Sewage In, Clean Water Out: “Living Machines”

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The people in the photo above are walking through the coils of a “Living Machine” in Emmen Zoo, Netherlands. It is a machine that filters and cleans 260,000 gallons of wastewater per day using nothing but plants. The water that comes out is drinkable.


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It was created by John and Nancy Jack Todd using the science of “biomimicry“, where innovations are inspired by existing systems in the natural world. They’ve built large scale water cleaning machines in Canada and the US.

Find out more at: Living Machines

6 thoughts on “Sewage In, Clean Water Out: “Living Machines””

  1. Humanure can be bio-gassed very easily into a good compressible, storable bottled fuel for cars, diesels, cooking, heating; and a sludge that can be radiated to safety for food gardens, plus, it builds top-soil, fertilizes and saves imported petroleum based fertilizers! Americans, for some perverse reason prefer to pollute creeks, rivers, swamps, lakes, seashores with their own Shiite, and pay through the nose, in more ways than one, for imported oil, because the Status Quo and strong lobbies keep America stinking! Yankee Doodle, meantime, stoned out of his gourd, drunk as a skunk, or stunned by Prozac, sits in air-conditioned glory, expecting the unsustainability of his condition to be resolved by corporatism, who have long deserted him for high, dry, lands and higher ROI’s and dividend checks in “Yuan” on the Shanghai and Beijing stock markets! Detroit City is my witness! This is the truth!

  2. I dont know who or when this was originally conceived, but NASA developed this many years ago called a wetlands systems (or something similar). My dad looked into have one installed a few years ago, but due to ignorance of the county he lives in they would not allow it. This system would have been much better then the required system that sprays chlorine all over the yard. The other thing about the wetlands is that you can grow food in it, and the system works year round… in the southern states anyway.

  3. Great idea! Not only is the water being filtered by the plants, another by-product of the system is oxygen from the plants! It’s a win win win situation. Whoever is the brainchild of this is a genious.

  4. this is a possible solution for the dam that is fed by the river next to which I live.
    in SOUTH AFRICA, the dam is listed as the 3rd dirtyest in the southern hemesphere! want to here my idea!? will take 50mill euro to build properly!

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