What Skinner and Cotula note is a worrying trend where governments are being rushed into signing away water rights during negotiations where they were initially only considering leasing land.

In many cases, say Skinner and Cotula, governments seem willing to simply provide water free of charge. In Mali and Sudan, for example, some investors have been given unrestricted access to as much water as they need. In other cases, where investors must pay to use water, they are often charged according to how much land is irrigated rather than how much water is used.

The role water plays in fuelling the global rush for land has received significant attention. It is no coincidence, observers say, that the most aggressive foreign investors are also those facing water shortages at home. This year, risk analysis firm Maplecroft said the results from its water stress index showed why India, South Korea and China, along with the oil rich Gulf states, are racing to buy land in developing countries and grow crops abroad. The chairman and former CEO of Nestlé, Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, has gone so far as to say the global rush for farmland is actually a “great water grab”. He writes in Foreign Policy: “With the land comes the right to withdraw the water linked to it, in most countries essentially a freebie that increasingly could be the most valuable part of the deal.”

Read the whole article

Educating the masses

The voting down of two municipal outsourcing contracts in the US and Canada this week should not be seen as a victory for the anti-private water brigade. The fact that both projects would have been deliverable for less money using private sector expertise means that municipal leaders simply have to get smarter about educating their voters – and their councilmembers.

The outcome of last Saturday’s referendum in Abbotsford, British Columbia, means that the Can$291 million (US$279 million) design-build-finance-operate project for a 150,000m³/d water treatment plant at Stave Lake – which had been eligible for Can$62 million (US$59 million) of federal funding – will now not proceed as a public-private partnership. The project would cost as much as Can$328 million (US$315 million) under traditional procurement.

Similarly, the decision to reject SouthWest Water’s low bid to operate the new 37,850m³/d surface water treatment plant serving the city of Lodi in California will end up costing the city an extra $90,000 every year.

The success of the Canadian PPP programme has to some extent relied on the fact that the majority of projects have been in sectors such as healthcare, roads and transportation – all of which are controlled at the provincial level. The fact that water and wastewater are under municipal control means that not only are there relatively few precedents in terms of completed PPP projects, but also that the fate of each initiative ultimately lies in the hands of the voters.

Although the outcome of the referendum in Abbotsford is a setback for private water in Canada, it should not be seen as a reaction against private water per se. All projects – irrespective of the sector they fall into – will inevitably generate some form of opposition, and the challenge for municipalities is to get the voters on side to the extent that when the time comes to vote, the result is a fair decision taken by an educated electorate.

Dwelling on private water operators’ imperfect track records – which sowed the initial seeds of doubt in the minds of the authorities in Lodi – is one of the easiest ways to alienate voters. Fears over tariff increases and job security for unionised labourers are also grist to the municipal mill. It seems they do not see the bigger picture. Canada’s public sector pension funds are some of the biggest investors in global infrastructure. Rejecting bankable PPP projects now could come back to haunt dissenting voters in retirement.

This week’s columnist is Ian Elkins, GWI’s editor.

‘Every single day, millions of gallons of good water needlessly drain away, filling our waterways with sewage and urban pollutants, rather than replenishing our water supply,’ said NRDC Water Program Director David Beckman. ‘But it doesn’t have to be that way. By making our communities literally greener, we can make our water sources cleaner too — and with much greater return than conventional solutions.’

‘Rooftops to Rivers II‘ details common water pollution problems and provides case studies for 14 geographically diverse cities that can all be considered leaders for employing green infrastructure solutions to address their pollution problems. The cities featured in the report have improved their ability to manage stormwater and reduce runoff pollution, saved money and beautified their cityscapes by capturing rain where it falls.

‘Cities of all sizes are recognizing that green infrastructure — which stops rain where it falls — is the smartest way to reduce water pollution from storms,’ said Karen Hobbs, NRDC senior policy analyst. ‘It often only takes a fraction of an inch to trigger this kind of pollution. And the extreme weather we’ve seen in much of the country this year — from drought to floods and hurricanes — drives home the need for smarter solutions to our water woes.’

The 14 cities featured in the report are all positioned on a six-point ‘Emerald City Scale’ to assess how each of these trailblazing leaders is doing. They are listed here from the highest to lowest points scored:

• Philadelphia, PA (6)
• Milwaukee, WI (5)
• New York, NY (5)
• Portland, OR (5)
• Syracuse, NY (5)
• Washington, D.C. (5)
• Aurora, IL (4)
• Toronto, Ontario, Canada (4)
• Chicago, IL (3)
• Kansas City, MO (3)
• Nashville, TN (3)
• Seattle, WA (3)
• Pittsburgh, PA (1)
• Detroit Metro Area & the Rouge River Watershed, MI (1)

The six-point scale identifies the primary actions every city can undertake to maximize their green infrastructure investment, including: a long term green infrastructure plan for the city, a retention standard, a requirement to reduce existing impervious surfaces using green infrastructure, incentives for private-party action, guidance or other assistance in deploying green infrastructure, and a dedicated funding source.

Only one city, Philadelphia, is undertaking all six actions, but each city featured in the report is undertaking at least one.

Green infrastructure — in contrast to paved and other impermeable surfaces — stops runoff pollution from the start, by capturing rainwater and either storing it for future consumer use or letting it filter back into the ground, replenishing vegetation and groundwater supplies. Examples include green roofs, street trees, increased green space, rain barrels, rain gardens, and permeable pavement. These design solutions have the added benefits of beautifying neighborhoods, cooling and cleansing the air, reducing asthma and heat-related illnesses, lowering heating and cooling energy costs, boosting economies, and supporting American jobs.

The report details how green infrastructure is frequently more cost-effective than traditional approaches to addressing runoff, like pipes and holding tanks. The City of Philadelphia estimates that a traditional approach to its sewage overflow problems would have cost billions more than its state-approved green infrastructure plan, which will achieve comparable results as it transforms 34 percent of the city’s impervious surfaces to ‘greened acres.’ The American Society of Landscape Architects recently surveyed its members and found that green infrastructure reduced or did not influence costs 75 percent of the time. EPA’s own analysis shows that green infrastructure approaches save money for developers, communities and, the vast majority of the time, for new development.

Read more

via: Environmental Expert