From Waste to Wonder - UO's Grey Water Conservation Project

Jan. 15, 2023 - By Keith Dickey

Lima, Peru, and Eugene, Oregon, are worlds apart in many ways. But spend some time with Kory Russel, an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Studies at the University of Oregon, and you will learn there are communities in both places with challenges of access to sustainable and efficient water use.

 

Kory has a photo in his office depicting a highly condensed neighborhood in Lima, a city where he and some of his students work on sustainable water projects.

“It is the second driest capitol city in the world, and all the water is trucked up to homes,” he says. “They are paying a premium for water, so if they can reuse it, it is a major economic benefit to them.”  The key is the development of low-tech systems to capture and filter grey water, which is water drained from kitchen sinks, baths, laundry, and other non-human waste sources. When properly treated, it does not need to be stored and removed and is safe to introduce back into the environment as irrigation for plants or gardens.

 

Like these communities in Lima, local CSS sites in Eugene do not have access to city water or sewage connections. Each community relies on a regular delivery of clean drinking water that is stored on-site. In addition, the waste grey water is collected and requires removal for recycling.  As supply and removal is costly, there is very little, if any, water on site to use for irrigation during the dry summer months.

 

This problem for CSS provided an opportunity for Kory and his students at the UO. Patching together money from several grants and using this challenge as a real-world teaching tool, his team—consisting of several graduate-level and more than 20 undergrad students—designed and built a low-tech grey water filtration system for the CSS Village site.  While clean drinking water is still required to be trucked into the community, the need for collecting and removing the grey water no longer exists. The ability to reclaim this water now creates the potential for irrigating plants and gardens during the summer dry season.

Kory says that the community members at the Skinner Village site have embraced the project and helped to provide and implement adjustments to the system. “What’s really been cool is that every time I’ve been to the site there are community members who will come out and are super interested and will help out. We had the filtration system set up with a grease trap that wasn’t quite functioning correctly, and the folks there just sort of modified it to work better.” As part of the project, Kory’s students compiled written instructions for CSS on the design and maintenance of the system. “One of the things that we want to do is update that manual," Kory says, “So that they are not reliant on us showing up with a bunch of students, and CSS has the expertise to maintain the systems.”


According to Tabitha Eck, Director of Operations at CSS, the success of this pilot program at Skinner Village has resulted in funding from The Oregon Country Fair for the development of similar grey water reclamation systems at five additional CSS sites. Tabitha says, “It’s just a matter of getting the bodies in the right place at the right time and the resources to implement this.” 


Kory is excited about working with the CSS team on additional sites with his students. While the fundamentals of the filtration systems are the same, the design is greatly influenced by each location's available space and landscape. “You’re taking the basic function of a wetland, and you are shrinking it into a box,” says Kory. 


The Skinner Village and similar projects associated with the UO are part of an interdisciplinary platform that Kory and several other professors called Landscape for Humanity created. The emphasis is to research, design, and build landscape-based water systems for abundant food, energy, and water.  To learn more, visit their website at landscape4humanity.org.

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