Specialist Group on Use of Macrophytes in Water Pollution ... - IWA

So we knew:
1. We wanted to do something useful for the environment (that had already been the red
thread through both our careers).
2. There were still quiet some remote locations where people produced waste water but a
connection to the sewer system would not be affordable.
3. Wetlands had been constructed to mimic nature - and their results
were impressive.
4. There were books on that item by Abby Rockefeller,
Dr. Käthe Seidel, Prof. Kickuth ...
– And a very readable book by Klaus Bahlo and Gert Wach (in German but okay ...)
Without any bias, Dion and I discussed the pros and cons of all known systems. Our goal was
waste water treatment, so Surface Flow was not really part of the discussion.
And – with ground being expensive in Holland – a system that claimed to need less surface
would probably win the race.
And filling such a system with fine material would result in far more treatment surface... - but
too fine material could result in clogging - that‘s a lesson learned from Kickuth.
And transporting water through the media, mainly by gravity – it makes sense!
So we kind of adopted this German system - and changed it to our liking concerning
drainage, lining, injection techniques ... Just by common sense, not by any tradition…
And suddenly (well, we spent one year of talking before we had our first client) we had a
system that worked, that was monitored by a waterboard and people got really enthusiastic!
A dozen wetlands later, more people entered ‗the business‘ and the discussion was raised
among waterboards and townships: ‗Next we have a couple of hundred wetlands built by who
knows who ... How are we going to control that?‘
So the idea of certifying systems was born and well, being first in the business, Dion and I
played our part in that discussion. We DID know what we were talking about and could
defend many ins and outs of what WE had come up with. So what we initially considered a
proper way of treating waste water sort of became the standard in Holland. Parties that later
entered the market often hardly knew about other treatment systems; if you wanted to deliver
the best small scale treatment system, you‘d take a helofytenfilter – and they meant: a VF
TW (which of course stands for a Vertical Flow Treatment Wetland).
Funny thing is that for Dion and me, this never has been the final, golden rule. Although our
collaboration only lasted a couple of years (Dion later moved to Belgium and continued
building wetlands there), for both of us the first rule is to ask yourself: What is to be treated
(how much water and how dirty)?
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IWA <strong>Specialist</strong> <strong>Group</strong> on Use of Macrophytes in Water Pollution Control: Newsletter No. 38 13