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Interview Transcript John Todd  University of Vermont professor John Todd is using biological treatment systems to clean wastewater.
John Todd: Hi, I'm John Todd. I wear many hats. One is as a professor at the University of Vermont. Another is the head of an NGO, Ocean Arks International, and finally my entrepreneurial hat as the founder of Todd Ecological, which is a design company that deals with all kinds of issues from an ecological perspective, but does it commercially. So that's me, three hats. Q: Talk about the living machine. JT: That living machine, which I did not have a direct hand in design of, was built by a company that I founded a number of years ago, here in Vermont with Will Rapp. Q: How is it working? JT: It's used in a rest stop on I-89. The rest stop is restricted in what it can do with waste. It's on a bedrock outcrop with no place to treat sewage in the normal way. So the plan there was to have a natural systems technology, an eco-machine if you will, and treat all of the waste of the visitors — and there's over a million visitor a year — and treat it, sterilize it and recycle it back to the toilets. And so the idea was to really have a closed loop. And to close that loop in such a way that it would be beautiful, wouldn't stink, would be attractive to the public, and would be ironic, yet still compliment to the Viet Nam war memorial. So when you walk in, and you look down on it, what you see is the sewage being transformed through a number of different ecological processes to clean water. And I think one of the things you may notice is that there, on the top of the tanks, there are a lot of plants. And plants are very important. When you look down on it, there are these series, this ring of tanks through which the waste is transformed from sewage to pure water, which is then sterilized And one of the most dramatic things you notice on the tops of the tanks are all these plants. The plants are a very critical part of the transformation process. They are grown on the surface of the waste in specially created supports. The roots grow down into the water, and what happens when a plant is photosynthesizing it produces chemicals out of its roots, which are really saps And these saps provide food for the beneficial organisms. And so that's a very critical part of it; the plants are feeding the system with some of the elements that they need to be successful. They also provide a little bit of oxygen into the water. They also provide a huge amount of surface area for beneficial micro-organisms to live on. Plant roots are just very, very superior for that kind of activity. You'd also find in those plants, in those tanks, an attribute of all eco-machines, which is that all of the five kingdoms of life are represented. This is unlike any other waste treatment, or most waste treatment systems, to have all the great five kingdom of life represented. From the bacteria on the one end, all the way up to the plants and the animals and the fungi or the mushrooms. It's essential that all of them be working together in the system in order to create this dynamic ecology which transforms sewage into pure water. After it goes through the final stage, it then goes into, flows through an ultraviolet sterilizer. This is basically sterilizing the water with ultraviolet light which then allows it to be safely recycled. At the rest area they inject a little bit of blue dye into it so that people know that it's not drinking water. Q: In case people want to drink out of the toilets… JT: And of course it's based in a greenhouse, because it depends on sunlight to work. When you start working with sunlight in waste treatment, you get this wonderful subsidy and it allows you to reduce the amount of energy necessary. And the most recent designs of eco-machines are using much less energy than even a few years ago. We really want to create technologies of the future that are almost carbon neutral. In other words they sequester as much CO2 as they create in the energy they use. Q: How much nitrogen and phosphorus do traditional waste treatment plants introduce? JT: I don't have the numbers in my head, but the waste treatment plants do introduce a fair amount of nitrogen and phosphorus. They're arguing that we should shift entirely to compost toilets. We can't completely remove it from the water that runs. And of course more traditional members of the staff and faculty are in favor of leaving the existing toilets. The students are more willing to make lifestyle changes. I have a doctoral student, Erica Gadis, who is looking at the various sources, non-point and point sources, into St. Albans Bay and basically she's found it's a very complex issue because there's the urban contribution, and urban run-off, but our agriculture is increasingly a problem. The reason that she's finding is that the soils are becoming saturated with phosphorus over time. And the reason for it, ironically, is not where most people would expect it to come from. We used to feed our livestock primarily from grains and grasses that were grown on the farm so there was a cycle. Now we feed our livestock from feeds imported from the Midwest and so every day tons and tons of animal feeds are coming from somewhere else with lots of phosphorous in them, going through the animals. Q: Did you get involved with George Bush? JT: You mean George the elder? We had at Ocean Arks International, a young man named Ryan Case, who worked on the Kennebunkport estate. And he noticed that a couple of the ponds on the estate were in crummy shape, filled with nutrients, not very pretty. He was able to persuade the Bushes to put a Restorer on the property to deal with this problem. And then being a clever fellow as he was ,this is Ryan, he managed to take the various visiting dignitaries like Gorbechov down to the pond and basically explain the virtues to these people of natural system design. He was a one-man ambassador for the ideas of natural systems, and it's amazing the number of world leaders that came through at one time or another and chatted that little technology with Ryan Case. Q: What did Ryan Case go on to do? JT: He then created the water steward network. Q: What are Restorers? JT: We've developed a technology for dealing with polluted bodies of water that's distinct from strict sewage treatment, and we call them Restorers. The Restorer Eco-Machine floats on the water, and it supports a wide variety of life forms that are water purifying, including higher plants. These are being employed to restore a number of polluted lakes in various places in North America and other parts of the world. One of the most dramatic examples that we got involved in, we were asked by the Chinese to build a Restorer to try and treat the waste in a canal in the city of Phuzou in South China. Now these canals are not ordinary canals, they're anything but. The city is one of these big cities that's grown up overnight, a million plus people and all of the sewage is not treated. It goes straight into the canals and then is washed out to the river and then into the sea. It's not an environment for the faint of heart, I can tell you. They're ugly. They stink. And so we were asked by the city officials and the Chinese EPA, could we create a technology that could deal with this stuff? And we, being as foolish as we are said, "Sure," and created one that's almost a kilometer in length, and set about to transform theses canals. It was an extremely difficult challenge, because the amount of flow we were told was going through the canal was really only a fraction of what we really had to deal with, and our poor little technology was kind of stuck, climbing up hill all the time. Nevertheless, after about nine months to a year it really began to do the job. And after another nine months or so, it became an officially approved technology for cleaning sewage-laden canals in China. We then hoped to go on and do many, many more miles of canals. There's roughly 55 miles of canals in the city of Phuzou alone. And we were led to believe that this would happen. What we didn't take into account is Restorers not only clean water, but they digest sludges. And in the process, we didn't realize it, but we were putting a very powerful group of people out of work. These are people who dredge canals. So they said, "Whoa, we don't like this." It may be pretty, the water may be great. We'd already shown them that they could raise fish in these canals after we'd cleaned it up. Q: The water actually began to clear up? JT: Yeah, that happened. Not only that, we introduced three species of fish that the Chinese fish-farm and they did beautifully. In fact, they bred. And you could go along that canal and at certain points you could reach down into the water, and put up a glass and it's clear. I mean, it's amazing. So, we thought our future would be unlimited expansion in China, but the dredging officials said, "Whoa, let's figure this out. You realize you're putting all of these guys with their big toys out of work." So the whole project's now in limbo and we don't know what's going to happen. Q: How about Hawaii? JT: It's the Four Seasons Resort on the Big Island, and if you want to see a high-end resort, that's the place to go. It's on the Kona Coast which looks like a moonscape if you haven't been there. And out of the moonscape you have these little dramatic clusters of vegetation. It really looks like another world. And then the Four Seasons is perched, of course, right on the edge of the sea. And to give you some idea of how dramatic a place this is, you walk down to the bar and they've created a little lagoon from the sea right where you have your drinks. You look back below, you see these big rays, and all these marine fish swimming right around your table. It's just simply very dramatic and a very, very exciting place to be. They had a pond on the golf course, called the 14-hole pond. It was a salt water pond, and it didn't look too terrific. So we built two Restorers for them, to a new design. And it cleaned up the water really nicely, so that you could look down, you could see sand on the bottom. Just what people who spend $1,000 bucks a night want to see, you know what I mean, clear water and sand on the bottom. And then we said, "Well, now we got this gorgeous pond, let's do something with it." So we introduced large numbers of oysters, Pacific white shrimp, the creme-de-la-creme of the shrimp, and three species of marine fishes, all edible, and they did extremely well in this salt pond. And it became the epicenter for the chefs. In other words, we now had the restaurant going bananas. Here was their live food center, and a big deal thing. And so on Earth Day, the EPA gave us one of their grand awards, and the citation was the demonstration of combining environmental restoration with economic development. And that's what they like, using a restoration project as an economic development project. So much of the work of my class at the University and of the company, Todd Ecological, is now trying to make environmental stewardship an economically entrepreneurial activity. I'll give just you one example from Vermont here. Last winter, I taught an ecological design studio, in which the students worked on a really interesting local problem. This year its going to be the Burlington Waterfront. Last year it was Vermont's probably most famous farm, Shelburne Farms. Q: What does second and third order integration mean? JT: First order integration is what happens when you have diverse activity on one place, so the manure from the dairy may go on to sort of deal with the pastures. The second order integration is where the manure makes new products, and then what's left over, more mature material, goes on to the land. And then a third order level of integration is where pieces that are now completely disconnected connect. The best example that the students came up with of that was, well why do we not create in essence, storm water interception using very closely planted hybrid willows. We've done stuff like that here in the Intervale, too. For example, we started working with Magic Hat Brewery waste on an experimental basis. There's two components of the waste, liquid and solid. We built, here in the Intervale, a series of small eco-machines that would take the liquid waste from the brewery as it's input. We then produced food chains that ended up giving us over half a dozen crops including fishes, freshwater prawns, perch, tilapia and many different kinds of agricultural crops, including tomatoes and cucumbers and basil and lettuce — all driven off the liquid waste from Magic Hat. We then took the solids waste and ran that through several food chains. The first one was to inject it with the spores of the oyster mushroom, and this waste then was immediately transformed into a completely new product — a new product that we found that cattle liked to eat whereas the original waste was not interesting to cattle, although pigs will eat it. After we did that, we then subjected it to another food chain, food web, that involved earthworms, and out of that we created a new type of material in which we were able to grow mescaline salad greens all winter. Oh, and I forgot to say, besides the new product from the mushrooms, we also had five crops out of each batch, five cuttings out of each batch of these gorgeous mushrooms, which went into local restaurants And in the end, from just that one organic waste, the Magic Hat Brewery waste, we were able to come up with over a dozen products, all valuable. And the biggest product out of that whole thing, and this is what you'll really love, was that all the people working on that project then went out to start new Vermont companies. We got the Wells family farm in South Hero, which is basically developing as an agro-eco park. Then we have the Vermont Mycelia, a new company that uses mushrooms as the basis for a drink called Vermont Tea, which is a very healthy drink, far healthier than the crappy soda that most students drink, and the students love it. And then another company out of that was to make medicines out of the mushrooms that were coming from the brewery waste. And now they moved these operations out into a local forest, where the material is grown on logs in the forest. So those are three companies that grew out of the operation. And then a fourth company that grew out of it was a company that's called Avatar Energy, which is based here in Burlington. They take waste from dairy operations, and they have been developing technologies to make it possible for small dairies to get energy from their cattle waste. In other words, fuel to burn from their cattle waste. There's a number of companies that are just spinning off out of that one little experiment that we did here. It was kind of an Intervale/Ocean Arks combination project that happened over a number of years. Q: What about Tyson Chicken? JT: There's one project that we've been involved in that's really very interesting. It's in Berlin, MD, part of the Chesapeake Bay watershed which is very threatened, as everyone knows, with agricultural contamination and urbanization. There's a chicken processing plant that was owned by Tyson, that was slaughtering over 1 million chickens a week, producing a million and a quarter gallons a day of high strength waste into this huge lagoon, where they were using state-of-the-art technologies to try and treat the waste well enough so that they could discharge into the river, which flowed into the Chesapeake Bay. They were out of compliance, and they were using hundreds of horsepowers of energy to try and come into compliance. So we designed and built for them a floating Restorer. It was a mile long, and it snaked back and forth in a serpentine fashion the full length of the lagoon. It had on it, 25,000 higher plants, native to the area, and so there were all these plants with their roots in the water. Plus all kinds of unseen technologies under the water, like habitats for organisms like fresh water clams, that kind of thing, because they filter water, and habitats for little freshwater shrimp, because they filter water, all the water filtering creatures. And it immediately, within a matter of weeks, began to bring the company into compliance, and in the process we were able to design it so that their electricity needs were reduced by 74%. So they were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars, and that dropped down to a manageable amount of money to manage this waste. The other thing that happened that was really fascinating was that it began to digest the sediments. Prior to the Restorer Eco-machine, a huge tanker truck would come in three times a week and fill up with the sediments on the bottom, and then drive off to try and find some place to discharge it, some farmers field or something. It was very expensive. What we found was that the Restorer was digesting the sediments faster than the new sediments were being created by new stuff coming in. So they no longer had to bring this big monster truck in and deal with their problem of sludges. So it was a real win for the company. The story has a slightly sad ending. Tyson in the end got fed up with the regulation in Maryland and moved their whole operations down to Mississippi where they wouldn't have to worry so much about regulations. So the town of Berlin owns the whole system now. I don't know if they have a client for the factory yet, so I don't know that answer. Q: Do you have anything else to add about this project? JT: So the only other thing I wanted to say about that project is it really gave us confidence in the engineering of these systems. It was built by my son Jonathan who is now the president of Todd Ecological. His background was in the Merchant Marines as a bad-ass tugboat captain, kind of thing. He's adapted to the world of ecology and environmental restoration very well, I might add. And he borrowed a lot of the technology from the offshore fish farming industry from Scandinavia, too, to provide the physical structures. Q: Ecology and economy, you can have both. JT: Oh yeah, the idea that we can't have ecology and economy is absolute bull. Any company worth its salt needs to get at least part of it on the cutting edge of ecological design now. You know, whether a huge company like General Electric developing the next generation of windmills, or a food company where you're currently involved in global distribution networks, it would be well worth your while to begin to think of the concept of localization of markets and localization of production. Say you're a yogurt company, and you're national in distribution. If you want to stay in the game as we approach an era of, well, where our energy and resources are not as abundant, say petroleum for example, you design into your company local production methods and local distribution methods, so that the only part of your company is national. In other words, it wouldn't be trucks coming from California with frozen peas, it would be based on a degree of local self-sufficiency which ecological design enhances and permits and provides networks and pathways that allow us to create these new entrepreneurial forms. But I would argue that most of the companies are going to be too slow, and the bulk of the economic activity in a state like Vermont will probably be the evolution of new companies. A lot of the students in my classes, for example, and I know they're all over the state, are really keen to dig in, whether they're talking about energy or fuels or food or materials, you know building materials. And it's a combination, in my view, of linking old skills, you know, skills that our grandparents knew well, like canning and preserving, and new skills, which are these kind of economic integration which we've only learned about in the last 20 years. You combine those and you get new economic forms. Q: Why do you think economics and ecology can/need to work together? JT: The real reason is that if we rely on compliance to save the planet, we haven't got time, it won't happen. If we can't combine jobs creation with environmental restoration, with economic stuff, we might as well just pack it up and go to a beach somewhere with a six-pack. Because I really do feel that we have to get a whole generation of young people at work as earth stewards. If they're going to be earth stewards, there has to be an economic engine derived from their activity. And once they see the connection between good work and a living, they get really excited. Q: There's a mindset difference: what is that about and how do we get everyone to get it? JT: The mindset that is providing the breaks or the reluctance to shift is basically what the social scientist Howard Kuntzler calls "sleepwalking into the future." He believes we as a culture are sleepwalking into the future. We don't have an idea of the aggregate things that we're doing to the planet, to each other, which can only stand so much stress and then we'll collapse like a deck of cards. So the big question then is how do you move from sleepwalking into the future, to becoming aware? And I think one of the things, and this is what I talk a lot to my students about, is we need to shift from teaching people that the future is going to be like the present, and therefore they need to get good at some piece of the present to be good in the future. We need to start teaching people to say that the future is not clear to anybody or any of us. Therefore, how do we create adaptive people, you know, people with their quote, unquote knees bent? And when you start thinking about how you educate adaptive people, you then go back to first principles which are food, shelter, transportation and energy, and you say, how do we create literacy in all those fields — food, shelter, transportation and energy? And then, how can we plug these people into that? Q: Talk about the role of soil in the climate crisis. JT: Well, I think the farmer that you referred to, Abe Collins, is certainly onto something with one part of the equation, and that is the ability of using these highly refined methods, like Yoemans keyline system developed in Australia, and other methods, that we can create topsoil, relatively rapidly, much more so than conventional scientists tend to believe. And I think one of the earliest examples of the recreation of topsoil in this part of the world was Louis Barmfields' Malibar Farm in Ohio, in which, in a little over a decade, he brought back this rather ravaged landscape to be really an Eden on Earth — a very diverse agricultural Eden — which he wrote about in a series of brilliant books. So, we know it can be done. The actual relationship between carbon sequestering and soil formation is more complicated. CO2 in the atmosphere is sequestered, or fixed, or buried in many different ways in nature. I mean, obviously one way is called oil. That's over geological time, algae to oil over geological time. When you have a bare cornfield in the winter, what's it doing? It's a no brainer. But I would say what's more worrisome about industrial agriculture is the CO2 produced and the electricity it takes to create a meal on your plate or the petroleum that's burned to create a meal on your plate. Or the energy and the materials that are used, consumed to produce the tractor and all the paraphernalia of an industrial format. So it's not just the soil in this equation, it's the whole game. We need to think about how do design for carbon neutral communities, so that they park, sequester, in the form of sediments or some other way, enough carbon as they emit. This is not an unrealistic way to design. There's a community in London, a whole neighborhood in London, England, which is designed to be carbon neutral. It's called the Bedsed community, and, for them to do that, they had to design completely differently than other urban neighborhoods. They had to learn to generate their own fuels on-site, using organic wastes locally. They had to learn to create their own electricity for their own heating and lighting and everything else that way. They had to learn to deal with all their own water, rainwater and sewage and so-on, on-site. They had to make it so that people could live and work and do commerce in the same area. Q: What is actually sequestering the CO2? JT: What's sequestering the CO2 is plants that take and use CO2 in the form of photosynthesis. We're surrounded by plants here that during the sunny times of the day is taking CO2 out of the atmosphere. We all breathe out CO2 and so at night CO2 starts to climb, and during the day it is brought back down again by the plants. And when the plants die and decay, the material is buried into the soil and the carbon is slowly increased. The carbon content of soils has been going down for the last 20-30 years, and your friend, Abe Collins, the farmer is reversing it. Return to top |
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