Looking for ways to protect the natural environment

Greywater is wastewater from comes from hand washing, basins, showers, laundry and kitchens. We are working on a great project to design a greywater treatment system to achieve zero impact on the surrounding environment.

Greywater from campsites drains into the surrounding national park, so it is very important that we do everything possible to not trash the natural environment. This is, after all, the reason people come in the first place.

Greywater treatment system options

We have been working through the designs with the project management and landscape architecture team. Our process involves incorporating both field testing and background research, looking at the range of natural passive systems that will cope with influxes of people and peak greywater generation periods.

Activated carbon as a pre-treatment option was our first choice but that won’t quite work this time (maybe in our next project it will).

We were very clear that we would not be using mechanical and chemical treatment options. These are too expensive, a maintenance burden, and not appropriate to have assets requiring power.

Interestingly, greywater can account for over 120 litres a day per person in a typical house or flat. But for campers, this could be less than 10 litres a day. In some countries, they only have 10 litres a day for everything!

We’ve run scenarios to determine how our final design works in a range of climate and visitation peak seasons. Designing which scenarios are low maintenance, and could be pre-fabricated, is now the focus of the project, along with drafting Land Capability Assessments.

We have just started another greywater treatment (at the household scale), but this time with reuse in mind.