News Stream

An editorial in today's Philadelphia Inquirer both lauds the city's plan to depave 500 acres of impervious surface and leaks the news that a groundbreaking ceremony will take place on Thursday to kick off the second phase of the Green 2015 action plan. A partnership of several organizations—the Philadelphia Water Department, the Department of Parks and Recreation, the Trust for Public Land and the Mural Arts Foundation—will implement the effort, which has both recreational and environmental benefits:

The Water Department’s role is significant. Replacing pavement with planted and porous surfaces will pay environmental dividends by reducing the polluted runoff that ends up in streams and rivers when it’s not backing up into homeowners’ basements.

Pictured above is the city's first depaving project, completed in Frankford last week.

Photo: Emma Lee/NewsWorks

Two shad posts in a row? It's a shad shad shad shad world. [Please make the shad puns stop. Thanks—ed.] As the peak of the shad spawning season arrives, WHYY's NewsWorks has a very informative article (and great photos) about the Fairmount fish ladder, including interviews with PWD aquatic biologists Lance Butler and Joe Perillo:

Historically, the shad traveled as far as 90 miles upriver from Philadelphia, past Pottsville, Pa., in the Schuylkill River system to spawn. In colonial times, shad dominated the Schuylkill's ecosystem and shaped life in Philadelphia. "Many families relied on the protein of shad to get them through the winter. They would salt barrels of shad, and that was their primary protein source," Perillo said. Industrial pollution and the construction of dams eventually depleted the shad population. With the Clean Water Act in the 1970s, a trickle started to return, but the Fairmount Dam blocked their way.

A quick note on shad and colonial times: Many sources mention that George Washington fed his troops shad from the Schuylkill River during the Revolutionary War. A previous post from last year—We've Been Shad (that was a pre-existing shad pun and is therefore not a punishable offense, right?)—calls this item into question.

The Kensington High School for Creative and Performing Arts was named one of the top 10 green projects of 2012 by the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Committee on the Environment. Kensington CAPA—designed by SMP Architects in a joint venture with SRK Architects—is the first public high school to receive LEED certification at the Platinum level. Of course, we here at the Watersheds Blog get really excited about the high school's stormwater management. Kensington CAPA keeps all its stormwater on site through a combination of green roofs (about 50% of the roof coverage), porous paving, rainwater harvesting for reuse, rain barrels and rain gardens.

View more info and photos from the AIA on Kensington CAPA here.

The big news around here is, as Forbes Magazine so elegantly put it, Hot Poop. More specifically, what hot poop can do for energy costs. Last week, Mayor Nutter was joined by city, state and federal officials to cut the ribbon on a new geothermal project at PWD's Southeast Water Pollution Control Plant that uses heat from wastewater (sewage) to warm the facility's buildings. The city partnered with NovaThermal Energy, a Philadelphia-based company, to implement the geothermal heating system. The 1 million BTU/hour unit in the plant's basement (pictured below) can provide heat at approximately 50% of the current cost, which would save $216,000 over the next 15 years. 

A scatologically correct article in Thursday's Inquirer offered more details:

"Wastewater picks up heat from a number of sources, including dishwashers, showers, and industrial processes, said Jimmy W. Wang, NovaThermal’s chief engineer. There’s also the “biomatter” that still contains heat, Wang said during a visit to the project Wednesday, although he used more scatological terminology. During the winter, sewage is about 60 degrees, and in summer it can exceed 75 degrees. That’s plenty of energy that can be extracted through a conventional heat pump. Haider said the technology is more efficient and cost-effective than traditional geothermal systems, in which deep water wells are drilled into the bedrock to capture heat from the Earth."

For more info on the wastewater geothermal heating project, see the official press release.