Willows could filter sewage
Alberta company Bionera wants to break into the small town sewage market
Glenn Baxter thinks sewage is one of the great untapped resources of Saskatchewan.
“The nutrient value in human waste is being overlooked,” he said. “It’s just awful.”
Baxter serves on the village council in Val Marie, a southwest Saskatchewan community whose sewage lagoon is now overcapacity. The troubles have forced it to release partially treated waste water into the Frenchman River.
That pains the councillor, and he’s long searched for another way.
He started looking for a crop that could absorb the nutrients. Letting second-stage waste water flow out for irrigation could ease the burden on the lagoon — and turn what’s flushed down Val Marie’s toilets into a useful harvest.
First, Baxter thought of growing hay. But what to do with it? Few consumers like the idea that human waste might find its way back into the food supply, even indirectly through livestock.
His next idea: Use waste water to irrigate a crop of Christmas trees. Again, Baxter ran into problems. The trees are not an aquatic species. They don’t do well on flooded terrain, and would likely die in a field swimming with waste water.
That’s why Baxter was so “intrigued” by what he found in Regina last week, during the Saskatchewan Urban Municipalities Association’s annual convention.
He found an Alberta company that wants to break into the smalltown Saskatchewan sewage market. Martin Labelle, the general manager of Bionera, was pitching a simple idea: Willows. The hardy trees act as a “natural filter,” Labelle said. They would thrive in a field fed by Val Marie’s lagoon.
“This was the first person I’ve seen in a public meeting that did the kinds of things I was interested in,” Baxter said. “I find it quite fascinating.”
For the past four years, Labelle has grown his willows using Alberta waste water. He said the trees are “like a big sponge,” absorbing water and nutrients to ease the pressure on overburdened infrastructure.
The company is now ready to expand. “I see Saskatchewan having as much potential as Alberta,” Labelle told the Leader-Post.
He said he can plant 110,000 trees each day. They’re a hybrid variety, and Labelle claims they quickly soak up the waste water through their fast-growing root systems. Then they pump it through their trunks until they evapotranspire (sweating for trees), releasing it out their leaves and into the atmosphere.
Bionera has only reached one Saskatchewan community so far: Coppersands. A utility company that services the mobile home park there uses willows as part of a sophisticated sewage treatment system that, it claims, could eliminate the need for a lagoon altogether.
But Labelle said he doesn’t aim to replace lagoons, only to increase their capacity. Municipalities have to comply with government standards to ensure water quality downstream. If their lagoons can’t handle the load, Labelle said, they’re forced to invest in expensive projects such as evaporation ponds or treatment plants.
He said his willows can buy them time.
“I’m a firm believer that this technology is really good for the environment, and it’s also good for the pocketbook of those communities,” Labelle said.
Val Marie is in just that sort of bind. After Baxter ruled out hay and Christmas trees, council fell back on a time-tested, if uncreative, solution. They would build a massive evaporation pond, covering 30 or 40 acres (12 or 16 hectares). It would cost the village of fewer than 100 households something like $1 million, Baxter estimates.
After talking with Labelle, Baxter thinks the willows might be able to shrink the size of that project and help protect the Frenchman River.
“You don’t need as big a pond,” he said. “The water wouldn’t get out. They would use that nutrient, evaporate it and sequester it into the ground, as part of the trees and the root systems … turn that nutrient into willows.”
Baxter said he’ll bounce the idea off Val Marie’s other councillors over the coming months. He still has questions, just like he did for his hay.
“The big question is: What do you do with the willows when they’ve grown, when they’ve got to fruition?” he asked. Once again, he wants to find a way to harness the nutrient-power of Val Marie’s human waste. “I wouldn’t want to say it makes you money, but it would cover the return on the investment — the cost of harvesting the willows.”
Maybe Val Marie could partner with a private company to turn the willows into garden mulch, Baxter surmised. Bionera advertises other solutions. At the SUMA convention, Labelle was floating the idea of burning willows to produce energy.
Val Marie is just the beginning, Labelle hopes. At the convention, he got leads from Moosomin, Kannata Valley and Birch Hills. He said he wants to be in nearly every small town in Saskatchewan and Manitoba within 10 years. “We’re helping filter the planet,” he said.