Document details

A New Image for the Water Hyacinth

Among environment improving technology transfers is a method of treating sewage by employing aquatic plants to remove pollutants

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Last year Walt Disney World, Lake Buena Vista, Florida activated a prototype 100,00-gallon-a-day sewage treatment plant using NSTL's water hyacinth technology. The plant is part of the Experimental Prototype Community of Tomorrow (EPCOT), being created to provide a site for demonstration of new technological, social and artistic concepts. Among the sponsoring organizations of this project – along with the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, NASA and private companies – is the state of Florida, which is studying the possibility of using water-hyacinth technology on a statewide scale. Florida has a need for improvement of its rural sewage treatment procedures, and it is estimated that water hyacinth systems could halve the $330 million cost projected for upgrading the state's sewage facilities by conventional means.

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A number of other state and local governments are looking into water hyacinth sewage treatment and there are also several experiments under way to explore the plant's byproduct potential as a source of methane gas or animal feed. For example, United Gas Pipe Line Company is one of the sponsors of the Disney World EPCOT program; in addition to its EPCOT study of separating methane from heat-treated water hyacinths, the company has been considering construction of a pilot plant in Louisiana to investigate large-scale production of methane from a combination of water hyacinths, Bermuda grass and municipal sewage.

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Source

Title
Source type Magazine
Published
Language en
Document type Feature
Media type text
Page count 2
Pages pp. 92-93

Metadata

Id 4088
Availability Free
Inserted 2019-01-20