The holiday season takes us into 2022, a season ripe for re-connecting and re-imagining. We are reconnecting with family, friends, and colleagues from whom SARS-CoV-2 has separated us. We are re-imagining our future ahead, considering the unknowable forces at work in the world, be they microbial, gaseous or political. Imagination is the key resources, as NY Times columnist David Brook explained in The Awesome Importance of Imagination. We need to turn to our imagination and connections to forge a new future, a formidable task even in normal times.
I can imagine a future when biosolids are connected to success stories in our national striving for clean water, air, and land. Few people know about what we do in biosolids treatment and use, and fewer seem to care, and we have ourselves to blame that we do not connect our customers to our successes. Maile Lono-Batura, the Director of Sustainable Biosolids Programs for the Water Environment Federation, is striving to change the public ennui around biosolids. A proposal is floating among some of us in WEF’s biosolids group that we create the “Year of Poo” to encourage people to give a moment’s thought to the environmental and sanitation miracle that is the flush handle we all use daily. The success of the social media star, Jack Kim (a/k/a, Mr. Toilet), and his feature length film MR TOILET: THE WORLD’S #2 MAN, ought help us imagine that we as wastewater professionals can have similar success in connecting the message of the value of wastewater treatment and of water and nutrient recycling to our public.
I can imagine a future when public agencies champion innovations and new technologies that yield great products and programs that connect ratepayers and customers to a government enterprise about which they can celebrate. We glimpse that kind of celebration with DC Water’s Bloom, when the agency became a chapter in The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health. Pyrolysis is a “new-ish” technology that seems to have captured the imagination of the public and of biosolids technologists, alike. The excited headlines from the news media in Logan City, Utah, captures the public imagination of biosolids-based biochar (Biochar is silver lining from our sewage), and the hopeful prospect that pyrolysis can answer pesky questions about PFAS sparks the imagination of engineers looking for solutions for wastewater clients (EPA Research Brief: Potential PFAS Destruction Technology: Pyrolysis and Gasification). I am most hopeful for the future of biosolids when a young entrepreneur with an industrial design degree, like Garrett Benisch of Bioforectech Corporation, imagines a wholly new use for biosolids-derived product, like OurCarbon. Too often, our community of practice faces the consequence of deferred maintenance and low-bid short term contracts, resulting in news items like Wheeling Officials Look To Clear the Air on Sewage Plant Issue.
I can imagine a future in which we embrace the magnificence of the carbon and nutrients we recycle to insist that biosolids be used as a tool to “decarbonize” the economy and restore ecosystems. The COP26 in Glasgow embraced these dual goals: Protecting and restoring nature for the benefit of people and climate. In response to the UN climate change leadership, the other WEF, the World Economic Forum, formed the Natural Climate Solutions Alliance. It has partnered with The Nature Conservancy, which has a holding of minelands in West Virginia they are eyeing for solar power. What better sequence of events than a biosolids-based sequestration of carbon as a first step in this renewable energy plan of global significance (Experts from Across Appalachia Gather to Discuss Opportunities for Solar on Mine Lands)?
Though “nature based carbon removal” is trumpeted as a realistic and immediately available technology for mitigating GHG releases, I can find no person or company in our Mid-Atlantic region working with biosolids that has been brought into a carbon removal project. Advocating for biosolids use on mining-scarred landscapes should not be difficult. Philadelphia Water Department’s biosolids were used on about 4,000 acres of minelands between 1978 and 2008 with breathtakingly amazing results (see my partial report on the first 25 years of reclamation). About 40,000 tons of Philadelphia’s biosolids products were delivered in the early 1990s to the Powell River Project, a reclamation research site directed by Virginia Tech researcher W. Lee Daniels, in Wise County, southwest Virginia. The biosolids were but a small part of a comprehensive research endeavor for reclaiming completed mines, but nevertheless significant (Low Cost Remediation of Mining Sites with Biosolids).
Reclamation of disturbed landscapes, particularly mine sites with their potential for releasing surface water contaminants, is a beautiful project, and biosolids is one of the most useful ingredients imaginable. However, even after 40 years of using biosolids for “nature-based solutions,” state regulators cannot seem to imagine getting solidly behind biosolids for large-scale reclamation. This reluctance may come from high loadings of biosolids-borne nitrogen that may be released to air and groundwaters. We have answers to this concern, and those answers involve making new connections.
I can imagine a future where biosolids practitioners connect with generators of other residuals that are high in carbon but low in nitrogen. The balancing of high carbon residuals and high nitrogen residuals has been the winning formula in New England for several decades. The work of Shelagh Connelly at RMI in New Hampshire figures large in the industry’s experience with projects that balance carbon and nitrogen in residuals, such as the Prouty Gravel Pit described on RMI’s website. Behind the scenes is soil scientist Andrew Carpenter, of Northern Tilth, who authored one of the important journal articles on this subject, Biosolids and Short Paper Fiber: A Natural Partnership.
Today, concerns for high costs of climate- and ecosystem-friendly projects, as might be incurred by residuals blending at large disturbed landscapes, mire our industry in our old ways. I can imagine a changing set of urgent drivers for which we ought to plan today so that we can be prepared in years ahead. One driver behind large scale reclamation is federal legislation. As explained in the article Reinventing coal country: Reclaiming America’s abandoned mine lands “The recently passed infrastructure bill contains $11.3 billion earmarked for abandoned mines.” Another driver is the work by consultants tapping into carbon credit markets. The Vermont-based consulting firm Native, with its software offering Help Build, offers to “use innovative carbon financing to develop custom initiatives,” employing staff experienced in soil carbon projects and authoring articles such as Advice for scaling nature-based carbon removal programs. The other driver is the growing foundation of expertise in this field. Virginia Tech’s post-doc Mike Badzmierowski, soon to be Oregon Department of Agriculture’s soil health expert, is completing a systematic review of long-term soil carbon sequestration from biosolids, and will be presenting his findings at the January 18 MABA webinar.
Finally, a driver into which biosolids practices can tap as we imagine a new future is the convergence of thought leaders on the role of land restoration in the grand enterprise of reversing environmental degradation. Articles appeared in 2021 around COP26 such as A Natural Fix: A Joined-up Approach to Delivering the Global Goals for Sustainable Development, Restoring degrading lands can help us mitigate climate change, and Positive long-term impacts of restoration on soils in an experimental urban forest. The well-regarded Project Drawdown features restoration projects as a climate change mitigation strategy. Inspired by the drawdown theme, University of Washington’s Sally Brown (author of MABA’s Research Updates), writing for BioCycle CONNECT, completed 14 essays on use of organic amendments for soil carbon improvement (see, for example, Hail To The Trees … And The Biosolids).
Today I am setting my imagination to how I personally will change my role in the biosolids community. As new leadership takes the helm of the Mid-Atlantic Biosolids Association, I am buffing up my connections to our biosolids community of practice and reviewing my “what’s next” against the backdrop of urgent needs of a warming world, while holding a new granddaughter on my lap. I have relaunched my consulting practice Effluential Synergies LLC, and I can now be reached at wtoffey@effluentialsynergies.com and at a new phone number 215-821-2006. The conversations we have together over coming months and years, as we re-connect and as we re-imagine our future, will be the path by which our “aspirational” goals transform to new biosolids practices and programs, ones in which biosolids assumes their necessary role as tools for climate mitigation and ecosystem restoration. That is a connection worthy of biosolids.