Land and Water

The Boston Globe has a story about communities in Massachusetts that are planning to help their waterways:

"Pushed by an increasingly green-conscious citizenry and anxious to avoid federal Environmental Protection Agency fines, many communities are embracing a host of new technologies to capture storm and snow runoff so that any pollution they carry does not wash into rivers, streams, ponds, and lakes.

Measures being considered and tested by local communities include:

* Tree and bush planters that act both as water-retention tanks and natural pollution filters.

*Permeable asphalt and sidewalk construction materials that allow water to seep through into the ground rather than channeling it into gutters and storm drains.

* So-called "bio-swales" and other engineered wetlands that trap water and use specially selected soil mixes and plant species to remove pollutants and return storm water into the local water table.

...

At least above the surface, storm-water planters look like typical urban landscaping, with a tree or large shrub set into the sidewalk and surrounded by a metal grate.

Underneath, however, they are radically different. Storm water is directed into the base of the planter through a cut in the curb, where it first enters a layer of specially developed mulch that traps trash and large debris on the surface, so that it can be collected by town workers. The mulch also traps smaller particles of debris and pollution.

After passing through the mulch, the water then flows into an engineered mix of soil and microbes, which work with the plant's root system to remove bacteria and heavy metals. Filterra, a company that recently exhibited storm-water-planter technology at a Charles River Watershed Association forum for area communities, stated that its products remove as much as 85 percent of oil, grease, and suspended solids, as much as 82 percent of heavy metals, and as much as 76 percent of fecal-coliform bacteria from runoff....

Thanks to a two-year-old dedicated user fee - $25 annually for residents, $150 for businesses - Newton has an annual budget of $700,000 for storm-water projects, [Maria Rose, Newton's environmental engineer] said.

The city also installed at the mall storm-water settlement basins that use sand as a filtering agent, and is working on plans to uncover and restore a nearby brook that for decades has been buried underground in a culvert, Rose said."