While it is understood that the town’s efforts will improve water quality and biological habitat, these benefits may not be realized in our lifetimes, due to the estimated 25-50 years it could take for all the contaminated groundwater to flush through the estuaries. Many residents balk at the $250-600 million price tag, which will likely be financed through betterment fees for homeowners and tax levies for all residents.

A message from Karen Schwalbe of Hatchville sums up the problem and offers a potential solution:

There is an old adage:  if you take a barrel of sewage and add a teaspoon of wine, you get a barrel of sewage; if you take a barrel of wine and add a teaspoon of sewage, you get a barrel of sewage… Adding clean (and drinkable) water to human waste, then having to clean up a larger volume seems the wrong way to go. Why aren’t composting toilets or dry toilets being considered as part of the solution to our wastewater problems?

What if there was an option that residents could undertake right now that would remove their household’s contribution to the waste stream? In this blog, we’ll explore some of the innovative ways that people are turning their waste into a resource. It’s not as tricky (or stinky) as one might think…

Amy Larkin shows off her vegetable compost pile

Alchemy Farm in Hatchville, the former home of the New Alchemy Institute, is a place where the traditional meets the modern. A wind turbine from nearby Coonamessett Farm beats under a steady southwest breeze. Houses tucked into the pine trees are adorned with solar panels. Roosters crow and goats bleat.

So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that many of the residents in the neighborhood have something unusual in their bathrooms: composting toilets, a method of collecting human waste and turning it into harmless, useful fertilizer.

Actually, there is nothing unusual about the bathrooms.  The Larkin family’s, in particular, smelled faintly of pine shavings.  The only noticeable difference in their composting toilet-enhanced bathrooms is the white pipe, which makes a faint whirring sound. And the subtle absence of a flush handle on the toilet.

Compost my… what?

A composting toilet: the only difference is the pipe

As Amy Larkin kindly explained, when someone uses the composting toilet, the waste drops down a tube to a Clivus Multrum storage tank in the basement. The white “stinkpipe,” seen at left, continually pulls air out of the toilet and the storage tank, removing any odors.

The fan in the pipe runs 24/7, but is powered by solar panels, which operate even if there is a power outage. Amy often cleans the fan and has replaced it twice in the toilet’s 11 years of operation. “If that fan goes, the whole house smells,” she said.

Occasionally, a user will throw some sawdust or wood shavings (in the bucket to the right) into the toilet, which helps promote the texture, aeration, and moisture of the compost.

At a cost of $6,000 to install two toilets (including labor for two men and one plumber), the composting toilets are not nearly as expensive as a sewer connection, and probably rival the cost of regular home plumbing systems. After jumping through a few hoops with the Board of Health and building department, they installed one of the first composting systems in Falmouth. Their neighbors soon followed suit.

The Larkins had enough foresight to install their composting system when they built their house 11 years ago. It would be more difficult, but not impossible, to remodel a typical Cape-style house to include one. As Amy’s husband, Jonathan, pointed out, “the limiting factor is gravity”: their house is designed around their 1st and 2nd floor bathrooms, which must be located directly over each other and the storage tank.

“That’s what we got, a two-story outhouse,” Amy said.

Muckraking can be fun

Fresh compost, straight from the chute

A composting system requires some maintenance, Amy said, but it has become part of her regular household chores to ensure the pipe is clear and aerate the compost with a rake. She estimates that she removes about 20 gallons from the tank every few months.

“I actually like it. It bothers me more to put sewage into clean water,” she said. “But it’s not for everyone. You have to be a little earthy.”

In the initial “mineralizing” phase, the waste is doused with fresh water. The liquid is then pumped out into a separate storage tank.  Aerobic bacteria and fungi break down the nitrogen in urea (the primary component of urine) into ammonia and carbon dioxide. As it passes through the compost mass, nearly all of the ammonia is converted, first to nitrites, and then to nitrates by nitrifying bacteria.

Good vs. bad bacteria

The holding tank of a Clivus composting toilet

Human pathogens are killed not by the heat within this “mouldering” composter, but by predatory organisms and the retention time they spend in the system. Phosphorous and potassium, along with a wide range of micro-nutrients, are also captured by the composting process.

According to the manufacturer, the compost liquid results is a stable, high-strength fertilizer. Fecal matter in the compost system is reduced in volume by more than 90%. When fully composted, this material looks and smells like topsoil, and is an organically rich soil amendment.

The Larkin’s system does not include red worms, but those may be added to the holding tank to transport oxygen and moisture throughout the compost mass, thus assisting the physical and chemical breakdown. Thermophllic composting systems rely on temperatures of 25-40 °C (77-104°F) to fully break down the pathogens, assisted by beneficial bacteria.

Ecological fertilizer

The remaining compost mass is supposed to be hauled away by a septage hauler, but if that step does not take into account the beneficial properties of adding the composted material to a vegetable-scrap compost pile to use as fertilizer. It also does nothing to remove nitrogen from our community’s wastewater stream. By letting soil and plants around your house absorb the nitrogen, phosphorus, and micro-nutrients, the “solution to pollution is dilution” adage is put to work.

Toilet compost may not be something you would put on your vegetable garden, but as the Larkin’s neighbors, Earl and Hilde Maingay said, “bury it 8 inches under a tree and see how well it grows.” In fact, the manufacturer advertises its composter as a way to produce a home-grown, organic fertilizer, instead of buying the energy- and chemical-intensive commercial brands, which are often made from the very same substances we flush down the toilet.

Nora Greenglass, a research assistant at the Woods Hole Research Center, shared her impressions as a negotiator for the UN program for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) with members of the Woods Hole Science and Technology Education Partnership (WHSTEP) last week.

Nora Greenglass shares her impressions of the UN climate change conference with members of WHSTEP

From Falmouth to Copenhagen

Nora Greenglass was among 8,000 party negotiators in Copenhagen, as world governments, NGO’s, and activist groups converged on the Danish capital for COP 15.

It was not her first UN climate conference, but the first one where she had to wait for five hours in the snow with other accredited observers, just to get into the conference hall.

That’s when the observers did just what 30,000 climate change activists had been doing over the course of the 2-week conference: they protested.

“They barred civil society from entering when the heads of state were there. It was a bone of contention. This was supposed to be an open process,” she said. “Needless to say, I did not get much work done that day.”

Ms. Greenglass went to Denmark with a team of other researchers from WHRC (and other Woods Hole Consortium participants from the MBL and WHOI) to give scientific input on aspects of climate change that rarely make the headline news.  Among those are the REDD initiative and the impacts of rising greenhouse gas emissions on the world’s oceans.

The UN-REDD Programme is aimed at tipping the economic balance in favour of sustainable management of forests so that their formidable economic, environmental and social goods and services benefit countries, communities and forest users while also contributing to important reductions in greenhouse gas emissions… The immediate goal is to assess whether carefully structured payment structures and capacity support can create the incentives to ensure actual, lasting, achievable, reliable and measurable emission reductions while maintaining and improving the other ecosystem services forests provide.

-the UN Collaborative Program on REDD

Reducing poverty and emissions?

The main purpose of the conference this year was to develop a “cap and trade” system for carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. With the Kyoto Protocol past its prime, the outcome of Copenhagen was meant to set a new blueprint for setting emissions reduction targets, and ways to measure progress toward those goals.

However, negotiations broke down between developing nations and some of the biggest emitters (including the BASIC countries, Brazil, South Africa, India, and China) on the terms of such a high-stakes deal.

From the point of view of the developing nations (led by Africa), the system would allow industrialized countries to keep polluting, thus endangering their chances of survival. In the case of small island nations or places where desertification threatens arable crop land, climate change is indeed a matter of life or death.

But as Ms. Greenglass pointed out, the countries that produce the lion’s share of CO2 need to act now to reduce their emissions, and need  incentives to do so.

The World is Waiting for US

Despite the worldliness of the conference, Ms. Greenglass said that the elephant in the room was legislation currently stalled before the US Senate. (Last fall, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would require polluters to offset their greenhouse gas emissions, but a Senate version is not expected to pass.)

“The world is waiting for Congress, and we know where that’s going,” she said.

President Obama made an attempt to save the day, crafting an 11th-hour document known as the Copenhagen Accord, with 29 other nations (out of 194). Among other things, this non-binding document states that the US will reduce its emissions by 17% (from 2005 levels) by 2020. However, this pledge requires congressional approval– in an election year, in a recession.

A few positives did come out of Denmark in the waning days of the conference, Ms. Greenglass said.

• The REDD negotiations are nearly complete, with a “relatively prominent” place in US legislation, and a favorable view from US industry.
• In addition, the US pledged $100 billion to go towards climate adaptation measures, technology transfer, and forest protection for vulnerable countries by 2020.
• The US pledged $1 billion to help implement REDD; an additional $3.5 billion was committed by France, Norway, Australia, Japan, and the UK.
• An agreement was made on a transparent mechanism for evaluating the performance of each nation’s emissions reductions through an independent review process.

Pat Harcourt, an education specialist with WBNERR, asked how much of a role science plays in determining the outcome of policy.

Ms. Greenglass said that the specific targets, such as the 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees F) maximum for global temperature rise, are based on sound  science, but overall, the negotiations are “frighteningly political.”

“We need to peak global emissions by 2020,” she told WHSTEP members.

These days, Ms. Greenglass and thousands of other science policy consultants are heading back to the drawing board in preparation for COP 16, this November, in Cancun, Mexico.

According to scientists at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, 30% of the world’s carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, known to be a leading cause of global warming, are being absorbed by the ocean. Small coincidence that over the past 50 years of global  industrialization, rising CO2 emissions have also led to a 30% increase in the average acidity of ocean surface water.

This phenomenon is just starting to attract the attention– and alarm– of policymakers and the shellfish industry.  I talked to Scott Doney and Sarah Cooley at WHOI to find out why.

How does ocean acidification happen?

When CO2 in the atmosphere combines with seawater (H2O), the molecules combine to form carbonic acid (H2CO3). This acid is weak and dissociates rapidly in basic seawater, releasing hydrogen ions. When these ions combine with the carbonate ions already present in the water to form bicarbonate, they rob coral and shellfish of the materials they need to grow their shells and skeletons.

Scientists estimate that the pH of seawater has decreased by about 0.1 units– a 30 % decline on the logarithmic pH scale– and could decline by 0.3-0.5 units more in the next 100 years, as CO2 levels rise. Over time, they warn, the ocean’s ability to absorb CO2 could diminish the development of coral reefs and marine organisms with calcium carbonate shells, with side effects reverberating throughout the ecosystem.

Scott Doney, of WHOI, explains the connection between CO2 and your favorite seafood dinner

The question is when, and where, said Dr. Doney. Using carbon emissions projections from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he predicted that acidity levels in the ocean will double by mid-century, and carbonate ions could decline by half.

Carbon dioxide, if you look at it as a pollutant, is very long-lived, lasting from hundreds to thousands of years. It will also continue to grow through the mid-century, with no good indication that we’ll be able to stabilize it.  We’ve now increased atmospheric carbon dioxide to a range that hasn’t been seen since 800,000 years ago,  judging from ice cores.

-Scott Doney

In a 2008 paper, Drs. Cooley and Doney indicate that bivalves, such as scallops and oysters, would feel the effects of acidification more heavily than sea urchins or crustaceans, such as lobsters, shrimp, and crabs, due to their use of a more soluble form of calcium carbonate in their shells. The effects of acidification on fish is not known, but should be studied, Dr. Doney said.

“There’s no indication that this will destroy sea life, but it certainly will diminish and dislocate some species,” he said.

Calling for additional research into the socio-economic, as well as biological and political ramifications of ocean acidification, Drs. Doney and Cooley, with WHOI marine policy specialist Hauke Kite-Powell, are investigating the impacts on the shellfish industry in the Northeast.

The economic effects of ocean acidification will be felt locally, the scientists say. In New Bedford, the top American port for shellfish, they found:

• By 2060, a 25 % loss in shellfish populations would decrease landing revenues by $67 million a year, or $2.2 billion
• Losses in primary revenue from commercial harvests—or the money that fishermen receive for their catch—could add up to as much as $1.4 billion within 50 years
• In comparison, a 25 % decrease in the seafood employment sector contributed to a dramatic economic decline from in New Bedford from 1992 to 1999, when 20 % of residents were living below the federal poverty level

The Bigger Picture

Dr. Doney’s research also takes a look at the global picture, especially at areas of the developing world that are dependent on viable fisheries.

“As with so many aspects of environmental degradation, the Third World is often hit hardest, and is the least resilient,” he said. “We want to make the connections with fishing communities and how they can adapt.”

Acidification could be the death blow for coral reefs, which are already impacted by pollution and overfishing, Dr. Doney said, which will have an impact on coastal erosion, fish habitat, and tourism.

Regions that are impacted by acid rain and nutrient runoff might already be experiencing the effects of acidification, he added. While a connection between nitrogen loading and acidity has not been thoroughly studied, Dr. Doney warned that algal blooms from excess nitrogen release CO2, “an unfortunate synergy” that could occur on Cape Cod.

Results from the Global Ocean Ecosystem Dynamics (GLOBEC) program indicate that Arctic ice melt has made its way to the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, said Cabell S. Davis, a WHOI senior biologist.

The influx of fresh water has lowered the natural salinity of these productive fishing grounds—and coupled with rising water temperature, the impacts will be felt across the entire ecosystem, he said.

Towing an underwater video camera from the Azores to Woods Hole, Dr. Davis captured thousands of images of copepods, a food source for cod and haddock larvae, and even right whales. Putting a computer model to work, the GLOBEC team found that decreased salinity led to an earlier spring bloom of phytoplankton, the main food source for copepods.

The result was a three-fold increase in copepod populations on Georges Bank from 1995 to 1999. Longer term data sets revealed that the water in the 1990s was more fresh and had more copepods than the 1980s.

Pointing to the 2003 haddock harvest, the best year for that fishery since 1963, Dr. Davis said the changes can initially be a good thing for fish. An earlier spring bloom of phytoplankton means that copecods have more food. Higher concentrations of copepods will allow the infant cod and haddock to grow faster, and thus have better survival rates.

However, not all copecods are created equal, Dr. Davis said. There are two types living in the western North Atlantic: one cold-water species, and one tropical species. The warm-water copepod, Centropages typicus, swims too fast for the larval fish to catch.

Already, Dr. Davis said, these copepod populations have doubled in the Mid-Atlantic Bight, off New York and New Jersey, since 1977.

“Potentially, cod and haddock larvae won’t have anything to eat,” said Dr. Davis, speaking at a Marine Biological Laboratory Ecosystems Center seminar last week.

“Even with best management practices, if the projected warming trend happens in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank, cod and haddock could be gone by 2080.”

Worst-case scenarios

Dr. Davis based his models on a medium prediction of climate change, established by an International Panel on Climate Change scenario that includes a mix of fossil fuel and renewable energy to drive the economy. If Artic melting occurs more rapidly than the predictions—which has already been the case—Dr. Davis said that the effects on fisheries could be worse.

“As more melting occurs, the nutrients on the surface sink, leading to a decrease in productivity. In addition, a climate pattern, called the North Atlantic Oscillation, affects how deep Labrador Sea water flows southward to New York, bringing in colder, low salinity water with lower nutrients,” Dr. Davis said.

Further research will be needed to study the consequences of this ecosystem shift, and other effects of climate change, on other commercially important species, including adult cod, haddock, scallops, and lobsters.