BioBubble
Perhaps one of the biggest challenges facing humanity today is the lack of basic sanitation for nearly half the world. This has life destroying consequences that reach way beyond the avoidable disease, sickness and death that millions of people suffer each year. I have seen too many Millenium Development Goals on sanitation come and go to sit by and watch an unnecessary tragedy continue to unfold. There is little effective action on the scale that is needed. I feel a sense of special responsibility and urgency to act since my life's journey has given me valuable insights into how nature effortlessly turns waste into abundance.
It is possible for us, as a community of designers to meet this challenge and perfect a BioBubble nutrient recycler if we emulate nature.
The Global Treatment System Challenge
For it to succeed, the BioBubble must ...
Be efficiently mass produced and cheap to transport
Be easily installed from simple pictogram instructions
Be energy-passive = uses no external power
Utilize robust biolytic ecosystems to treat used-water and organic wastes without odour, noise or significant methane
Deliver liquid fertilizer reliably to the roots of food plants
Require only infrequent maintenance by its users
Be compact and low cost + pays for itself by turning waste into food.
Natural Biolytic Ecosystems
Natural ecosystems are amazingly efficient with nutrients and water. Fraser Island in Queensland, Australia is a testament to this. Here, a complex and diverse rain-forest community thrives on nutrient-poor silica sand. The tangle of roots matted through organic matter and humus built up over many years, sucks up the nutrients and recycles it back into the ecosystem so efficiently that the water passing into the aquifer is some of the purest in the world. A crystal clear stream flows into the sea a short distance from where a dense colony of fruit-bats roost.
Conventional sewerage systems, even with the highest tech membranes and lots of energy come nowhere near the efficiency of nature's biolytic ecosystems when it comes to purifying used-water and recycling nutrients and organic matter.
The Biolytix Story
Some years ago I started to really look at and think about how nature decomposes organic matter. It is every bit as mysterious and fascinating as bringing all the bits together to make life! Biolysis (bio-lysis) mostly takes place on moist soils, on the edges of swamps and around streams. I looked closely at the patterns that emerged as cow manure breaks down. Carcass' have the same micro-architecture in their decay patterns, as do the humus-rich soil under a dense bat colony near my home in Maleny, Queensland.
I mimicked nature's examples to create an ultimately unsuccessful Australian business, Biolytix - its a great technology that won many awards up until January 2011 when the company went into liquidation. The technology is still evolving and now based out of New Zealand. It treats waste eco-logically using worms and soil organisms rather than electricity to treat human waste and used water. In the late 1980's I experimented with applying these unorthodox ideas and was soon so fascinated by the amazing power of nature to regenerate life from waste and death that I wanted to team up with her to make the perfect habitat for a biolytic ecosystem to do its wonders.
I made the mistake many inventors make of going into business to make the process popular, and to show the world how it is ridiculous to burn up fossil fuel to "treat" sewerage and food wastes, and even more ridiculous to waste the valuable nutrients and water produced by disposing of it into the sea or water or atmosphere. I learnt that paradoxically, death and decay are the secret elixir of life, the true source of fertility and fruitful abundance. I wanted to bring this fantastic knowledge to as many people as possible in a practical way, especially to the 2.6 billion people on our planet who still tragically do not have access to safe sanitation or healthy food. Unfortunately, due to a combination of bad luck and some poor business decisions the business failed before this goal was realized.
The BioBubble Architecture
With this vision in mind, I set out, a few years ago, to re-engineer the treatment housing so it could be mass produced and transported at low cost but would still be able to transform sewerage and food scraps into living gardens of food right at the fingertips of the world's poorest and hungriest people.
This part of the BioBubble vision has collapsed now too with the recent demise of Biolytix. I'm sure however that it will be possible to come up with an even simpler way to achieve the same goal if the project becomes truly open source.
PS this is now already happening. While working as a consultant to create a byolisis treatment system at Yangpo Ecovillage in Henan province China I came across a brilliant product called polycore and a related product Polycore sheet. It is cheap sturdy and very light weight because of its honeycomb structure. The sheets we used to make a support structure with intrinsic filtration capacity and the polycore honeycomb for the biolysis media and it just brilliant for that job with a large natural water-holding capacity even without the bonus of the humus that is created from the organic waste to fill the honey comb voids.
In the context of a rural community with no waste treatment infrastructure this can be configured into a strong and remarkably cheap below slab or below ground treatment system without the need for tanks of pipes. Amazing advance, but it would take years and at least 200K to get it approved for use in a developed country. In any case I will provide drawings and photos of how to construct it using low skill labour in any case as this after all is an open-source technology community, and who knows someone may take it through approvals in a developed country and make it more widely available. (Been there - done that, and that sort of red tape is not for me at this stage in my life)
Fraser Island Stream - An open book on nutrient recycling.
Fruitful ecosystems attract fruit loving animals and birds. Their waste products fertilize the ecosystem and make it more fruitful. It's a virtuous cycle.
