Thanks Carole, I push for wastewater plants to use secondary effluent to grow & harvest biomass as a way to purify the water instead of using flocking chemicals.
But, my design work is on a miniaturized unit for the home that purifies all the water at the home the same way, this in dense units not ponds which take up a lot of land and are expensive to use climate control on.
My grower-harvester cube is 16" on a side and has 28-times the lighted surface as footprint, two stacks about 7-feet high will process the waste from a family. These can use sunlight or artificial for growing, the artificial lighting I'm working on uses biodiesel flames and then adds in missing spectra to sunlight so can be used in winter, this idea is easier to insulate so growing is usually set to about 22-hours a day, a big deal for holding times.
I have a rural utility as a working partner, haven't gotten funding yet.
There is a lot to wastewater, pathogens in our waste are important for the first couple of stages of removal, after that you're to algae-strength effluent and few if any pathogens.
The first stages are too strong for algae and require other biota, the rural utility has PhD's ready to help find them for these early stages, for wastewater and farm-spill remediation, my units are portable or scale fits their need for both types of treatment.
So, the idea is find fresh-water plankton that thrive in these stages, it's a biologic process. By using enclosed units it adds a huge level of safety, another reason to avoid the ponds, so everything is piped in-out of the cubes ... my guesstimate is $15-million to have a production protype of the cube only ... but it's the whole deal really, growing-harvesting, able to hook them up in series or parallel, climate control & lighting for any climate. The biomass squeeze to biodiesel has quite a few mfg's already so miniaturizing that will be a snap compared to the wastewater part.Pretty certain I'm an author of this type of work, specific to wastewater recycling using fresh-water plankton, not land plants to purify the water.
So, this type of idea is complex & simple, it can handle raw sewage when it's too rich and the pathogens need handling, a key issue for something real for any home, rural or urban.
Twelve states had a meeting last spring with this as the issue, economics will drive it as it turns the expense of municipal wastewater treatment tobe released under EPA rules into a revenue stream, localizing fuel production is an offshoot of using biomass to purify the water, nice feature that isn't technically difficult to add as an automatic unit to the purification harvest.
Regardless, ponds are just too expensive & land intensive so the cube is essential, but once this idea becomes a product in big-box stores for homeowners it allows a practical way to recycle at the family level, independent of society thus sustainable in a true sense.
Autonomous architecture is the theme, plenty of resources if you search that term ... no funding yet but I continue designing it and it is very improved over sketches from say 4-years ago, ready enough to me in ways now.
OK, the cube contains 12" square x 1/8"-3/16" sheets of glass or lexan set apart 3/16"-1/4" water between, pumping a squeegee to clean-harvest, container w/insulation one piece, bottom & top injection molded have grooves for circulation and all, connectors exist to use but haven't spec'd them yet. Right now I connect them when you stack them, final one has the outlet to the world, by turning them 90-deg you change from series to parallel. Fiber-optics move the light to the glass, built-in temp control, circulates while growing. So, to service it the squeegee is replaceable, it's the only moving part, no creepy corners to clean, the molding is detailed to not have uncleanable corners.
These have to scale & operate for cities as well as homes, the cubes have little to maintain or break, what leads into them and afterward have more to take care of by far, but without a low-footprint, isolated growing unit ponds are the only alternative.
To have a cube ready to mfg would be $6-8 million, that's really ready to grow & harvest biomass 22hrs/day x 365 for years type of design, standardized bomber connections and it works as intended for wastewater treatment for towns or for your house.
Passing sanitation requirements demands a together design, otherwise it'll just get shot down by regulation. Having a utility to work with is key ...
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