Hello everyone, and happy Friday!
This week I would like to share with you what I did on Monday and Tuesday. On Monday afternoon I got to visit Barranca (about 40km north of here). They have just finished building a brand new waste water purification plant, and the EMAPA Huacho staff (mostly engineers and important people within the company) were invited to go for a private tour of the facility. To my surprise, this construction isn't like your typical water purification plant: it is actually a pilot project in Peru, filtering the sewage by growing lentils.
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| The first (of many) pools of lentils that the waste water gets cycled through |
The water comes in, lentils grow, the water gets cycled through a second time, and then comes out clear!
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| Treated water |
They then put the water through a reverse-osmosis process to cleanse it further.
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| Micro-organisms filtering the water some more |
They plan to use the treated water for irrigation once the system is complete. The plan is also for this project to being financially self-sustaining. The project is the result of a private donation ($500,000 USD from a US-based waste water solutions company,
RF WasteWater), but they have built a solar-powered heater that will dry the lentils so that they can then be ground up, turned into pellets, and sold as fish and animal feed. Talk about making use of all of the products of the station!
Not only will this new facility help improve the surrounding environment, but the site itself has been designed to be an eco-park for the community to use. There is no smell whatsoever from the lagunas full of lentils, and various trees and flowers have already been planted to make it a calm, relaxing place to enjoy a nice ocean view.
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| This area of the park has been designed to resemble the terraces at Machu Picchu |
Quite a revolutionary project! On Tuesday, we went back to Barranca for the inauguration of their waste water treatment plant. You can read about it in the local paper
here. There were speeches, traditional dancing, more tours of the facilities, and then a wonderful seafood buffet lunch (at 4pm) for special guests. I got to meet two Americans who working there - they are super nice and we have exchanged contact information, so hopefully we will be able to meet up sometime. I also met the head of the company that is funding the project and one of the main donors, a man working for USAID, and Paul Skillicorn, the man behind the design. Paul spent a long time talking to the staff from EMAPA Huacho about the environmental, social and economic benefits of his model, and EMAPA was very interested in pursuing this idea (not as the only waste water treatment option, but as a way to recover costs). I am now the liaison officer between Paul and the EMAPA team, and we hope to have Paul and his team come visit us here in Huacho to make a presentation to our board of directors! All in all, a wonderful opportunity to learn more about new technology and to network with other people living nearby, working in a similar field, but using other solutions for their problems. I can't wait to learn more from them.
Happy Thanksgiving to everyone in Canada, I hope you make the most out of your long weekend! (Tomorrow, October 8th, is also a national holiday in Peru, but unfortunately their national holidays don't automatically get moved to the Friday/Monday of that weekend, so it will just be like any other weekend for me!)
Sheila
