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Restoring Our Infrastructure: Transportation, Power, Solid Waste, and Water

Santo Domingo, on the southern coast of the Dominican Republic, is one of my favorite large Caribbean cities (though I love the rural villages and underwater life of the Dominican Republic even more). But from overhead, Santo Domingo looks like a toilet. A monster plume of pure, unadulterated, raw sewage gushes down the river that flows through the city, forming a huge brown plume in the otherwise turquoise Caribbean. Street children swim and fish in and near the plume. Locals with a car or bus fare travel miles down the coast to find clean water for recreation. Tourists go to the northern and eastern coasts.

Santo Domingo residents tell me they are ashamed of the “Rio de Caca.” So why this barbaric flood of feces, which is impeding the Dominican Republic’s goal of becoming a major U.S. tourist destination? This is the largest metropolis in the Dominican Republic—and its capital: Doesn’t it have the money for a modern sewage treatment plant?

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Sure it does. The country has tremendous natural resources, along with industrious people. The Dominican Republic has a strong trade relationship with nearby Puerto Rico, which—along with the millions of Dominicans living in the United States—gives it access to U.S. markets. The Dominican Republic shares the Greater Antilles island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Unlike its neighbor, the Dominican Republic hasn’t yet destroyed all its forests and watersheds; such destruction led to Haiti’s grinding poverty and political instability, so typical of ecologically ravaged nations. (Of course, the Dominican Republic isn’t the only Caribbean “paradise” to be wallowing in its own filth; the bays of Point Lisas in Trinidad & Tobago, Bahia de Pozue-los in Venezuela, and Bluefields in Nicaragua are other examples.)

So again, why the open sewer? You’re probably expecting me to say it’s due to antiquated infrastructure that needs to be restored, but it’s actually due to a lack of infrastructure. Incomplete, anyway; the country does have aging sewers, but someone forgot to build the treatment plant, and that’s more of a political problem.

Fortunately, a greater sense of responsibility seems to be evolving, exemplified by the government-supported work (aided by The Nature Conservancy) of biologist Francisco Nuñez and his staff to preserve and restore the vitally important Madre de Las Aguas watershed. In 2001, the country raised half a billion dollars for revamping its infrastructure. We can only hope it will be spent as wisely as were the watershed restoration funds.

For now, let’s leave the Dominican Republic and review the infrastructure restoration industry, as a whole. We’ll return to Santo Domingo toward the end of the chapter, by way of introducing the concept of “restorative technologies”.

THE SCOPE OF THE INFRASTRUCTURE RESTORATION INDUSTRY

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Originally a French word, “infrastructure” was limited to describing military installations, and it carried this meaning when the English adopted the word in the 1920s. After crossing into English, the word quickly started encompassing all other aspects of public works beyond those of the military. The “infra” portion is Latin, meaning “underneath,” so “infrastructure” literally means “below our structures.”

According to Webster’s New World Dictionary; “infrastructure” is “the substructure or underlying foundation, especially the basic installations and facilities on which the continuance and growth of a community or state depends.” My definition of infrastructure: “fabrications that facilitate flows among folks and facilities” (sorry: I’m a Monty Python fan). Those flows include cars, trains, water, sewage, electricity, natural gas, communications, etc. Infrastructure keeps us fed, watered, mobile, and in touch, but we seldom notice it or think about it.

For simplicity’s sake, I’ve divided public infrastructure into transportation, power, solid waste, and water. Telecommunications is also infrastructure—and the system has certainly undergone a major technological rehabilitation from copper wire to wireless and fiber optic—but it’s privately owned for the most part, so we won’t include it in this discussion of public infrastructure.

Public buildings and schools are also considered infrastructure in many circles, and many of the older ones also qualify as heritage. We won’t discuss them here, though, except to point out the monstrous backlog of rehabilitation needed by the 80,000 public schools in the United States. According to the National Education Association (NEA), that backlog amounted to $322 billion in 2000. That’s a frightening figure (or exciting, if you’re in the restoration business) to be sure, but even scarier is its rate of growth. The NEA’s 1998 report had put the figure at “only” $112 billion, so a rather dramatic increase occurred in two years.

PUBLIC TRANSPORTATION INFRASTRUCTURE

The United States has over 6.3 million kilometers of roads (by way of comparison, Brazil has over 1.6 million, Canada 912,000, and Mexico about 323,000) and we spent about $54.5 billion maintaining our roads in 2000, a historic high, thanks to the flush economy of the ‘90s. But the Federal Highway Administration says even that level of spending wasn’t enough to maintain roads in their current “fair” condition; an additional $40 billion was needed just to bring their average condition up to “good.” “Very good” or “excellent”? Forget about it. 156

In Chapter 1, we mentioned the “Report Card on America’s Infrastructure” issued in 1998 by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE). This was the first overall accounting of the $1.3 trillion backlog of rehabilitation needed by U.S. public infrastructure. Other reports have since stated that 50 percent of U.S. infrastructure needs to be replaced by 2005.

Chapter 1 also mentioned the Transportation Equity Act (TEA-21), and the TEA-21 Restoration Act. They poured $218 billion of federal funds into rebuilding the U.S. transportation infrastructure over a six-year span ($177 billion for highways plus $41 billion for mass transit) and states will add billions to this amount.

Only 20 percent of those funds are for “new starts,” and about 25 percent are officially designated for restorative projects. But almost the entire remaining 55 percent are allowed to be spent on restoration (as opposed to maintenance, e.g., patching potholes), and most of it will be, according to my conversations with officials from the Departments of Transportation (DOT) of several states. This means that some three-quarters of transportation funds now goes to restorative development. (In an overlap between the infrastructure and heritage restoration industries, TEA-21 allocated $50 million to “rehabilitation of historic covered bridges,” according to the January 2000 issue of Civil Engineering.)

What Chapter 1 didn’t say was that, despite this 70 percent increase in highway spending, the backlog of needed upgrades and restoration to the nation’s infrastructure remained at $1.3 trillion in ASCE’s updated 2001 Infrastructure Report Card. The good news is that the nation’s overall score improved from D- to D+, thanks to the transportation sector. That’s certainly no reason to drop our guard; witness the headline in the April 2001 ASCE News: “ASCE’s Infrastructure Report Card Paints Dismal Picture.”

The article quoted ASCE President Robert W. Bein as saying, “When you’ve got rolling blackouts in California, bridges crumbling in Milwaukee, and kids in Kansas City attending class in a former boys’ rest room, something is desperately wrong.… With a projected budget surplus of $5.6 trillion dollars, our leaders in Congress have the funds needed to restore our ailing infrastructure.” (We’ve managed to make that nasty federal budget surplus go away, but the point is valid nonetheless.)

Impacts of the Backlog

Infrastructure projects (both new and restorative) frequently go over budget (just ask anyone from Boston about the “Big Dig”). One of the major reasons is that our infrastructure has not undergone a comprehen- 157sive national assessment: only when we start working on it do we find out just how rotten it is.

For instance, when planning the rebuilding of Virginia’s I-95 Springfield Interchange (the “Mixing Bowl” mentioned in this book’s Introduction) and the replacement of the nearby Woodrow Wilson Bridge, engineers bidding on the project didn’t know they would have to rebuild ten existing bridges. Nor did they realize they’d have to dredge the Potomac, which was constipated by silt from unrestored watersheds and nonrestorative agriculture, as well as by dams. Underestimating the restoration challenge—primarily the “Corrosion Crisis” elements—added a cool $1 billion to the combined tab, with the Mixing Bowl price tag alone ballooning from $220,000,000 to almost $700,000,000 in eight years.

Fortunately, preventive maintenance is now the fastest-growing trend in highway maintenance. At the 2000 annual convention of the American Public Works Association (APWA), Richard Herlich of VMS, Inc., a national road maintenance firm based in Richmond, Virginia, told me that state DOTs were finally awakening to preventive maintenance. He said Virginia was an early leader of this movement, but that many states are still stuck in the mode of funding primarily new development and rehabilitation, with just token amounts for maintenance.

This leaves states with a nasty combination of near-perfect roads (either new or recently restored) plus dangerously decrepit roads, with little in between. Traditionally, roads have had to reach an acute condition before getting funding; fortunately, this mindset is fading. Some states, such as Wisconsin, Michigan, New Mexico, Ohio, Illinois, Indiana, and Utah are now using long-term warranties (from road builders) to get a handle on costs, and to give contractors increased incentives to build roads that last.

Exiting the Highway

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There’s a lot more to transportation than roads, of course. Many airports are in sad shape. It’s not just the buildings and runways: virtually the entire world’s aviation radar network must be replaced. In the infrastructure restoration industry the word “billion” is exceedingly common— consider, for example, the $3.2 billion renovation needed at Chicago’s O’Hare airport, and the $3.4 billion renovation plan for Virginia’s Washington Dulles airport.

America’s love affair with automobiles brought our passenger rail system to the brink of death. General Motors and Ford reportedly bought up metropolitan trolley systems and dismantled them in the first half of the twentieth century in order to expand the market for cars. The combined pressure from consumers and industry left us with a public transportation gap that the airlines eventually filled, but only for the longer distances with any efficiency.

What with airport congestion, remote airport locations, and poor connections from airports to local public transportation (Washington, D.C.’s restored National Airport being a happy exception), flying has become a stressful, unproductive experience; more Americans have rediscovered the joys of being able to read and write on trains. (September 11, 2001, added another factor: we gained a new appreciation for the difficulty of hijacking trains and crashing them into buildings.)

The above circumstances, combined with the shocking condition of U.S. rails and rail bridges (not just compared to Europe and Japan, but even compared to many lesser-developed countries) should lead to a massive rail restoration in the United States. Because we have so little decent rail infrastructure in place, such a restoration even offers the opportunity to leapfrog several technological generations. The current state of the art in high-speed rail is the nearly silent maglev (magnetically levitated) train, powered by hydrogen fuel cells. Some of these trains can achieve 528 kilometers (330 miles) per hour.

Shanghai is installing a German maglev to connect its downtown to Pudong International Airport, 33 kilometers away. The U.S. Department of Transportation has committed $950 million to putting a maglev in one of two places by 2004; either between Baltimore and Washington, or between downtown Pittsburgh and its airport. These aren’t fuel cell projects, but they should be (they can be converted later, since maglevs run on electricity.)

Given the use of fuel cells in cars; public transport; mission-critical institutional installations; plus remote, off-grid communities and 159homes, their appearance in urban and suburban homes won’t be far behind. Let us now, therefore, consider the reconstruction of our public power infrastructure.

PUBLIC POWER INFRASTRUCTURE

The reconstruction of our energy infrastructure, as suggested in the above quote, is shifting the seat of power from public and semi-public entities to private companies, and an entirely new type of power grid is emerging. There will be at least three key differences between our old power infrastructure and this new one:

1. Power production will be largely decentralized, with most energy being produced where it is used.
2. Utility companies (assuming the oil companies drop the ball on creating a hydrogen infrastructure) will switch from being primarily energy producers to being energy distributors, both for the electricity itself and for hydrogen. Remaining fossil-fueled power plants will become the grids’ backup generators, but that function rapidly will become unnecessary.
3. Power utilities (at least, the more innovative ones) will assume other new roles, too. These include trading energy and pollution credits, partnering on technology R&D, and integrating the power with other forms of public infrastructure. Probably the leading example in the United States is the Electric Power Research Institute [EPRI], a think tank in Silicon Valley funded by leading power companies to help their industry make this 160istoric shift in roles, technologies, and values. Their EPRIsolu-tions division is especially interesting in this regard. They have Adam Davis working full-time to find ways to market “Eco-Assets,” such as the services provided by watersheds and other ecosystems.

It has been said that the U.S. power grid is the largest machine ever built by humans. Most countries already have extensive national grids that can be adaptively reused into a kind of “energy internet,” with each residence and business uploading and downloading power as needed. While existing grids have value, countries lacking such infrastructure can leapfrog past the need for all those wires and cables.

Most of us just want to save money on our energy bills. Some of us also consider it important not to contribute to air pollution, or to our country’s dependence on foreign oil (or domestic oil, for that matter). The rush towards “green” energy—whether motivated by dependability, cost savings, environmental concern, or national security—is picking up tremendous momentum, and this will automatically result in adaptively reusing our grid into a decentralized energy generation system.

For the past decade, wind power has been the fastest-growing energy source in the world, with a steady 20 percent annual rate of increase. Denmark already gets over 10 percent of its power from wind, and the state of Navarra in Spain is 20 percent wind-powered. Germany has installed 1.6 gigawatts of wind power in recent years.

More recently, solar hit the 20-25 percent annual growth mark. Wind will continue to grow nicely, especially for use in large installations and for the production of hydrogen. This hydrogen is for fuel cells, which will be a key technology of this decentralized power system. Stationary (non-vehicular) fuel cells are already a $40 million market, and the most conservative projections expect it to hit $10 billion by 2010.

Fuel cells enable everyone to have local power without the noise, smell, air pollution, and unreliability of diesel and gasoline generators. But fuel cells have been—until now—too expensive, except for high-tech, medical, and other mission-critical businesses that require completely dependable, blackout-proof power. Now, the number of companies switching to fuel cell power is skyrocketing. Many switches have been precipitated by the Internet revolution: large electronic commerce companies, banks, and other types of firms can lose enough money in one minute of blackout to pay the entire cost of these one hundred percent-reliable fuel cell systems.

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The major driver of fuel cell affordability in the future will be the automobile industry. Every year, it produces enough engines to equal half of all the generating plants in the world. Replacing engines with fuel cells, which will happen sooner than the public realizes, will cause the price of cells to plummet. And because fuel cells will be in widespread use in buildings by that time, much of the hydrogen refueling infrastructure will already be in place. Because large-scale fuel cell generators are merely aggregations of small fuel cells, prices will come down for everyone.

It’s important to remember that the key to this rehabilitation of our world power system isn’t just in the nature of the energy source, but the location of the energy source. Using renewable sources is a great step in the right direction, but it would be a shame to waste half of it by using the old centralized systems of distribution.

Centralized power generation is hugely wasteful. We wouldn’t tolerate a gasoline tanker that spilled half of its load, but that’s what those massive high-tension transmission lines are doing. Only about half the energy in coal, oil, or nuclear actually becomes electricity, by the time you figure in heat loss. The loss of another 50 percent in transmission makes for a horribly inefficient system. Add in the energy used to mine, refine, and distribute uranium, coal, and oil, and the net delivery comes down to five percent, sometimes dropping to a net loss. Most appliances, such as incandescent lights, waste 75 percent of the power they consume, so the bottom-line numbers are truly appalling.

Centralized power is also highly fragile. Most of southern Brazil—11 of the most populous and industrialized of its 26 states—discovered this on January 21, 2002. A single broken transmission cable (that’s the official story, anyway) left millions of people (not to mention businesses large and small) in total blackout for two hours. Three years earlier, the region had been in the dark for four hours after lightning struck a substation in São Paolo. Part of the design problem of “modern” systems is that the failure of a large dam or a nuclear plant can be so disastrous that they automatically shut down whenever the power grid becomes unstable.

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Those shutdowns make the system even more unstable, and so the ripple becomes a tsunami.

Using fuel cells and (to a lesser extent) microturbines to power buildings gives the buildings more reliable energy than does today’s grid, and a distributed “embedded generation” network of millions of fuel cells and microturbines would be almost completely blackout-proof. The backup system (the grid) would actually be less reliable than the building’s primary system, since ice storms, hurricanes, etc., can knock down power lines.

Grid Restoration Is Powered from Within and Without

Only immense political influence, combined with purposely misleading cost-accounting systems, keeps the world’s most wasteful “business” (electric power generation and distribution) operating. But this is changing. San Francisco’s citizens recently voted to switch all of the city’s public offices to clean, efficient energy sources. Santa Barbara, Calif., did nearly as well, voting to go 80 percent green power. Every major government office in Britain is now supplied by renewable energy sources. Where demand appears, supply will follow.

Britain’s energy regulation agency, the Office of Gas & Electricity Markets, is studying how to remove the regulatory barriers that block small generating facilities from connecting to the power grid. That office envisions getting at least 10 percent of the United Kingdom’s power through embedded facilities such as windfarms, rooftop solar, and cogeneration (a combination of the heating and powering processes). As in the United States, this will offer tremendous economic revitalization opportunities to the struggling farm economy, which has vast capabilities to generate energy from wind, solar, and farm wastes (biogas).

Turning farm waste and landfill gases into energy is actively restorative: it takes existing contaminants from circulation. What appears to be an energy production industry from one angle, looks more like a pollution remediation and waste cleanup industry from another.

PUBLIC SOLID WASTE INFRASTRUCTURE

In Amsterdam, the highest point of elevation is a so-called “Dutch Mountain” of trash. After closing a decades-old landfill, the Dutch capped this “peak of poison”—comprising everything from heavy metals to cyanide—with a layer of relatively non-toxic rubble (sand, peat, and plastic), and layered that with a little topsoil and grass. It’s now becoming a popular hiking and strolling destination for local citizens in search of a little altitude. (At 98 feet, it’s not exactly Alpine: they climb it “because it’s there.”) There’s debate, of course, over whether throwing a pretty park over an ugly landfill qualifies as restoration. Visually, sure. Environmentally? Hmmm…

ASCE’s “Report Card on America’s Infrastructure” gave our hazardous waste infrastructure a D-, and our solid waste infrastructure a C-. The solid waste portion of our infrastructure is almost as decrepit as our water infrastructure; design-wise, it’s even worse. Rather than cleaning solid waste poorly and recycling it (as we do with water), we just bury our garbage (or sometimes we incinerate it, which is just a way of “burying” it in our air).

Reducing waste production is the obvious solution in the long term, and there has also been significant growth in recycling businesses. Manufacturers are making inroads into reducing their waste. Because a quarter of the average landfill’s volume comprises construction waste, more communities are requiring that condemned buildings be deconstructed (allowing valuable, often no-longer-available materials to be recovered), rather than demolished.

One positive, waste-reducing trend that combines the two is “servi-cizing.” This is where a firm leases the use of the product, rather than purchasing the product, such as elevators, chemical solvents, carpets, etc. The manufacturer thus retains ownership of the product, taking it back for recycling or restoration and resale at the end of its useful life. But these are all matters of sustainability, not restoration.

These are all trends that will slow the growth of landfills and thus retard the further despoilment of our world, so they contribute to passive 164restoration—but none of them remove the toxins and wastes that have already been released into the environment. That would be actively restorative.

A more active form of restoration, for instance, would be sealing an old landfill to stop the groundwater contamination, landscaping it to use as an industrial park, and then tapping the methane from rotting garbage to heat or cool the buildings, thus cutting fossil fuel use and preventing the methane from leaking out to destroy the ozone layer. The most restorative approach, which will require some significant technological breakthroughs, will remove all the waste in these old landfills and reprocess it into raw materials for remanufacturing. Such a process, of course, would need to be powered by clean energy and would not release toxins or new forms of unusable waste.

Interim efforts to restore old landfills to a more productive and aesthetically pleasing state were worth a mention, but we’re not going to spend any more time on solid waste. Eliminating waste production is the real solution, and that will require a rehabilitation and reconstruction of our economy—maybe even our society. Readers are directed to many excellent books on the industrial ecology for more on this topic.

PUBLIC WATER INFRASTRUCTURE

ASCE’s Report Card gave U.S. water infrastructure the lowest marks of all public infrastructure, with wastewater getting a D+, and drinking water a D. Part of the problem is the sheer age of the facilities, and part is their antiquated processes.

In 2001, a bipartisan coalition of U.S. senators sent a letter to their leadership asking for up to $5 billion for the purpose of “upgrading this critical, but aging and failing, infrastructure.” The letter continued, “Although Americans take clean, safe water for granted, our drinking 165and wastewater infrastructure is in disrepair throughout the nation, with literally billions of dollars in documented critical needs.”

Wastewater

U.S. wastewater infrastructure already went through one extended— though relatively superficial—national rehabilitation. It started in 1948 with the passage of the Clean Water Act. The act has been amended nine times since then, with each amendment pushing the restoration further. The most significant change was in 1972, when the federal government took over as the primary enforcer (through the USEPA, which was only two years old at the time). What had really helped catalyze action was when Ohio’s Cuyahoga River caught fire in June 1969 (capturing our attention requires good visuals).

In 1992, three major changes to the act occurred:

1. It became illegal to pollute—defined by the EPA as discharging any type of industrial, municipal, or agricultural waste (including heat) into water—without a permit.
2. The use of better pollution control technologies was encouraged.
3. Billions of dollars were provided for the construction of new sewage treatment facilities.

The Clean Water Act—bitterly opposed by the industries of new development at its passage—is widely acknowledged to be one of the most successful U.S. federal legislations ever, and it did make a significant difference in the quality of our waterways and coasts. So, why did I call the Clean Water Act a “superficial” rehabilitation? Because it only addressed sewage treatment plants. Our water infrastructure also includes sewers, water mains, drinking water treatment plants, and watersheds (sometimes referred to as part of our “green infrastructure”).

For example, our aging, leaking, under-capacity sewers went largely untouched by the Clean Water Act. What’s more, while the quantity and quality of sewage treatment plants improved, the basic processes and underlying paradigms remained the same. All were based on outdated technologies. (The Act also didn’t address drinking water treatment facilities for the most part, nor their mostly ancient, rupture-prone systems of mains and pipes for collection and distribution, which we’ll discuss next.)

In other words, the Clean Water Act partially addressed the Contamination Crisis portion of our water problem, but focused even less on the 166Constraint Crisis, and almost completely ignored the Corrosion Crisis. Even in 1948, many U.S. cities had century-old water mains and sewers. The act also ignored some of the big picture issues, such as the ethical assumptions underlying a system that solves local problems by sending partially treated effluent to an endless chain of anonymous downstream communities.

Drinking Water

The drinking water domain comprises two components, water treatment plants and the distribution system for that water. These systems were designed in the early twentieth century to treat water polluted primarily by biological pathogens. They don’t even monitor, much less remove, hundreds of dangerous industrial compounds now lurking in aquifers and surface water.

The water mains that distribute “clean” water in the United States average over 50 years old, with most older U.S. cities relying on mains over 150 years old. The Washington Post regularly features photos of local broken mains geysering fifty feet or more into the air. Less dramatically, many are clogged with calcium deposits, and most leak a substantial portion of their contents. Some are even made of creosote-treated wood, now known to be carcinogenic. All are restoration opportunities.

Drinking water treatment plants tend to be in better shape than their distribution network. This is due in part to the Clean Water Act, and also because renovating them doesn’t involve tearing up the whole city. But many plants are quite decrepit, and most are grossly undersized, due to population growth.

A bigger problem is that their design is based on getting rid of pathogens by poisoning the water with chlorine. Chlorinated water is obviously better than water carrying cholera. But, if it weren’t for those deadly diseases, would we for even a moment think of adding something as nasty as chlorine to our drinking water? Not if we knew anything about it, or its breakdown products. We need to get away from the chemical manufacturers’ doctrine that the only way to make water safe is to poison it. Nature knows a better way: it improves the healthfulness of water without destroying health elsewhere—in other words, it uses a restorative process.

Most of us are also aware that we have been poisoning wildlife with the carcinogenic breakdown compounds of chlorine for decades (we’ve mostly switched to chloramines, which don’t break down, so now 167we’re chlorinating our rivers and oceans). But only recently has anyone bothered measuring—and telling us about—the degree to which our rivers and bays are loaded with hundreds of excreted prescription drugs (not to mention caffeine: billions of fish drink secondhand Starbucks on a 24/7 basis).

Scientists in Britain are investigating possible links between the large amounts of estrogen excreted by women taking birth control pills, and the fish (in the North American and U.K. rivers receiving that estrogen) whose males are turning female by the millions. These same rivers supply our drinking water, but treatment plants not only don’t remove estrogen (or the other drugs and industrial compounds); they don’t even attempt to detect it.

Many of these drugs, such as those from birth control pills, are hormones that have powerful but largely unknown effects on humans and wildlife. Because most cities get their drinking water from rivers, we are drinking the drugs of upstream cities. Public health authorities only test our drinking water for a handful of toxins or pathogens (just three, in many cases) despite the presence of well over a thousand harmful pollutants in the average river. Our primary “warning system” seems to be the tracking down of unusual cancer (and other disease) clusters years— even decades—after the fact. So, buy a filter or be a filter.

It’s not just pharmaceuticals that are rife in our drinking water: One of the not-commonly-acknowledged facts about public health is that the vast majority of household products that end up in our water— shampoos, sunscreens, toilet cleaners, etc.—are not tested for their effect on humans or wildlife when ingested. The labels say “do not ingest,” and that’s considered good enough. But it isn’t good enough, because we ingest them every day in our drinking water.

Restorative Technologies

What did the opening story of Santo Domingo’s missing sewage treatment plant have to do with restorative development? It sounds more like they need some old-fashioned new development, right? But Santo Domingo does, in fact, have a sewage treatment “system” that needs to be replaced: it has a network of sewers linked to the ocean, and the city uses the Caribbean to purify its wastes.

Adding any kind of sewage treatment plant would be restorative for the river and the ocean, but that would still be new development. There are such things as “restorative technologies,” and building them from 168scratch will be part of the “restoration of new development”. Again, new development isn’t going away, so there are plenty of opportunities to take it beyond the current goal of “greener,” all the way to restorative.

What would a restorative sewage plant look like? Let’s define “restorative technologies” first. From a waste or toxicity perspective, these are technologies that aren’t just less polluting, or even nonpolluting (a feature most “sustainable” technologies strive to achieve): They actually reduce existing environmental pollution, in addition to not adding any of their own.

A restorative sewage plant, then, wouldn’t just remove the waste that has been flushed into the already-polluted drinking water: it would discharge water that is cleaner than it was before that waste was added to it. For instance, most cities use river water for residential use. Some is used for drinking, but most either becomes greywater (from the kitchen, bathtub, etc.) or blackwater (from the toilets). A restorative sewage plant wouldn’t just remove the fecal material, soaps, drain cleaners, and whatnot added by this household use. It would remove the pesticides, fertilizers, and sewage from upstream farms and cities that were in the water when it arrived at the plant (and which were passed on to consumers). A restorative sewage plant, ideally, should discharge spring-quality water: water that’s ready for drinking.

Spring water is (usually) the result of (1) solar-driven plant and algal purification (and oxygenation) at the surface, (2) anaerobic bacterial action (which breaks down complex compounds) in the muck, and (3) mechanical filtration through porous rocks and earth. The good news is that Santo Domingo’s lack of water treatment infrastructure frees the Domican Republic to leapfrog past several generations of sewage treatment technology, going straight to the state of the art, which is restorative.

From the Caribbean to Canada

With this in mind, let’s hop from the Dominican Republic up to Nova Scotia. One of the major tourist attractions of Bear River, Nova Scotia, is its sewage treatment plant, the $400,000 Bear River Solar Aquatic Facility, which attracts some 2,000 visitors annually (hey, this is a tiny town, not on a major tourist route!). Located in the middle of its tourist district, the solar- 169powered, 4,200-square-foot, 80,000-gallon plant emits no odors. The water that reenters the river is literally fit to drink, with not a single chemical having been used in the process (except those produced by the plants, bacteria, snails, and algae and other organisms that actually do the cleansing work).

The plant, built by Environmental Engineering Associates of Massachusetts, also produces high-quality compost from the solids. It costs about the same to operate as a traditional plant, but takes up far less room. This was important, because the town had no land available for the normal space-hogging technology. (In a perfect example of my earlier warnings concerning “engineering think,” someone informed me (as this book was going to press) that an engineer without any background in such systems had been recently hired to manage it. He reportedly reengi-neered it in a way that “mechanized” it and destroyed most of the vital flows and processes. The same source told me that the town is currently trying to restore the original system.)

Why would tourists want to view Bear River’s sewage? It’s not just the pretty green plants floating on the water of these ecosystem-based treatment facilities: this facility is (was?) a microcosm of restoration. The filth of civilization enters at one end, and pure, oxygenated water is discharged at the other. It’s more like a greenhouse than anything else, and revitalizing oxygen emitted from the plants floods the air. People are mesmerized, and being there makes them feel really good.

These ecosystem-based sewerage systems—like the Living Machines long pioneered by Dr. John Todd—actually have an advantage over nature, at least in terms of edutainment value. In the great outdoors, it’s difficult to perceive the complete cycle of cause and effect. But when a miniature ecosystem takes sewage in at one end and dispenses drinking water from the other, and when each portion of the process is visible, peoples’ perception of sewage treatment goes from disgust to wonderment. No school field trip in the wild could teach as much about the invisible processes of nature as does this machine/ecosystem hybrid technology. In fact, our planet’s interrelated built and natural environments might be considered such a hybrid.

Integrated Water Management: The Path to Restoring Water Quantity and Quality

The only sound method of creating economical sewage plants that produce high-quality drinking water is to use systems that combine the same organisms that have been purifying the earth’s water for millions of years: plants, algae, and bacteria. Besides restoring public health, a wholesale restoration of our sewage and drinking water treatment plants using such technologies would be the single greatest thing we could do to restore our rivers, estuaries, and oceans, and thus our fisheries. Take those collateral benefits into account, and the cost-effectiveness of such systems drops far below the full cost of current systems.

Despite the efforts of a few dozen forward-thinking communities like Bear River, Nova Scotia, ecosystem-based sewage treatment is a restorative technology that has disappointingly little momentum. What does have momentum—counterintuitively—is something even more grand: The integration of wastewater, drinking water, and stormwater systems with watershed and wetlands restoration.

Ideally, our drinking water and sewage treatment systems should be one and the same. This kind of integrated, closed-loop water management will actually be the core dynamic of the water infrastructure rehabilitation and reconstruction of the next few decades. Closed-loop design is the real test of a system’s integrity. Our current systems are horribly primitive, mostly based on dumping huge quantities of chemicals into the water to precipitate dissolved solids. Anaerobic bacteria are briefly used to break down a few of the compounds, but the flow-through is far too great for this bacterial decontamination to be in any way thorough.

It’s always amazing how quickly we can come to accept the most abhorrent behavior as normal. The infamous Nut Island wastewater treatment plant fouled the waters of Boston Harbor horrendously for three decades. Before it was built in 1952, Boston dumped its raw sewage directly into the harbor, a startling reminder of how recently the realm of new development started developing a conscience (or watchdogs).

The March 2001 Harvard Business Review published a shocking study of the dismal state of affairs at Nut Island, specifically the city’s state of denial about the plant’s barely functional condition, and its resistance to change.¹

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The article told the following story: “It seems that one day, James W. Connell, Nut Island superintendent in the 1960s, went to Boston to ask the MDC [Metropolitan District Commission] for funds to perform long-deferred maintenance on essential equipment. The commissioner’s only response: ‘Get rid of the dandelions.’ Startled, the superintendent asked the commissioner to repeat himself. ‘You heard me. I want you guys to take some money and get the dandelions off the lawn. The place looks terrible.’ “ The Nut Island facility was recently rehabilitated with “modern” equipment, which has contributed much to that harbor’s restoration, but it’s still based on an antiquated paradigm.

There are three primary sources of wastewater: residential, industrial, and storm. One might think storm water runoff wouldn’t be much of a problem, since it’s nice clean rainwater, but it is, in fact, a major challenge, for two reasons. The first is that, in between each rain, our city streets become coated with vehicle exhaust deposits and tire “rubber” (mostly a petrochemical product), not to mention oil drippings, dog doo, pigeon droppings, detergent from neighborhood car washings, fertilizer and pesticide runoff from lawns, etc. By the time it hits the sewer system, rainwater is anything but pure.

The second problem is related to quantity, rather than quality. Our sewage treatment plants are designed to handle fairly linear inputs, and their capacity has been outstripped by population growth. Storms thus cause them to overflow, spewing raw sewage into the river or bay to which they are connected. This is a major threat to the restoration of rivers and estuaries, so the restoration of our wastewater infrastructure must be integrated with those projects.

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Ten or twenty years from now, we will begin a massive overhaul of the primitive technologies and designs causing the “point source pollution” described in the above quote, that is, pollution entering a body of water from an identifiable source where it can be measured. Waterless composting toilets and residential gray water (showers, sinks, etc.) treatment units are being incorporated into homes on an increasing basis. This portion of infrastructure restoration—as with many concepts that wreak fundamental changes on industry and society—will likely be stimulated by a successful model operating in some smaller country, island nation, or sovereign indigenous territory. For now, let’s return to the present, and look at the infrastructure restoration that’s already going on, and at what’s planned for the near future.

The funding, and maybe even the paradigm shift, might come from the “Water 21” initiative being advanced by a number of associations, such as the Water Environment Federation (WEF), the American Public Works Association (APWA), the Association of Metropolitan Sewerage Agencies (AMSA), and others. Designed after the TEA-21 and AIR-21 legislation, which provided major new funds for the rehabilitation of the nation’s roads and highways, Water 21 aims to get Congress to take the renovation of our water infrastructure equally seriously. These organizations have documented an annual shortfall of some $22 billion in water infrastructure construction and maintenance in the United States alone, so the restoration backlog is continuing to grow at an alarming rate.

Water 21 is supported by the Water Infrastructure Caucus, a bipartisan coalition of legislators led by the chairman and ranking members of the House Water Resources, Health, and Environment Subcommittees. WEF and AMSA announced in 2002 their joint goal to “build and maintain sustainable wastewater and water supply infrastructure.” If they take the word “sustainable” seriously enough, this project will catalyze the wholesale abandonment of current water system designs: nothing less than such a tabula rasa approach to this sector of the Restoration Economy is needed.

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The Water Infrastructure Network, a broad-based coalition of governments, engineers, and environmentalists, has asked the Bush administration for $57 billion to be spent on water infrastructure over five years. The backlog includes replacement, enhancement, complete restoration, and ordinary maintenance. In many cases, the dollar amounts categorized as “overdue maintenance” have morphed into restoration, due to the deterioration that took place during the period of delayed maintenance.

Integrated restoration strategies will greatly improve water infrastructure and its impact on the natural environment. Such strategies will help prevent project failures, such as when oysters are reintroduced into a bay before the sewage plants have been rehabilitated, causing the new oysters to die off for the same reasons their predecessors died off.

Most of our sewer systems are as old as our drinking water systems, and those of many European cities make the century-old sewer infrastructure of U.S. metropolises look sparkling new. Thus, sewage treatment plants have two serious problems: age and design. We need both drinking water treatment systems and sewage treatment systems that remove everything undesired from the water, while adding desirable oxygen to the water: only plant-algae-bacterial systems do this. But closed-system biological designs like Dr. John Todd’s Living Machines— which use enclosed ecosystems in tanks to break down and take up pollutants, using only sunlight for power—aren’t the only way to accomplish this, or necessarily the best.

Increased funding is a step in the right direction, but the real growth phase in the restoration of the world’s water infrastructure will involve a third element (in addition to the current two, restoring drinking water treatment plants/distribution and restoring sewage treatment plants/ collection): integrated watershed management (IWM). IWM is coming on 174fast as planners belatedly realize that drinking water and sewage issues cannot be separated from regional watershed issues.

We’ve mostly discussed public infrastructure here, but it should now be obvious that the future of energy, water, and solid waste infrastructure will be an internet-like grid, linking public and private infrastructure. Private residences and commercial buildings will become part of the system, rather than just the endpoint of the flow. On private property, more energy will be generated, more water will be collected, treated, and recycled, and more solid waste will be composted or burned as fuel.

ISSUES AND INSIGHTS

1. Perversion of restorative technologies by dying new development industries Fuel cell technology offers a good example. Although the cells aren’t actively restorative, they do eliminate new pollution, allowing passive restoration. But some people want to make fuel cells produce pollution.

Let’s back up a moment. Hydrogen-powered fuel cells get their energy by putting hydrogen and oxygen back together into water. The amount of energy this produces is exactly the same as the energy it takes to split water apart at the hydrogen production plant. Splitting it “stores” that energy until the fuel cell allows the two elements to merge again, so there are zero byproducts.

But oil and gas companies are trying to force us to use fossil fuels in fuel cells, such as natural gas, instead of hydrogen. (They can do this 175quite easily, simply by blocking the establishment of a hydrogen refueling infrastructure.) Fuel cells do burn natural gas more thoroughly than do reciprocating internal combustion engines, but the net effect would be an incremental improvement, rather than a paradigm shift to a non-polluting energy infrastructure.

What’s more, fuel cells burning these dirty fuels don’t last anywhere near as long as those burning hydrogen. It would help tremendously if the federal government were to ban the burning of anything but hydrogen in fuel cells for 20 years or so, just to give the industry a clean start, but that would probably require replacing 80 percent of U.S. Congressional incumbents (political restoration).

Part of the oil firms’ disinformation campaign tells us that hydrogen won’t work, because you have to burn so much fossil fuel to create it. They “forget” to mention that it can be (and is already) produced from clean energy sources. When the hydrolysis creating the hydrogen fuel is powered by electricity from nonpolluting energy sources—such as geo-thermal, solar, wind, methane (from waste), etc.—the use of fuel cells will be almost completely non-polluting, except for aspects such as the initial manufacturing and distribution of the fuel cells.

In fact, Iceland plans to base its entire economy on hydrogen produced from geothermal, hydroelectric, and wind in the near future. That country will use only hydrogen domestically, and as other countries adopt fuel cells, hydrogen will quickly become its major export.

2. Other forms of infrastructure restoration can also be compromised by retaining old designs and investments While rebuilding our roads and bridges is a good thing, taking advantage of their decrepit condition to direct the money towards replacing some of them with public transportation would be better. Rehabilitating inefficient water filtration and sewage plants, as we’ve just discussed, is also a good thing, but getting rid of them in favor of an integrated watershed/water infrastructure system is even better. Somewhere along the way, we need to make bold decisions as to when we cut ourselves loose from dysfunctional designs: when to replace, rather than rehabilitate.

Such decisions will be easier when the restoration of all aspects of our built and natural environments is integrated. Presently, the fact that a city’s rehabilitated sewage plant will help restore an estuary 200 miles downriver is an “oh, that’s nice,” rather than a factor entered directly into its cost-benefit analysis, or into its repayment scheme.

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CLOSING THOUGHTS

Some readers might be wondering if these hundreds of billion of dollars put into infrastructure restoration wouldn’t be better spent on something more urgent and irretrievable, like endangered species. Are the needs of pipes, roads, and buildings really as critically important as saving whales? I wouldn’t argue with them, except to point out that rotting infrastructure leads to huge waste, which leads to environmental damage, which threatens species.

Some of that waste is obvious, such as the millions of gallons of gasoline burned daily in traffic jams. Some of it is more subtle, such as wasted educational efforts due to uncomfortable students in dilapidated schools. Either way, the quality and efficiency of the built environment is directly connected to the health of the natural environment.

One problem encountered by water recycling projects is the public perception that recycled water is inferior to “fresh” water. This can only be attributed to a failure of our public school system: how can students graduate from high school not knowing that every drop of water they’ve ever put in their mouth has already been recycled through kidneys, colons, and swamps millions of times? On the plus side, this means people obviously trust nature’s water treatment system more than those based on concrete and industrial chemicals. This makes systems that integrate watersheds and water infrastructure—such as New York City’s— that much more marketable.

No one needs to tell public works directors that they’ve got an infrastructure restoration crisis. They’ve been waiting for the rest of us to wake up to it. One hurdle is that city and state budgets are not formatted in a trimodal manner, making it difficult to properly budget for new capacity, maintenance, and restoration. Once they start using the right terminology, politicians will find that restoration is a far easier “sell” to the public when bond issuance time rolls around.

This chapter has been intentionally U.S.-focused: I wanted to show how bad things are (infrastructure-wise) in the country that many assume has world-class infrastructure. Countries whose infrastructure 177was built even earlier than ours can be assumed to have even greater restoration challenges/opportunities.

If we want to restore the world, we must restore the built and the natural together, or we’ll restore neither. This isn’t a pipe dream (no pun intended), as demonstrated by New York City’s success. Until our cities (and eventually our buildings) are on closed water systems, ensuring both quality and quantity means integrating infrastructure restoration with watershed and agricultural restoration, and this will lead to ecosystem and fishery restoration.

Unless you’re a civil engineer, you probably found infrastructure to be the “coldest” and least interesting of the restoration industries so far. Let’s change pace, moving to one of the most human and subjective of the restoration industries: heritage.

A SMALL SAMPLING OF OPPORTUNITIES

Business and investment

• Private companies are increasingly purchasing, restoring, and operating aged public infrastructure (often due to shortfalls in public funding). This includes transportation, power, water, and solid waste, plus public assets not mentioned here, such as prisons.
• The recent enterprise-level software/hardware trend towards “grid”—also called “utility”—computing (systems that dynamically reallocate resources) will likely find many applications in the public-private world of infrastructure, especially transportation, water, and power.
• The privatization of water is producing a growing number of stock market investment opportunities. French mega-firm Vivendi—originally a stuffy utility, now an entertainment giant (via acquisitions)—had a very successful IPO on the Paris stock exchange for its Vivendi Environment division in July 2000. In 2001, it got listed on the New York Stock Exchange (symbol: VE) in preparation for U.S. trading. The parent firm’s current accounting woes don’t negate the intelligence of moving into addressing “real” problems like water.

NGOs and other nonprofits

Infrastructure (as well as brownfields) is a restoration industry in sore need of more not-for-profit activity. Smart growth groups are currently the main citizen players, but many niches remain. Among the most obvious are those that would integrate infrastructure with other industries of restoration, e.g. water infrastructure with watershed and fisheries restoration. This would leverage the current government trend towards integrated water management

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Community and government

• Once again, integrated approaches are the future of public utilities, but this might go much further than “simply” integrating public drinking and wastewater with watershed and wetlands restoration (à la New York City). Eventually, all infrastructure, public and private, will likely achieve web-like integration: transportation, energy, solid waste, and water.
• Bulk water transfers aren’t limited to the state and municipal level, as is common in the western United States. National governments shouldn’t miss the trend towards international swapping of water. As of this writing, China had just completed its first large-scale water exchange, Iran and Kuwait had just done a deal, South Africa and Lesotho are in the process of doing their first transfer, and the U.K. is moving in that direction. As water increasingly becomes a tradable, strategic international commodity, restoration of infrastructure and watersheds becomes ever more urgent to national security and economic welfare.

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¹ Paul F. Levy, “The Nut Island Effect: When Good Teams Go Wrong,” Harvard Business Review, March 2001.